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I sometimes correct people's PRs from under the shower or from the toilet, but my favorite place to code are in the dune forests (Netherlands).
Most unusual place would be operating room at the hospital though, getting my leg/foot bugfixed after a car accident. I asked the surgeon if it was OK if I brought my phone in, to distract myself, so I went through some code cleanup tasks.3 -
The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?
The hospital's recovery room after my second child.
I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.
Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.
Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.
Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.
But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough6 -
On the top of a mountain, while skiing, -6 °C, no gloves, on my phone.
I use a live wallpaper I made with Processing and it uses gps location and forecast datas to change the background image according to the environment and climate. It sucks and drains battery like a bitch, and as soon as I got the top of the mountain it fucked up everything, home screen froze and camera wouldn't open.
So guess what, it was debug time. Hands dead cold and APDE with no autocomplete on a smartphone keyboard. The agony.
My gf yelled at me and after 10 minutes I switched to a static wallpaper, uninstalled that one and never touched it again since then2 -
In ancient times, a friend and I made a new website for a golf course, in exchange for free golf whenever we wanted it. We were traveling to Texas for work(we were Linux sysadmins for a defense contractor at the time) and found out that mechanical/logistic issues at the airport in Houston would delay our departure by two hours, but this wasn't until after the plane was fully boarded and had begun to taxi. So we sat on the tarmac at Kansas City Airport for two hours with nothing to do but release that website. We finished some perl hooks to site resources, and pushed the site live. This was on a laptop tethered to a phone with a CDMA data connection, before even EVDO was released.
Even so, it went great! I sshed into the server(running netBSD), swung over the necessary tags, and the site was up.
My workflow today is largely the same, just with git and a more elaborate .vimrc.10 -
Weirdest place I've coded has to be in an Uber on my way to my wedding venue hours before I was supposed to get married. I wasn't working on a specific project it just seemed to calm my nerves down, luckily my wife understood that.
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In a military district.
I sometimes accept freelance jobs. Don't ask me how I found this one. (or how they found me)4 -
In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.
One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.
This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.
Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.11 -
At a Magic: the Gathering prerelease tournament (yeah, yeah, stereotypes), on my phone, with a pen and paper copy of the SQL query, as the phone screen was too small to read it properly in full. Managed to fix the bug in the query about 30 seconds before the next game started.
The debugging went well, but the tournament did not; I think I was a bit distracted!!2 -
The most unusual place I have coded:
At office
Last Friday at 9:05 PM.
No one was there except me and a strange tapping sound kept coming out of no where.
Outside the window, I could see two people fighting. -
TL;DR: At a house party, on my Phone, via shitty German mobile network using the GitLab website's plain text editor. Thanks to CI/CD my changes to the code were easily tested and deployed to the server.
It was for a college project and someone had a bug in his 600+ lines function that was nested like hell. At least 7 levels deep. Told him before I went to that party it's probably a redefined counter variable but he wouldn't have it as he was sure it was an error with the business logic. Told him to simplify the code then but he wouldn't do that either because "the code/logic is too complex to be simplified"... Yeah... what a dipshit...
Nonetheless I went to the party and He kept debugging. At some point he called me and asked me to help him the following day. Knowing that the code had to be fixed anyways I agreed.
I also knew I wouldn't be much of a help the next day due to side effects of the party, so I tried looking at this shitshow of a function on my phone. Oh did I mention it was PHP, yet? Yeah... About 30 minutes and a beer later I found the bug and of course it was a redefined counter variable... My respect for him as a dev was already crumbling but it died completely during that evening2 -
At the Ritz Hotel bar in London England. That client was charged an arm and a leg because I was attending my cousin's wedding and I had to tack on a fee for the $75 regular drinks.3
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On a date
... as a strategy to intimidate and show myself as a hacker. It did work and spark interest ❤️4 -
At a party.
- USB debugging with my phone
- Writing Java
- Testing webapp on phone using HTTP requests2 -
So my company was building a software to allow users to use a screen without the screen being touch itself.
It was made using a camera above the screen and then with openCV detect where the hand was.
Anyway I had to test it on the place.
And the place was a factory where they did produce pipes.
It's the biggest company in my city, and yet I was there, in the break room, coding a raspberry in winter in a factory.
The only source of heat was the fire used to melt the metal
That was literally awesome2 -
In the royal city of Aagra. My phone broke and knowing the exploitative bitch I used to meet back then I was certain had I disappeared amid a conversation she would break up with me, so I debugged an Android 2.3 image with no documentation and shaky hands from frustration while cursing her every family member in Hungarian. (Passers-by probably thought I was casting spells on my computer)20
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Not as unusual, but definitely the most comfortable:
Next to a fireplace in a cabin in the woods. Without the Internet. Best coding session I've ever had.2 -
On the toilet at work after dealing with a cunt of a customer, decided fuck it, let's install termux, nano and do some shit in both ways
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A very nice restaurant in a Vegas casino at 3am.
A friend and I were working on a project after defcon, and we got hungry. It's Vegas, so we have no clue what time it is except for our laptop clocks. And who cares anyways. Time is irrelevant in Vegas. So we got a table at a steak place at Caesars palace. And just dropped our laptops on the table and kept coding.4 -
In a hospital bed and in my cellphone, web app went down, sended a bug fix while mildly conscious, typhoid fever btw1
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In a shed in a small Valley in Switzerland. Everyone was stoned. I was drunk.
That’s where I started programming.
Good old elementary school days 😐 -
In a gay bar. Pretty drunk.
