When Pigs Fly

[Thales750]

If once, only once, I would write a page of code and not have to go back and, edit it, declare a variable, check for spelling, or have every ", .,';[]()" just right.

I would run outside and look for Flying Pigs.

What is it that bugs you the most about developing software?

 

[ConnorGiles]

Think you've cleared it up for me Thales!

The accuracy needed is too damn high!

 

[Frothingslosh]

What is it that bugs you the most about developing software?

Being told halfway through the project that the bosses/clients have changed their minds or realized an error that results in having to rewrite half the project.

First ran into that in 95, when the engineering company where I worked (it made the control systems for assembly lines) was told by GM that the 12 foot control cabinet that was 90% complete and a week from completion would instead have to be an 8 foot cabinet. And that neither the due date nor the fee would be changing.

 

[Thales750]

Being told halfway through the project that the bosses/clients have changed their minds or realized an error that results in having to rewrite half the project.

First ran into that in 95, when the engineering company where I worked (it made the control systems for assembly lines) was told by GM that the 12 foot control cabinet that was 90% complete and a week from completion would instead have to be an 8 foot cabinet. And that neither the due date nor the fee would be changing.

Been there.

 

[Libre]

Well, customers and bosses changing requirements is infuriating, but not really specific to writing code. We've all been there.
As far as writing code, here's a little thing I've noticed from time to time. It doesn't anger me. I find it amusing.
So, you're writing some code to develop a function, or just looking through your modules, and your eyes hit a strange line of code you don't remember writing. You look at it and it seems either unnecessary or even disasterous! Yet, everything is working.
Hmmmmmm, you say.
What does this line of code do?
Nothing!!
I'm going to comment it out.
So you add the ' mark at the start of the line and then continue with what you were doing.
Now add some time. A day, a week, a year, could be almost any length of time, until...
All of a sudden your program crashes.
You can't figure out why.
You didn't just change anything.
You might have tried something you've done before and it worked fine before, but not now.
So you start debugging.
Eventually you figure out you need a line of code that is missing somehow and that's why the program is crashing.
So you write the line of code, now the program works, you debug/compile, and happen to notice that right above your new line of code is the exact same line of code, commented out. It's happened to me from time to time. Always makes me smile - glad the program is working again and glad I unraveled the real problem - everything fits again.

 

[Alc]

Libre, an ex-colleague had a simmilar experience to that while were contracted to do support work for BP.

He got called in the early hours and told a taxi was being sent to his house to bring him into Lndon urgently as the traders couldn't work. He rushed in and spent hours trying to work out why the code we were supporting had suddenly failed, all the time being berated by the a**hole of a manager and told how all of us were useless and this is why he'd argued against us being on-site and he was going to sue our company, etc. etc.

The investigation finally revealed that one of the in-house staff had manually deleted a folder from the server, somewhere out in the countryside. He'd checked it for a few nights and found it always empty. Rather than ask anyone, he'd deleted it. Unfortunately, it was used between 2:00AM and 2:30AM - to store the various downloaded share prices used by another application - after which time it was cleared ready for the next day. When the next process couldn't find this folder, it fell over.

Funnily enough, no apology was ever issued to the guy who got called out and it turned out (somehow) to be impossible to find out who had done the deletion, even though only one person was working in that department at that time each night.

 

[Vassago]

Libre, an ex-colleague had a simmilar experience to that while were contracted to do support work for BP.

He got called in the early hours and told a taxi was being sent to his house to bring him into Lndon urgently as the traders couldn't work. He rushed in and spent hours trying to work out why the code we were supporting had suddenly failed, all the time being berated by the a**hole of a manager and told how all of us were useless and this is why he'd argued against us being on-site and he was going to sue our company, etc. etc.

The investigation finally revealed that one of the in-house staff had manually deleted a folder from the server, somewhere out in the countryside. He'd checked it for a few nights and found it always empty. Rather than ask anyone, he'd deleted it. Unfortunately, it was used between 2:00AM and 2:30AM - to store the various downloaded share prices used by another application - after which time it was cleared ready for the next day. When the next process couldn't find this folder, it fell over.

Funnily enough, no apology was ever issued to the guy who got called out and it turned out (somehow) to be impossible to find out who had done the deletion, even though only one person was working in that department at that time each night.

That's a fairly common problem in any corporate environment, people taking the lead on something without completely understanding what it's for. It happens quite regularly at my company. I've had access to folders removed by without question, a database server used by the call center removed from the network because the DBA didn't know what it was and didn't bother asking around, a company issued laptop used by a visiting VP at my desk for a project we were working on together removed and powered down in the middle of our project while we were at lunch because "personal laptops are not allowed on the network." What ever happened to a little detective work before taking an initiative that could cause serious ramifications?

 

[Thales750]

all the time being berated by the a**hole of a manager and told how all of us were useless

Funnily enough, no apology was ever issued

Sounds like my wife LOL

 

[Galaxiom]

The investigation finally revealed that one of the in-house staff had manually deleted a folder from the server, somewhere out in the countryside. When the next process couldn't find this folder, it fell over.

I blame the application. Good programming practice would not presume the folder existed and create it if it isn't there. Secondly it isn't sensible to have a folder sitting somewhere without its context being apparent.

