121–130 of 242 posts
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It's an interesting time when one can build a living/breathing piece of engineering that can outlive us indefinitely.
This isn't specific to computer or software engineering, of course. There are still Roman aqueducts in use that were engineered thousands of years ago.
How ancient this all seems . . . until you realize people are doing the exact same thing by shipping "golden" VM/container images around instead of doing proper package and configuration management.
As a engineer I do not have time to get into this new VM/container thing. I fail to see how it leads to anything productive ( no offence ). Call me a simpleton but I am happy with better package management and config systems.
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On legacy systems you may only have six significant characters for identifiers. Gotta scrounge for every last character.
Six characters! Luxury. I worked on a system where we only had five.
Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its runni…
The system was 10s of millions of lines of 16-bit assembly code written for a minicomputer in the the mid-1970s. The next generation of 32-bit systems in the early 1980s were able to run the code, so they purchased one and kept it running to nearly 2000.
They had a project that was trying to rewrite everything in C targeting the DEC Apha, but after 10 years it still wasn't ready yet.
Because 80s era minicomputers sucked so much electricity, we were able to sell them new Pentium servers running SCO OpenServer that could emulate them. I always wondered if they ever got their rewrite project finished.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an interesting time when one can build a living/breathing piece of engineering that can outlive us indefinitely.
This isn't specific to computer or software engineering, of course. There are still Roman aqueducts in use that were engineered thousands of years ago.
I supported booking systems that could have bookings stretching far into the future, this made switching systems tricky as a lot of quite complex bookings would need recreating with each taking proper time to do. The scope for automation was there but that wasn't possible. With the software we supported there was no expertise in the company as the original developers left a long time ago. Therefore there was no way t…
I'm curious - how did you do this?
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Dear %prospect_name%; I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you. Sincerely, %recruiter_sig%
You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.
The only way to stop this madness is to go on strike against it, as you did. I work very hard to never mention online that I've had anything to do with SharePoint or ColdFusion because it will bring recruiters with a job that will kill you.
I am in Brazil, and I accept any tech job that people offer, even if someone offered me to work with MUMPS I would accept (it is better than going hungry at least...)
But I get one or two recruiter calls (as in, phone calls! not e-mail) per year, and usually it is useless (the last one they told me some bullshit about their process needing adjustment and that they would call me later and they never did... another one before that complained I was not experienced enough, but wanted something that is almost impossible to find anyway...)
As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the furor when Gingrich and Clinton discovered that the FAA was using vacuum tube computers and radar in the air traffic control system. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/clinton.htm The foreign (sole) vacuum tube supplier that Clinton mentioned was Russia. Oh, the embarrassment! I knew that there were some delays in rolling out the the replacement system, so I did so…
A similarly embarrassing state of affairs is the train traffic control system used by the NYC subway system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx3S3UjmnA