And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
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Not, I repeat, my only great failure as a geek.
But, *damn*, that was humiliating.
I wrote an *excellent* program that *brilliantly* displayed data coming from hardware that didn't work.
It was a gig. I got paid. That's not the point. I was a pro, and pro's deliver *value*.
All I delivered was a good laugh.
@GeePawHill having myself given a hardware demo where almost everything went wrong in front of a few hundred people and god knows how many more on the live stream, any presentation where you get the whole room laughing is a good presentation
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill Thanks for the great story! It's all about having fun.
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@GeePawHill Wow. What a story. Awesome.
But somebody hired you. This wasn’t your idea. You didn’t say “I have an idea: let’s bring these 3 devices together on an icebreaker.”
So somebody knew enough about these 5 things: icebreakers, gps, speed logs, radar, and computer programmers. They knew enough to imagine what each could do, but not enough to know that this wasn’t going to work at all.
And the supreme irony that you forgot to mention: all 4 ships, the icebreaker and its 3 ships behind, all made it safely to where they were going even while your thing didn’t work at all.
Brilliant story though. Humbling and hilarious.
@paco @GeePawHill i am guessing that the reason this story was presented is that to write software well you need a good understanding of the process and empathy for the people involved, and this test showed some fundamental misunderstanding that could have been resolved much earlier had anyone thought to ask, which is the embarassing miss, but at least it was caught during testing.
A lot of software today is written very arrogantly where there is little attempt to understand the problem or empathy for the users, because being *useful* is so decoupled from "money line go up".
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And I was sub-contracted to do that. It was about a six month long project. I wrote an entire windowing system on top of DOS to use VGA to show the display.
(I'm a good fucking programmer, and that's not the only time I've written a graphical UI from scratch.)
And. A comical note: about six weeks before the project was due, my hard drive died. And. My backup drive died.
All I had were some two-month old printouts.
@GeePawHill i dont understand what we are doing differently with all of the tools we have today, because i think back to how much i can do in 6mo and it doesnt include writing an entire graphics system on top of whatever the actual goal is. We have web browsers and html/css/svg with openstreetmap and im not sure i could make something with the same featureset in the same timeframe. I dont have a complete clear thought but im not sure we have the right level of abstraction and code reuse and might instead be making things harder and more comples for minimal benefit. Im not saying we need Amish / acoustic pixels or anything, but it seems like this would still be a 6mo project and im not sure how much the layers of functionality between then and now are buying us. There are many things i wouldnt want to do without, like unicode, but it seems we built everything that is needed and useful 20y ago amn its been downhill and bloat ever since.
Sorry for the stream-of-conciousness, trying to get a thought in order
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@billseitz They were all already in place, with displays, on the bridge. I suspect they were often ignored, cuz they didn't work very well.
@GeePawHill @billseitz “I suspect they were often ignored” ought to be posted in giant letters where anyone involved in a data visualization or consolidation project should see them.
A neat experiment: how would putting that in the startup instructions for an LLM affect the resulting product?
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@GeePawHill as someone who once worked on calibrating software for inertial navigation units...
Yeah.
Your story is epic.
@knowprose
Tell us more, please. Which depths lie there unseen?
@GeePawHill -
@knowprose
Tell us more, please. Which depths lie there unseen?
@GeePawHill@yala @GeePawHill in that role and others, I was always adjacent to those things, never a participant.
I was the one slaying dragons while the cool kids were out doing the fun stuff.
But I got stories. None of them mine.
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@GeePawHill here's an illustration of another good point : go on the field to see how shit works before coding any line of code that's suppose to fix that shit.
@Fangh @GeePawHill by now I don't even remember how many times my teams coded some kind of quick, hacked together version instead of multi-month solution, to learn that domain doesn't work as they expected and they would have wasted many months if they went with perfect plan.
Difficult to coach or explain to people who never experienced it. -
Now. I was afraid of sea sickness. I'd been on fishing trips on the open ocean, and had been very sick. So I wore a patch.
You may not know this, but there are still Royal Navy traditions practiced aboard ships.
One of the important ones: there's always a comedy officer. Someone whose job it is to be funny, to make sailors smile.
You think that's silly, but sometimes these people are on board these ships for a *year*. It is important that they be amused.
@GeePawHill One of my uncles was medical offer on a submarine. Two weeks out of port, all the various *ahem* medical illnesses have resolved themselves one way or another. And so now his job is... entertainment! That really was his job for most of the time - keeping folks from going stir-crazy.
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And the other Royal Navy tradition: Captains are inviolate commanders, at all times in all settings. They present "serious". They eat and drink separately from the crew. They have only three or four other officers that they ever get to, comparatively, relax with.
So, you have a comedy officer, and you have a captain, and the captain simply looks the other way when the comedy officer is up to their hijinks.
He *knows* the hijinks. He *sees* the hijinks. But he pretends not to.
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Fun fact: my mother has expert card shuffling skills because as the daughter of a merchant navy captain she was one of the only people the sailors trusted to deal for money games in or out of port (she would have been around 10 at the time and didn't normally travel with the ship). The captain, of course, couldn't be involved but the crew preferred having relatives of the captain run the game than the local casino.
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill
Fantastic story. Would you mind if I screenshot it and share it on Tumblr - I would link back to your posts as a source. -
And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill Thank you for this great story. As so often, we programmers don't get access to clients soon enough to catch these kinds of unclear/misleading requirements.
I don't think I can count the times where at product delivery the client has crucial insights that nobody told me about.
...and I never even got a helicopter flight out of those situations.
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@dtwx I read (from Jon Turk, who traveled extensively in eastern Siberia) that walruses are scarier than polar bears!
@superball Good to know! I'll avoid them too!
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill Thanks for the story !
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And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
@GeePawHill Thank you for the story!
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill great story. Thanks for sharing.
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill thanks for the write up. Really cool.
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@GeePawHill Thank you for this great story. As so often, we programmers don't get access to clients soon enough to catch these kinds of unclear/misleading requirements.
I don't think I can count the times where at product delivery the client has crucial insights that nobody told me about.
...and I never even got a helicopter flight out of those situations.
@tsturm @GeePawHill ^this...
The times I've requested "real data" to be told that "its simple" or "covered in the spec" and guess what. Huge bits were complex or/and not in the spec. Usually followed by a massive rewrite, or once, abandoning the project entirely.
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And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
@GeePawHill what a great story! I'll be using it to teach juniors about fun... And talking to your users before even planning anything
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
@GeePawHill wonderful story, well told. there are special skills, and wrangling multiple serial datastreams is among them. these days I'd lazily convert separately, drop into database and hide all the complexity in totally separate software that can only read the db. How times have changed...