BTW. The person who deleted it obviously didn't check the date on the folder or they would have seen it was in use.

 

[Thales750]

I blame the application. Good programming practice would not presume the folder existed and create it if it isn't there. Secondly it isn't sensible to have a folder sitting somewhere without its context being apparent.

BTW. The person who deleted it obviously didn't check the date on the folder or they would have seen it was in use.

I was thinking the same thing. Always verify the folder exist. To that end there is a routine that I downloaded years ago that populates a table with file names from a folder.

I don't remember who wrote it, but I'll post it in the main forums if you like.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Well, customers and bosses changing requirements is infuriating, but not really specific to writing code. We've all been there.

I DID mention project changes halfway through the project that require rewriting half your code. That is, by definition, a programming issue, and is my pet peeve. It happening to everyone doesn't make any less so. The other was just tangentally related, but was my worst experience of a last-second change to-date. (Luckily I was hourly, so the 118 hour week made for a nice paycheck.)

As to random deletions, someone at the company where I am now deleted all of the folders used by my department (Business Information) Tuesday morning. Our IT contracting firm has been telling us for three days now that they're working on getting the backups restored, but that there are a lot of files and it's going to take time. And, of course, most of the things we do straight-up require the data and tools that got deleted. At least the data we're legally required to keep and the data that drives the business was untouched.

 

[kevlray]

This goes back a few years. We had a department that was using an Corel WordPerfect document that they were basically using as a database. I was asked to create an Access database for it. After months of creating tables and forms. I presented the 'draft' to the clients. It was then that they mentioned that they needed to take the database on their laptops when they went to visit clients. Which would have required re-syncing everybody's copy of the database back to the master DB. I explained while it was possible, someone in the office would have to do the re-syncing. To much trouble for them, and anyhow they were going to be using a new application in less than two years. I learned a lot, but what a waste (also before we had project managers that might have saved me a lot of time and work).

 

[Thales750]

This goes back a few years. We had a department that was using an Corel WordPerfect document that they were basically using as a database. I was asked to create an Access database for it. After months of creating tables and forms. I presented the 'draft' to the clients. It was then that they mentioned that they needed to take the database on their laptops when they went to visit clients. Which would have required re-syncing everybody's copy of the database back to the master DB. I explained while it was possible, someone in the office would have to do the re-syncing. To much trouble for them, and anyhow they were going to be using a new application in less than two years. I learned a lot, but what a waste (also before we had project managers that might have saved me a lot of time and work).

Thank you for bringing this up.

This to me is the most egregious of all policies from Microsoft. Access should have been made web friendly years ago.

Instead, we (several million people) have been forced to learn new technologies, that are either less powerful, or else require an entirely new skill set.

They are more concerned with forcing people to adopt Share Point.

 

[Galaxiom]

Thank you for bringing this up.

This to me is the most egregious of all policies from Microsoft. Access should have been made web friendly years ago.

Instead, we (several million people) have been forced to learn new technologies, that are either less powerful, or else require an entirely new skill set.

They are more concerned with forcing people to adopt Share Point.

Hmm. Several posts have mentioned projects having their specifications changed midstream.

That is exactly what you are doing by asking Access to be made web friendly. Access was conceived before the use of the web was considered plausible. It was never a web enabled product and making it so would require a complete rebuilding of its fundamental structure from scratch.

SharePoint is Microsoft's solution to using Access on the web.

 

[Thales750]

Hmm. Several posts have mentioned projects having their specifications changed midstream.

That is exactly what you are doing by asking Access to be made web friendly. Access was conceived before the use of the web was considered plausible. It was never a web enabled product and making it so would require a complete rebuilding of its fundamental structure from scratch.

SharePoint is Microsoft's solution to using Access on the web.

I am aware of that, and when I was a developer for the Federal Government I got a first hand view of that incredibly inept system.

And either way Share Point is not a viable solution for small businesses.

All they had to do when they changed midstream from Jet to Ace is make Ace capable of non-persistent connections and back end queries. And that over a 20 year period.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

My pet peeve is having to go in and clean up someone else's mess.

One case I had to fix when when someone tried to do some cleanup involving scratchpad memory (essentially, allocating memory from within your virtual memory space for a NEW object). They tried to go back and delete the objects but, because of the crazy pointers they used, ended up thrashing virtual memory and causing pagefaults out the wazoo. It took me three days to find out how to fix this... I deleted four lines of code. It was the code that called the "release allocated scratchpad object" subroutine. I realized that since the memory was local, if I just waited for the application to exit, ALL of the memory would be deallocated instantly. The program that had taken 72+ hours to run suddenly finished in 1 hour. But it took me days to figure out how poorly the code was designed.

A very large part of my career has been cleaning up other people's messes, to the point that for a while, my "personal title" on my e-mail was "Senior Systems Janitor." I had to stop using that because some government wag took offense at the title for reasons I have yet to understand. That guy needed to get a life but I don't care now anyway. He's left the site and I'm still on the job (for a little while longer.)

 

[Thales750]

I don't know Doc, I got a job at the TSA because the previous guy did it wrong. They asked me how I would fix it, and I told them start all over. LOL

They're still using my system today.