One thing I don’t understand about my childhood is that neither I nor anybody around me knew that Freddie Mercury, George Michael and Boy George were gay. Hell, we didn’t even think Boy George was a man.

We didn’t even know Elton John was gay. But we did think Rod Stewart was gay.

I remember the desperate scramble to find something to read when I had to go take a shit.

Writing bug-free code?

Lol “landed”. We are fucking desperate for drivers. So desperate that one of our drivers totaled two cars in one day last year and didn’t even get suspended.

One thing I actually liked about my last company was that our team-building events involved great food, copious amounts of alcohol, and edibles. True, I had to bring the edibles myself, but nobody complained.

I did BASIC on the Apple IIe, then TurboBasic, Visual Basic (3, 4, 5 and 6 with some C in there somewhere), VB.Net, C#, Java, Objective-C and finally QT. Now I drive a school bus.

I started with VB3, which didn’t have custom classes. I have no idea how I did anything back then, but at least it was better than TurboBasic.

On Error was used within a function, so you would have one (or more … or less) per function.

Is there a downside to training your AI on broken code? Can’t be!

JFC and I thought having to work in an open-office plan was the worst thing a company could do to me.

More like all the On Error Resume Next statements. Which wasn’t even the worst thing about Visual Basic! VB also had the On Error Resume statement. On Error Resume Next at least moved on to the next line after an error occurred; On Error Resume just re-executed the error-generating line, I guess on the assumption that something would eventually change there.

Sounds almost as irritating as “OK boomer”. Which I have to say is especially irritating to be on the receiving end of since I’m not a boomer.

This guy’s code once fired a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Probably not the same guy.

Job interviewer: “What’s the best sorting algorithm for {whatever}?”
Me: “The SORT BY clause in SQL.”

We’ve more or less kinda settled on HTML

It’s funny, one of the modern UI glitches that I hate the most is when a long bit of text is just truncated with ellipses instead of the whole thing being shown and you have to hold the mouse over to get it in a tooltip, or shudder actually click on the thing. HTML is great at word-wrapping and allowing the whole UI to “flow” with variable heights and widths as necessary - and yet that is never allowed to happen in apps.

I used to work for Cisco but I can’t say what it’s like internally. Not because of an NDA but because I literally have no idea. I worked for a much smaller competitor of theirs that they acquired, obviously just to remove a competitor from the marketplace. We were all allowed to work remotely but given nothing at all to do for six months and then everybody (except the executives, of course) was laid off.

I spent a good fraction of my career taking over and trying to fix code bases that my company refused to scrap and replace outright because they didn’t want to admit their worthlessness. Complete rewrites would have taken maybe a tenth of the time I spent.

My favorite thing to encounter (which was nearly universal) was the phenomenon of a young programmer fresh out of college encountering SQL for the first time, deciding he hated it, and writing a huge mess of code to handle auto-generating the necessary SQL. I remember taking over one C# application that had classes named “AND.cs” and “OR.cs” which just took a String as a parameter and returned that String with " AND " and " OR " appended to it, respectively. In about an hour, I replaced three months of this guy’s work that had bottlenecked the project with like five SQL statements.

It’s insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.

I moved from Visual Basic (3 no less!) to C because I needed to optimize the performance of a software synthesis (like, sound synthesis) application I was developing at the time (mid-1990s). It boggles my mind to this day how much fucking work you had to do just to create a simple window in C. It instantly made clear why UIs at the time were so bad and I went back to Visual Basic for the UI with a compiled C DLL to do the heavy lifting.

There’s no excuse for why UIs are still so bad today.

Developmestuction!

capturing the rules as tests is a great way to make sure that rules remains true

Capturing the rules as documentation is also a great way to make sure that rules remain true.

Lol just kidding! Documentation … can you imagine?