Stories From 25 Years of Software Development
46 points by susam
46 points by susam
This was a very nice read. Thank you for sharing.
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. Of course, there is no reason one cannot do both. But in the end, that was his decision, not mine.
I'm inclined to believe he probably had a more fulfilling career than if he'd stuck to topping the class and not having fun, though of course it's impossible to know for sure.
The post explicitly mentions 'academic competition' which sounds negative to me. I wonder why you think it would be advantageous. Maybe it's related to the distribution of scores, and the size of the classes.
For example, if the top ten (that he would still often end up in) all scored above 95%, and each class contained 200 students, wouldn't you agree it's not important to be number one?
Maybe my comment is was unclear – I'm saying it's probably a good thing that they focused less on academics, and more on fun.
If any of you know any "old timers" who did software development back in the 70s and 80s, ask them for a story of two. I think you'll find them to be pretty fun :) For example, maybe they started at a software company that didn't own any computers (had to rent computer time from mainframes), or their "version control" system was just several large binders of printed out fortran code, or their software installer was an employee going to the customer site with a real of magnetic tape.
I think people don't really grasp how "new" version control is (at least as common as it has become).
My whole career I've had access to tools like SVN, and even Git became incredibly popular very soon after I'd entered the industry, so I've never known a time before version control.
But ask someone who's 45+, I guarantee that they used to copy disk around or use shared drives.
One colleague of mine used to have a plastic dinosaur, and you were only allowed to copy files into the shared drive if you were the holder of the dinosaur.
This apparently led to people losing the dinosaur from their desks when they went to the bathroom.
I used to have multiple directories, with names like foo-1.0, foo-1.1, foo-2.3 and so on. I'd get to a point where I was happy, then copy the source to a new directory to continue. My first real use of version control was in 2000 with CVS. A friend tried to get me to switch to SVN but the installation process was so horrible (this was around 2002-3) that I kept with CVS until Git hit the scene, and I never looked back. For complaints about Git, it was a very fresh breath of air at the time, and much easier to set up a new repository compared to CVS or SVN.
I'm 41, and my first job barely out of college was full of files like index.php, index.1.php, index.real.php, index.bak.php.bak, index.20010104.php, etc.
All edited live on the production server, of course.