It's funny how "I'm drunk and cannot be held responsible" doesn't seem to be terrifying2 -
Most unusual place I've coded would probably at a bar while utterly wasted. I fixed a production outage and even got on the phone with tier 1 support when they reported the issue.4
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In the hospital while having some shit sucked out of my lung with a drain just under my right nipple. Not pleasant experience but coding helped.7
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On the roof of my friends house. On new years eve.
The party was too noisy for me to hear the client over the phone, so I was milling around the appertment until I no longer heard the noise.
Sat down, took laptop from backpack, solved issue, wished client a Happy New Year.
Packed in laptop. Stood up, realised I had somehow wandered out of the appartment and up onto the roof.
Sat down again. Vertigo.
Opened the laptop again, sending the client the bill at 500% overtime rate.
At least the fireworks were pretty.2 -
In a heavily crowded metro sitting on a ladies senior citizens seat with my 16" laptop almost getting out of hand or pushed by nearby ppl until some oldie got tired of my shit and asked me to stand up.
Imagine the most messed up system of connections on a laptop because i am a droid guy whose laptop had 3 wires coming out of ports (laptop charging cable, usb and earphones)1 -
12 Hour bus drive while everyone else was partying and having a good time.
Well I drank some Jägermeister but so much for party. -
once I have to code in a public train station’s restroom just because I have no place to sit and floor is not comfortable enough because people keep walking by distracting me,
So I cover the lid, pull my laptop out, use my phones hotspot connect to remote server to fix the problem.
The smell is not good.2 -
In from of a cinema. I was doing my BSc thesis involving a GPS receiver. The pointcloud on my pc had to be synchronized with where the receiver was, so it had to be tested outdoor. I and my teacher drove around some streets to see if my code worked, and everytime it didn't we had to stop in a parking lot (the one of a cinema). I couldn't code inside the car because the GPS receiver my laptop was connected to (via USB) didn't get a decent signal there, so I had to fix bugs sat on a brickwork in front of the cinema. My teacher kept looking at my monitor constantly, it was summer with 28°C, the sun hitting on me and my monitor, I couldn't see shit, the sweat of my hands flooding the keyboard. After a while I was saved by my laptop's battery which gave up. Thank you laptop <31
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In the race control room at the 24 Hour Le Man race events. That was actually my office for 3 weeks.
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Next to a large pond / lake, trying to connect to & debug & rescue a robotic boat that had gone haywire, flipped upside down and was somehow just spinning in circles.
Eventually realised it was spinning in circles because its props were stuck at full power in alternate directions and acting as fans, so eventually decided to just use them as fans to blow it upside down back to shore. -
During the company's Xmas event, we were off-site at a place that does events to do a team-building event followed by dinner party.
An error report came up, it wasn't a showstopper, but it was fairly serious, and the perfect excuse to sit out the BS improv team-building exercises that the powers that be thought would be a good idea to have.
Probably my favorite bug ever. -
wk195 sounds like people are describing the weirdest places they had sex. Lmao, I'm sure this has gone through somebody's mind at one point.
Let's see, what else to vent about. Ah yes, today I took the public transport because I had to be somewhere in the evening and I wanted to avoid traffic congestion. Guess what? I ended up sandwiched between hordes of people in public transport. I hate that much more than sitting in my car dragging the clutch. At least I was somewhat relaxed and I had my own space (so to speak). Being smooshed between a horde of stressed people? And pushy people trying to ram their way through others "I have to get out, I have to get off here" while the others are clearly heading out too? No, that's not for me.
And I know what's gone through one's mind at one point: "Look at this sad state of the world, look at the highway inefficiently and disrespectfully stuffed, look at these people, most of them wearing sad looks on their faces from the routine of life and their subconscious dissatisfactions. The current system has many shortcomings. In fact, the entire system is wrong."
Well, I'm glad I'm home now. Space, temporal as well as physical and psychological, is indeed a core component of one's space (no pun intended). It's at times like these we need to look at our lives and make the necessary changes to change at least our own lives, there that the system is hard to change.4 -
It was the first time using unit tests on a project of mine. Coded from midnight to 5am on Lisbon's Burger King balcony before my flight.
Then while visiting a friend of mine who fell asleep while watching me play Overwatch on his computer, sshed into my server and continued the tests there.
I was productive and managed to score some cool hacker points. 😂2 -
On a road side bench. I was testing a GPS application I did back in college. The application stopped working when I get to the destination. I figured the problem right away and couldn't resist fixing it immediately.
[ Few hours later...] (It was a small change but you know, Android studio on a low end laptop)
Tested and completed the app successfully. Oh and by the way, it was 11 in the night. I can just imagine what the people that saw me that night could have thought. 🤣 -
Was moving some equipment into my closet/attic space to reduce noise and had to use a laptop with SSH to reconfigure a few things. It was dark with only a laptop screen to guide the way.1
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Baseball game
I love sports, the weather was fantastic and the crowd wasn't that loud. Kicked my feet back, cracked open a Yoohoo, turned on my light theme and went to work.
I'd do it again too. But that kinda weather isn't here yet. -
We had to code at the hospital. It was for our thesis and one of the members in our group had to be admitted so we "joined" in and hoped for the best. It was definitely weird but we had a great time.
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I used to code in the cab where the train operators drove the trains pretty frequently. I've also coded in an airplane hanger that was turned into a train factory, but it was less exciting then you'd think.
At the time I was working for a train company so it wasn't weird. I got pretty used to it. We weren't allowed to code in the same cab if the operator was driving the train, so I'd sometimes pop into the spare can because their seats are really comfy.5 -
At a bar while everyone had fun on my phone fixing a bug I thought about for a while and suddenly had an idea on how to solve it.2
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A crowded bus, going to school, on a WhatsApp group that's only me and I use it to keep stuff.
It was quite uncomfortable.1
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