[umarniz]

Symbian was the era that trains you to never be afraid of debugging the hardest problems and understand how big of a blessing documentation is.

A few examples of my childhood experiences making a game for Symbian:

1) Debugging that one problem which would cause the whole OS to crash

The crash log didn't help cause it wouldn't flush the logs to disk in time. My under developed concepts of multi-threading didn't help much either not that I know much more today 10 years later.

2) Overriding OS memory safety to read accelerometer data from memory in phones that didn't have APIs for it

The patience and creative thinking you learn tackling with such high levels of uncertainty and painful problems is incredible.

I am not aware of how engineers learn engineering (I am self taught) but this kind of patience and endurance does shape a lot of my engineering skills today.

[abcd_f]

Earlier Windows versions shipped with the same wonderful developer experience. My favourite was a bool API function returning 2 under certain circumstances that you’d better be aware of.

And by “earlier” I mean from Win 3.1 and up to W8 era or thereabouts, when the documentation finally started to improve.

[KptMarchewa]

GetMessage?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/n...