![Tech Memoirs [a tongue-in-cheek rememberance of my tech adventures]](http://www.techmemoirs.com/images/logo7.png){kind=logo}
Are you getting repeated calls from a fax machine, with no apparent end in sight? Welcome to my personal day of hell yesterday! I had exactly this problem on Wednesday, so rather than simply let it be as one of my stranger days at work, I thought that I’d turn it into a lovely learning experience for all!
On 01.28.10, In problems, By Derek
On 01.25.10, In programming, By Derek
(If you haven’t read part I, make sure to start there!)
After a night of hardcore, sloppy programming (a phrase that just missed being caught by my work’s naughtiness filter by a single word), we had a program that did the exact opposite of what we intended. Meaning: it didn’t do anything. The next day, my small group went to see our professor shortly before our project was officially due to get some last-minute help. After listening to our sob story and suppressing one’s natural instinct to laugh outright, he actually took pity on our hapless souls. Realizing that we had never before been put into such a situation and could learn a valuable lesson, he gave us some advice on how to fix our program and granted us a couple extra days to get our act together. Our professor’s advice essentially boiled down to this:
- Scrap what we have and start over from scratch
- Break the overall program down into chunks, and design each chunk individually
On 01.19.10, In programming, By Derek
For my first instructional posting, I thought that I’d reach back to one of my finest failures in my history of being a programmer. This little tale harkens back to when I was first starting out in programming, back to my freshmen year in college. I never did a lick of programming prior to entering college, unless you count hacking away at the BASIC source code for that hidden artillery game in DOS 5.0 when I was supposed to be paying attention in high school typing class. Actually, doing that was quite fun, making the explosion radius half the size of the screen — I even showed the trouble maker in the class how to do it, which promptly got him in trouble with the teacher. He never did have that innate instinct for ALT-tabbing when said instructor was walking past you.
Note quite the same game (this is from Blarworld.net), but close in appearance.
On 01.18.10, In problems, By Derek
Hi.
My name is Derek. I’m a software and web developer. How are you?
In my decade-plus of dealing with technology professionally, I’ve run into enough aggravating, head-banging, and/or downright confounding experiences that I decided to share them with others in the hopes that you can learn from my past and prevent the same horrors from plaguing future IT professionals.
Some problems in the world of IT are simply water off a duck’s back – you hardly notice it and move on. Others might make you take a step back and say, “Hmm… I really wish that particular scenario had resulted in a better outcome.” (Do you always talk to yourself so formally?) And then there’s an entirely different level of problem. These are the ones that make you exclaim, “That couldn’t have gone worse if a cloud of shit started raining on me.”
As I illustrate various scenarios of these ilk that I’ve found myself in (sometimes, much to my chagrin, time and time again), I hope to educate, entertain, and warn those youngsters that haven’t picked a career yet to run far, far away from IT if they never want to lose their marbles. I kid, of course. No one plays marbles anymore.