And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
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@GeePawHill Delightful thread -- and you lived to laugh about it! Also happy at the mention of Canadian icebreakers. My grandpa was a merchant sea captain and was responsible for delivering a much-needed icebreaker abroad during the war (to Russia, maybe?). Got a medal for it and they used his silhouette in a poster. Bc when you need an icebreaker, even when lots else is going on, you NEED an ICEBREAKER. 😸
@GeePawHill what a great story! I'll be using it to teach juniors about fun... And talking to your users before even planning anything 😉
@GeePawHill Thank you for the story!
@GeePawHill
Fantastic story!
Another way of summing up the issue: When doing data analysis, get real world data as quickly as possible
What an awesome story. And congrats on helping an icebreaker momentarily attain lightspeed!
@GeePawHill This is a great story. Thanks for sharing.
@GeePawHill wonderful story, thanks! 😃
@GeePawHill a good read, you made my lunch break, thanks!
@GeePawHill A great story, and well told. Thank you for this!
Canada has serious ports that are, well, kinda up-north-ish. In order to get ships in to those ports, which include some significant manufacturing and other supplies, one must use a kind of ship called an icebreaker.
Icebreakers are, basically, a big-assed razorblade at the prow, and big-assed engines at the stern.
Being an icebreaker captain is one of the most stressful jobs you can imagine.
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You're working in harsh weather. You can't see shit. You have these client ships that are very slow and very large and very expensive. If you even *touch* one of the client ships, that's $3m, minimum, instantly.
An icebreaker would go right through an oil tanker, and come out the other side of it with a broken radar antenna, covered in oil.
And the icebreaker runs in front of the client breaking ice so it can get where it's going.
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There are three main modern tools you can use, versus the old days: You have a radar system, you have a speed log, and you have GPS.
All of those tools have serial outputs on them, good ol' RS-232.
So here was the concept: take a PC and make a custom "ice breaking" UI, taking input from the three devices, and rendering it in such a fashion that the icebreaker skipper could get all the info in one place.
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And I was sub-contracted to do that. It was about a six month long project. I wrote an entire windowing system on top of DOS to use VGA to show the display.
(I'm a good fucking programmer, and that's not the only time I've written a graphical UI from scratch.)
And. A comical note: about six weeks before the project was due, my hard drive died. And. My backup drive died.
All I had were some two-month old printouts.
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@GeePawHill I’m fairly sure Fred Brooks didn’t mean that when he said “Plan to throw one away”, but whatever floats your boat… 🤷♂️😉
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@thirstybear Yeah, he wasn't talking about dead drives. :)
Fun, fun, fun!😉
So, for my juniors, when I tell you "typing is not the bottleneck", I know what I'm fucking talking about.
It took me a couple of weeks to re-create 4 months worth of work. If I had to bet, I'd bet my second edition was *better* than the edition I lost.
So we come down to the day, and I am ready.
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@GeePawHill
It's a terrible thing to experience when it happens, but this is exactly my experience too.
And it's probably a variant on Fred Brook's "throw one away".
Coding is primarily a way to come to understand the problem, and so to understand what the solution/program should look like.
Once you know, the typing usually isn't the bottleneck.
First, I had to go before the admiral's board of the Canadian Coast Guard and give a demo.
*Second* comical note: the fucking app froze in the middle of the demo, and w/o in any way acknowledging this, I used it as an opportunity to demonstrate that even if we lost power, the app would restart correctly.
Yep. That's right. I rebooted the computer and startup.bat did its magic.
Anyway, the admiral's board is like, "cool, let's try it in the field."
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