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Search - "poignant"
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So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).
My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)
My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.
On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!
It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!
I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since2 -
Got my first laptop while I was overseas.
It was a windows hp laptop with Vista.
It was an absolute piece of shit.
Decided to find the people responsible of it.
Got to what a software engineer was.
Boss told me to look in the library to see if i find some books on the subject. Got a Java and C++ book.
Shit was hard af cuz I had no clue what I was doing, but I liked it. Decided to look more into an application wise platform of study rather than doing basic CLI shit. Got into web development with Java. Got a hold of more JS. Liked JS more cuz shit was easy, found about server side JS with classic ASP, did VBScript as well.
Eventually found Python, fell in love but hated the whitespace ussage for block level code etc. Found Ruby, to this day the most beautiful language according to me. Read about why's poignant intro to Ruby.
Dug it, but wanted some other things. Found out about the study of data structures ans algorithms, then harvard's free cs50 course, then mit courseware, rice's python class. Took all of them. CS50 introduced php, liked it, sounded like a drug, was easy to use, for whatever fucking reaskn my ass decided to use version 4 even though 5 was already out. Learned to appreciate advancements in programming language even more
Hipster phase, while studying php got more into JS and web design with more css concepts, wanted my shit to be pretty. Somehow landed with Common Lisp. Mind fucking blown.
Continued with php. Got into uni, math made sense through programming, ok so I am stupid, but not that stupid, python is the best calculator ever.
bring it bitches.
Graduated.
Still don't know what I am doing.1 -
This article about the types of legacy code bases you will have to deal with just made my day!
Not only do I have every one it describes but somehow it even made me laugh at thought of each of the std riddled petri dishes of code that I reluctantly maintain... My "Happy Place" is a folder dedicated to reliquary projects I like to look at when I feel sad to lift my spirits and restore hope that one day things will be better.
Do you have any definitions to add or know where to find more? I'm hooked.
Link: https://medium.com/@dylanbeattie/...
Excerpt:
The Reliquary
The reliquary is that one repository full of really good ideas. Clean code. Brilliant algorithms. The OpenID implementation that you optimised until it shone. Classes so beautifully designed and perfectly documented that they’d make a senior architect weep.
You remember the big rewrite? The project that was going to fix everything, only you never worked out how to actually launch the thing, or get any revenue from it? The reliquary is where you’ve preserved it, pickled in revision control like a fabulous museum specimen. A treasury of good code and good ideas; maybe even an entire codebase that was “a couple of weeks” away from shipping before somebody finally looked at the number of critical features the team had somehow forgotten to include and discovered — to everybody’s surprise — that validated XHTML, normalised data models and 95% test coverage are not actually features any of your end users cared about.
Like Buran or the Spruce Goose, the surviving artefacts stand as a testament to the quality of your engineering… and a poignant reminder of just how much fun engineers can have building high-quality stuff that nobody actually wants to use. -
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and this quote struck me as quite poignant:
On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher[5]
Basically realised this is 90% of my clients.
A colleague and I were musing about how warped ones understanding of fundamental reality must be to expect this, but then I realised that actually, their understanding is actually far more sophisticated than ours! Here we are boxed into our pissant Euclidean physics, and what they are looking for in software is the equivalent of a Tenet Turnstile, capable of reversing entropy to make sense out of their garbage data!
Incredible! Now that I understand their ingenius vision, I will get to work on the trivial task of writing the 'Algorithm' and packaging this in .NET application (because to those who cannot actually DO, ideas are everything and execution is nothing 🙄).
Once I do I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to use that to make sense of their data or just get in touch with Sator1