No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
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No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
1–10 of 202 posts
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#2A good Friday story.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#3I read this on break and needed to hear these words of encouragement and hope.
Thank you for sharing your misadventure with us.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#4That's quite a tale, a parable almost about how software engineering differs from other jobs (I want to say 'real' jobs but tongue in cheek). I like this one too, it's even snappier.
A software engineer, a hardware engineer and a department manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside.
The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?
"I know," said the department manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no," said the hardware engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it and we can be on our way."
"Well," said the software engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#5Wow what incredible timing. I am currently working on an Image Uploader component and the gotchas are hiding around every corner.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#6Reminder that vets have it extra hard.
And a reminder to myself to do good.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#7I'm feeling the anecdote about the wasp nest.
Landlord in our office complex installed a touchscreen interface on the outside of the building to dial the various front desks, all of which could buzz a person in. They did this because they had no front-desk receptionist who could see the door.
The thing lasted six months and then started to malfunction badly. The culprit? The interface is running on essentially a big black Android tablet and they installed it on the side of the building that faces East. Mid-spring rolled around and it caught enough sun every day to overheat and fry the touch electronics and part of the screen hardware.
As a software engineer, writing the kind of software I do, I never have to worry about thermal load.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#8That's quite a tale, a parable almost about how software engineering differs from other jobs (I want to say 'real' jobs but tongue in cheek). I like this one too, it's even snappier. A software engineer, a hardware engineer and a department manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of co…
The big advantage to software engineering is we deal in abstractions. I liken it to building castles in the clouds; everything down to the foundation is reshapeable.
... the big disadvantage to software engineering is we deal in abstractions. Everything down to the foundation moves.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#9Wow what incredible timing. I am currently working on an Image Uploader component and the gotchas are hiding around every corner.
This is one of those things I wouldn't suggest you solve with the "roll your own" approach. There are some good libraries out there that will handle this and more. Uppy is one that comes to mind. I created and maintained another popular one for 7 years that i sunset in 2017.
Re: No dogs were harmed in the making of this app
#10A very nice post, well written and with a positive outlook on our position.
And while there are many developers that write software that directly impact in one way or another the lives of other human beings, generally speaking we need to recognize we are in a fairly privileged position, as the author states.