I have given up on Logic when dealing with clients… Trying to figure out what they actually mean is never what they actually mean.
It seriously blows my mind that some of these people are like CEO status of huge companies. How they even function in every day society and remember to breath is beyond me.
Reminds me when I was working with a guy and he named a database table recieved . I had adapted my code to that, and then one day without warning he renamed it to received - and it took us an hour to figure out why everything broke.
had a co-worker once who called the variable holding the first record in a complicated workflow "rec1st" and the last record "reclst", unaware that in every font used by every code editor except his, a lowercase l and number 1 look identical.
Lesson for the future: stop using crappy illegible fonts in a code editor, and use something nice like Fira Code or even Fira Mono or Sans if you don’t like ligatures.
Edit: In the middle of writing this I realized it was a confusion between “1” and “l”, which makes the font choice even more bizarre. What kinda garbage font doesn’t distinguish between the two? I could understand if it was capital “i” and lowercase “l” since they look extremely similar in most sans serif fonts, but “1” and “l”?
Also it takes like 10 seconds to change the name of a variable across the whole file with a modern code editor like VSCode or an IDE for the specific language you were working with. If they were confusing you, you could have just changed “reclst” into “last_record” and that would save you a day of work.
Our Python virtual environments at work on all Linux-servers are in the directory /opt/vens instead of /opt/venvs so when some intern corrects that, we will be screwed!
I wrote code for industrial automation years ago (think assembly line machines). I was reviewing production code and found a stupid bug and fixed it, then reinstalled. The motors moved incorrectly - I don't recall if that was the time it smashed glass everywhere, but "fixing" the code definitely broke the program. I could not figure out why...but due to time constraints I sadly had reinsert the bug to put the machine back in production.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth's webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)
Excel wrongly assuming the year 1900 was a leap year for their timestamps is my favorite bug that will never be fixed because everyone has built workarounds for this already
I actually ran a moderately active (like 20,000 hits a day) small business site from a laptop for a couple years. Of course one of the first thing I did was put a “SERVER DO NOT SHUT DOWN” sticker on it, and set the power settings so closing the lid did not shut down or sleep the computer. It was a Dell 7000 series with 16GB IIRC, it did great.
Not advertising here, but with this low traffic you could be in a permanent free tier with AWS with all the availability guarantees. It doesn’t work with EC2, but for serverless solutions (ApiGateway, Lambda, DynamoDB) they have something like “we start charging after 1M calls per month” (don’t quote me on this exact number). I have a couple of pet projects working this way
This was originally an engineers’ complaint about managers’ honesty regarding business trouble: Managers think we’re mushrooms; they keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit.
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