Your favorite programming job....
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... QA for a pron site.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
Just an in-and-out job contract?
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
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Just an in-and-out job contract?
It was an /instructional/ assignment shall we say. :laugh:
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
I'd have to day my favorite was working on a submarine navigation subsystem years back. We used C to interface to all the sensors and ADA to display pretty pictures to the user. Taught me all about the importance of getting the interfaces right :) The team was small and so I had a chance to work at pretty much all levels.
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... QA for a pron site.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
I really hope you didn't find any bugs.
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
That would be hard to identify, because most of them have all had great aspects. The "figure out how much ice to pack with the chocolate based on NOAA weather predictions" was a favorite because it was cool (hahahaha) and short. The entertainer management system for adult entertainment clubs was a favorite for, erm, obvious reasons The boat yard management software was a favorite because I had to work with a lot of people and it was great to see efficiency improvements The satellite design stuff is a favorite because it is plain and simple awesome technology The educational gaming stuff was a favorite because it's fun to work with artists and I revolutionized the development process (very ego gratifying) I guess they are all my favorites, but if I were to rank them, the satellite design stuff is first and the adult club stuff is a very close second. :) Marc
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... QA for a pron site.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
so you were paid to poke around :laugh:
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
When I ran my own company writing edutainment software AND producing the content for it. My business partner and I lost money (in real, money had to be paid back, terms and salary we never gave ourselves), but both agree we'd do it over again if we had the chance.
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Norm .net wrote:
Currently WFC, WPF, Silverlight and learning HTML5 at the mo.
What the foundation is WFC? Is that a typo for WCF? :)
Regards, Nish
My technology blog: voidnish.wordpress.com
Wisconsin Fried Chicken.
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
My favorite job was the first one where I actually got PAID, plus it was interesting and useful. For a professor at my college, I programmed a Macintosh (circa 1993) to talk to a piece of custom equipment which measured radiation in radon gas samples taken from aircraft. Pretty simple stuff by my standards now, but man was I proud when I got that $600 check! I bought myself a sweet new laser printer (which turned out to be a piece of junk, but that's another story...) The real lesson that I learned was this: I was "rejected" from getting a work-study job because somehow they thought my parents earned too much money (which was BS!). So, I went around asking professor if they needed any help and sure enough, this guy in the physics department needed some code written. Ask and ye shall receive!
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
My favorite was when I was hired in a development team (back in 98-99) as the only MS-oriented developer on a team of Java & Oracle developers. My task was to write a distributed, n-tier program that would do what HP OpenView would do. The company needed the app for monitoring its telco systems, and thought by having the program written in-house, it would 1) better fit their needs, and 2) help increase their value as a startup by owning the code. I wrote the distributed app using VB6, DCOM, SQL Server, and a fairly decent knowledge of SNMP and IP networking. I took a lot of good-natured ribbing from Java developers for bewing only a "VB6 programmer", but in the end, I was done in six months. The app worked perfect (including text-to-speech and speech-to-text at the operator's console) and did everything HP OpenView did that we would use, and some things it didn't. The middleware ran as real (not wrapped) services on NT4. I exported the object design as PTL files, and three Java developers used Rational Rose to take thos PTL files, and reverse engineer the app in Java. Three develoeprs couldn't even come close over the next year, and gave up. I loved the task I was given, it was a great group of folks, and it was before the tech bubble burst. Unfortunately, since the company was doing so well, the investors brought in some NationsBank executives to take over running the business from "the techies", and before long, the company met its eventual fate. That said, I have enjoyed almost all software development jobs I've been on, and where I am at for the last 7 years (RouteMatch Software) is pretty close to my favorite. Great company, great co-workers, challenging and interesting programming. Also, in developing my "job enjoyability metrics", I use as a baseline when I used to crop tobacco and pick cucumbers as a teenager.
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
It's a toss up between: * porting WordPerfect to the NeXT back in '89 & '90 * working on digital photography and image archiving software for the plastic surgery industry in '96-'99 (including tools to simulate surgical results for things like face lifts and boob jobs)
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
A contract job implementing data-processing algorithms for the University of Michigan. It was 80s technology (C programming), but it paid $75/hour! This was about 10 years ago. It only lasted 5 weeks though.
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
Getting paid to learn
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
I'd have to say it was one that most Code Project members wouldn't recognize. One fine day in 1992, I was handed a three-board combination, intended for a VAX/Unibus backplane, and a few data sheets that described the programmable onboard components.
"What do you want me to do with this?" I asked my manager.
He said, "Make it do what we need," and walked away. (He was like that.)
What he'd handed me was a non-Von Neumann engine: a bit-slice architecture with several independent but coordinated processors on it. It was intended to support MIL-STD-1553 communications: as a Bus Controller, as up to 30 Remote Terminals, or as a Bus Monitor, or as all three simultaneously. But the magic wasn't in the engine itself; I had to provide that with onboard micro-software.
It's hard for me to make clear just how limited this thing, which we called the VAX DI, really was. The instruction word was 48 bits wide, and there was a grand total of 4K such words of program memory. There was another 8K x 16 bits of data memory, which had to be addressed through one of two "page registers" that could only make 64 words available at a time. The stack was only five levels deep and could not be used for data, only for return addresses. There were 32 computational registers, each 16-bits-wide. And of course, there were two MIL-STD-1553 transceivers (dual-redundant buses). The DI's clock rate was 5 MHz: one instruction would execute every 200 nanoseconds. That instruction had parts that commanded the program sequencer, the arithmetic and logical unit, the memory bus, the DMA interface to the VAX Unibus, and a very intricate scheme for moving data and status among them. There was a microassembler, and an exceedingly rudimentary debugger. The device had been designed and built by the Navy, but there was no developer's support available for it.
It was my job to make the DI speak seven different dialects of MIL-STD-1553, all at the same time. (I also had to write a VAX/VMS device driver to make it accessible to application programs.) A few of those dialects had clearly been designed in Hell. And until I had the DI properly programmed, software development for the billion-dollar program I was on could not proceed.
But I was given my own VAX 8650 to do this with. I was told that I would not be disturbed, and that if I discovered that I needed anything else I hadn't received (that already existed, of course), all I had to do was ask. A suicide mission it might have been, but I was guaranteed the gr
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Hopefully, the next one... ...which I'm starting on 10th October :-)
Rhys "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal" "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe"
Me, too. Hopefully my next one that I will be starting on Monday 9/26
Mark Harrington "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG" --Bill Gates
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
The position I am in now. I started here six months ago and the co-workers are awesome. I've worked with some pretty bad co-workers and it can make all the difference in the world. The company is doing well also which also makes a big difference, especially in this economy. (If the execs are happy, they usually make life better for us pee-ons)
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Let's have it -- what was your favorite programming job?
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
any job that has forward, clear and innovative thinking and not an asshole as a boss. :cool:
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Wisconsin Fried Chicken.
No food issues I can see...
