Wait, you didn’t have meetings about the button first?

We had an all hands on deck, world is ending bug one time. Like, basically the entire org got pulled onto it. In our product is a spreadsheet of activities, with dates and durations. Our customers can run a scheduling algorithm to adjust dates based off of durations and activity dependencies and relationships. This is super important. This broke. We have to make sure that activities don’t have circular dependencies, or otherwise scheduling will loop infinitely and fail. So, we basically dfs looking for a loop before scheduling, and fail it with a not really helpful error message. That loop checkimg got updated so it could properly provide helpful info in the error message. This change caused most real world schedules to have false positives for loops when checked, ergo, no ability to schedule. I found the cause of the problem but not the dependency structure that caused the issue, and ultimately decided it would be faster, cleaner, and overall better to rewrite the feature myself than to fix the original. So, I wrote the most beautiful damn depth first search of my life! Learned about the bug monday morning, had the fix good to go tuesday night, so that qa could test wednesday thursday for the hotfix merge deadline friday. Two days isn’t a lot to cover testing it, but I figure with every tester in the org pretty much available to pound on it itd be good enough. While I was working on the rewrite, other devs and qa were hunting down all the details of what happened to cause the bug, data structure wise, and coming up with good test cases. So, by the time it was ready, they knew what happened and had a much more thorough test plan. Well, it came down from on high that the fix would go into the next major release, not a hotfix, so it didn’t actually go out for 3 weeks after the monday the bug came in. Sigh. Well, I had fun writing it, and I consider it the cleanest, most beautiful and elegant code I’ve ever written. It used a stack of stacks! When I’m feeling shitty and useless at work, I go back and look at it tbh.

I code maybe 2 times a year at my job. Every other time I am doing some sort of paperwork to verify features work, or I am using fucking excel. It’s incredibly dull.

Make the user search for this button depth-first

I was interviewing a couple of months ago, and one of the in-person technical interviews wanted me to write, on a whiteboard, a function that took in a timestamp and calculated the angle between the hands on a clock set to that time. After I did that they wanted me to reverse engineer the linux “tac” command for files of unknown size that I could not store the contents of locally, resulting in probably the most sinful piece of code I’ve ever written.

What really gets my goat about it, is that out of all my interviewing companies, they were by far at the bottom of the list, and was really only interviewing to get negotiating power. My company had worked pretty closely with them, so I was well aware of the poor treatment and absurdly high turnover rate, so they were really in no place to be picky. My top choice company’s hardest question was one of those basic college programming math questions where the answer is “use the modulus operator”.

Sometimes the customer throws out insane shit you have to talk them down from though. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg