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Ask HN: Programming war stories?

7 points| bestnoodles | 11 years ago | reply

Hey veteran engineers of HN, what are some good war stories and lessons you care to share?

In lieu of the 'old dev' story, I think older, experienced programmers have a lot wisdom to pass down to the guys just entering the game.

Thanks in advanced

6 comments

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[+] canterburry|11 years ago|reply
One of my first clients ever as a freelancer set up an online donations site for charities. This was back in 2002-4.

I wrote the entire site from scratch for him in ASP 1.1 with VB script. ASP.net wasn't even around yet. The entire site ran on a DELL box in his office with Comcast Cable internet serving hundreds of charities and taking credit card transactions and ACH transfers online. This was all before any kind of PCI requirements. The only requirement from the bank was SSL.

The worst part of this job was that he was too cheap to have a separate dev and prod environment so all my dev and updating was done on a live site with live credit cards flying by. If I happened to hit save in the middle of a transaction, the whole processing flow might change mid swipe. I was a nervous wreck every day going home. My biggest point of pride is that out of the 2-3 years working with this client, I only lost 1 table of reference data in the DB. That was the biggest disaster I had.

The ironic part of all this was that even through he cared very little about the transactions he lost due to the prod site also being dev, he was absolutely fanatic about HTML layout and pixel perfect design. Since it was difficult to guarantee consistent cross browser look and feel back then, the just converted all text and layout to images...so each page was just an html table with images in each cell.

Oh...he also believed his firewall was slowing down his cable internet so he turned it off. Got hacked once mid sales presentation.

I swear this is all true.

[+] csixty4|11 years ago|reply
I believe it's all true, because around that same time I bought some web design software at Microcenter. When I got home, I learned it was a cheap Photoshop clone that output a giant image and an imagemap. It was pixel-perfect, but completely useless.