Chuck Peddle Dies at 82 (December 15, 2019); His $25 Chip Helped Start the PC Age.
His Chip brought digital technology to a new breed of consumer devices and powered early Apple and Commodore computers. 6502 microprocessor; KIM-1 SBC; Commodore PET PC are the notable works.

Previous developers read entire result of a SELECT into array of arrays.

Then used that later on in the following fashion.

print "name: " + result[row][17]
print "address: " + result[row][23]
...
without any description whatsoever what the numbers mean.

And it's here "result" and "row", in the actual code it was "arr" and "ii".

And these arrays were "public static" used everywhere, but initialized only at few places, so if you went onto wrong screen or if there was a phone call that kicked the app out it crashed.

But real fun began when people started changing queries and altering tables...

I seriously thought I was being pranked as a new hire.

Working with assembly is just something different... note to self: keep a cheat-sheet with the labels and corresponding addresses at hand.....

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

DEVRANT: need not apply

/* stolen from @gsiskind twitter account */

Some 6502 Instructions by the legendary Beagle Bros 🖥💻

Me and Synthron are discussing devRant on a custom 6502 computer.

1) move
2) finish uni
3) learn more about the 6502, the nes and finish my game
4) get a decent job

Terminator ran on a 6502! Wonder if he came with a copy of duck hunt?