[HN Gopher] Stories from 25 Years of Software Development
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Stories from 25 Years of Software Development
Author : vinhnx
Score : 110 points
Date : 2026-02-07 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (susam.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (susam.net)
| zahlman wrote:
| > With a single jump to the processor's reset entry point, I had
| somehow inspired someone to step back from academic competition
| in order to have more fun with learning.
|
| Seems like it wasn't just the processor that reset.
| arcfour wrote:
| > At that point, the telecom carrier's representative intervened
| and bluntly told the set-top box representative to just shut up.
|
| This got a laugh out of me. The whole scenario was both hilarious
| and surreal from start to finish. It's a wonder what people get
| hung up on sometimes, even if getting hung up on it makes them
| look bad.
| MBCook wrote:
| All the STB guy had to say was that there was no way to get it
| smooth enough on real hardware.
|
| Instead he made himself look like an idiot.
|
| Great article.
| elmomle wrote:
| Like many people in the working world, he likely knew his
| company's policy but did not consider it important to know
| the reason, only to stand by the policy.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| These were great. It's certainly a blessing and curse to no
| longer dazzle people when solving a tech puzzle as a middle-aged
| person. I'm hoping I'll become impressive again if I can still do
| it when I'm elderly. :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The installer, written in Python, often failed because of
| incorrect assumptions about the target environment and almost
| always required some manual intervention to complete
| successfully.
|
| Nothing ever changes. I spent half a day just getting some SDR
| development stuff to work just now, long live Python code with
| baked in hard dependencies on particular versions of obscure
| libraries... In the end it worked, but what a mess.
| alexjplant wrote:
| I've worked at a place or three where development environment
| setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to
| shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to
| automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it
| was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS
| projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it
| all together. In virtually all cases these environments would
| break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev
| downtime.
|
| One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI
| and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers
| instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev
| dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course,
| orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break
| in odd ways.
|
| Fun times.
| reactordev wrote:
| I got let go once because they didn't have setup instructions
| and hardcoded their own paths into scripts and things that
| "worked on their machine".
|
| The reason they gave was "Unable to perform basic environment
| setup".
|
| Some people are just born stupid.
| collingreen wrote:
| Roughly this happened to me once. Got a horrible review
| after doing what I felt was a heros effort. I'll skip the
| details but the cherry on top was "you did all this work
| but it didnt build on the cloud server so we're not going
| to count it for anything" - the "cloud server" (of the live
| project) was the ctos laptop and it could only build his
| local stuff (you could even see the local paths in the web
| output). As if that wasn't enough, literally all he had to
| do was git pull and it would have all the new work on it.
|
| Cto was eventually fired for trying to steal the company IP
| and he went on to fail upward making a security camera
| company infra famously insecure and got a ton of very
| valuable stock for it.
|
| Life is weird!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well, I probably was born stupid then. This was a Gnuradio
| setup (super impressive piece of software by the way) for a
| not-very-well supported SDR running an even less well
| supported GRC file. I'd been putting it off because I know
| those tell tale little clouds on the horizon well enough by
| now. Anyway, it's working now. But what a nightmare.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > I've worked at a place or three where development
| environment setup took the better part of two days.
|
| I feel like this is a real barrier to getting effective
| contributions from outside of existing team members. Some
| colleagues seem to see this as an advantage.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Python is an absolute disaster when it comes to packaging
| runnable artifacts. I love the language for server-side stuff
| where I control the environment (the final deliverable is a
| container image) but there's no way I'd use it for anything
| else.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| working in software before LLMs, you had to be there.
| Luker88 wrote:
| for devops I highly recommend Davide Bianchi's "tales from the
| machine room".
|
| https://www.soft-land.org/cgi-bin/doc.pl?mode=setpreferredla...
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