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"We ran out of columns"

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: "We ran out of columns"

#181

Post by vertis »

deathanatos wrote: post #154

Two early databases I worked on. The first contained monetary values. These were split over two columns, a decimal column holding the magnitude of the value, and a string column, containing an ISO currency code. Sounds good so far, right? Well, I learned much later (after, of course, having relied on the data) that the currency code column had only been added after expanding into Europe … but not before expanding int…

Reminds me of a date column where half the dates were MM/DD/YYYY and the rest DD/MM/YYYY. I did manage to eventually find the point in time when it changed and normalise the database. For those wondering about DD/MM, Australia.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#182

Post by djbusby »

dtech wrote: post #177
djbusby wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years later there was a scene in Silicon Valley where their VC set a tequila bottle on the delete key and caused havoc. That's when I figured out what happened in 1998.

And what's the less opaque reference to 1998?

Me, up thread, I was the junior in 1998, trying to introduce CVS.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#183

Post by collinmanderson »

djbusby wrote: post #161
qup wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they probably fired the guy who deleted 2MM lines of tabs for not meeting LoC metrics.

Many years later there was a scene in Silicon Valley where their VC set a tequila bottle on the delete key and caused havoc. That's when I figured out what happened in 1998.

I have had a website taken down by (pretty sure) a person setting something on their F5 key.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#184

Post by cyberax »

djbusby wrote: post #138
fouronnes3 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.

I was one of those once. Tried to get CVS in a project. Then some other dev committed 9MB of tabs 0x09 at the end of a file. Then the site was "slow" (cause the homepage was 10MB). And the blame went to...CVS somehow. I left.

> And the blame went to...CVS somehow.

CVS was notorious for doing "text/binary" conversions (CR/LF line endings to CR and vice versa), sometimes inappropriately. More than once, it resulted in files where every other line was empty. I can very well see this happening several times, resulting in exponential growth of whitespaces.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#185

Post by [deleted] »

stavros wrote: post #50
jrochkind1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh good question on date essay was written -- put dates on your things on the internet people! Internet Archive has a crawl from today but no earlier; which doesn't mean it can't be earlier of course. My guess is it was written recently though.

At least we know it wasn't written after today!

[deleted]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#187

Post by rochak »

agentultra wrote: post #132

The ending is pure gold. Some of the best times in my career were working on a codebase for an application serving folks I knew on a first name basis and had had lunch with. I could talk through pain points they were having, we’d come up with a solution together, I’d hack up a quick prototype and launch it just to them to try out. We’d tweak it over a couple of weeks and when it was good I’d launch it to all customer…

[Deleted]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#188

Post by coldpie »

llmblockchain wrote: post #175
malux85 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a few of my horror stories where I was a consultant at various companies: 1. Previous consultants left no documentation or anything, and a running Hadoop cluster handling (live!) 300 credit card transactions a second. Management hired 8 junior sysadmins - who were all windows sysadmins, had never used Linux before, and were expected to take over running this Linux cluster immediately. They all looked at me whi…

"Senior" holds no weight with me. I've had plenty dumb founding conversations with "seniors". My favorite was at the company that was self hosting their code. The senior team lead wanted me to help him find a memory leak that plagued the product for months. Customers were told to restart the application every few weeks (this was a C++ application). I sat down with the senior and looked at the code. I spotted the erro…

[flagged]

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#189

Post by collinmanderson »

I’m seeing a lot of comments about terrible code bases, but I do think there’s something really beautiful here, something like “worse is better”:

> This may sound like a mess to you. But it was remarkably enjoyable to work in. Gone were the concerns of code duplication. Gone were the concerns of consistency. Gone were the concerns of extensibility. Code was written to serve a use, to touch as little of the area around it as possible, and to be easily replaceable. Our code was decoupled, because coupling it was simply harder.

Re: "We ran out of columns"

#190

Post by fragmede »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #130
hleszek wrote: post #126

When I started at my first company, they had a very complex VB application running on dozens of customers around the country, each having some particular needs of course. There was a LOT of global variables (seemingly random 4 uppercase letters) controlling everything. At some point, the application had some bugs which were not appearing when the application was run in debug mode in Visual Studio. The solution was ob…

This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.

I'm assuming this story predates git and the Internet, but I'm not OP. Things were different back in those days.
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