Most meaningful project?
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With my retirement later this year, I've been thinking about the most meaningful projects I've worked on. Top of my list is the work I did for the 1984 Olympic games held in Los Angeles. I was working on the operating system of the IBM S/38 back then. IBM was a corporate sponsor of the Olympics. My task was to make some modifications to the operating system so we could print a special bar code that we were not making generally available. This was printed (by a dot-matrix printer) onto the employee and athlete badges. The badge had a dark red square where the black bar code was printed -- so even though it was machine readable it was not easy to read with one's eyes. I felt a lot of responsibility as a 25 year old. Of course the application worked well and there were no security problems. It's a special memory. Best wishes everyone - Craig
I wrote HaiBas, a BASIC interpreter, in 1975/76 for a software company in The Netherlands. The company and independent developers sold their packages, "apps" in modern parlance, and brought in eventually several thousand end users. It never progressed to a graphical world but there are still enthusiastic developers and end users. I bought the software rights about 10 years ago and have maintained the interpreter and associated tools (now in C++) for nearly 50 years. Significant? Certainly on a personal level!
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Very cool! Did the siren ever sound off (outside of test environment)?
Ha! There's a funny story related to that but it can't be told in a public forum ;-)
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I wrote HaiBas, a BASIC interpreter, in 1975/76 for a software company in The Netherlands. The company and independent developers sold their packages, "apps" in modern parlance, and brought in eventually several thousand end users. It never progressed to a graphical world but there are still enthusiastic developers and end users. I bought the software rights about 10 years ago and have maintained the interpreter and associated tools (now in C++) for nearly 50 years. Significant? Certainly on a personal level!
Any software that lives longer than 5 years is significant. (Because that's what's quoted as the "useful life" of software).
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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My story is not as good. In fact, it didn't have a happy ending. In the early nineties, before I incorporated, I got a gig to create a payroll system for a national fitness company. The payroll system was just for the professional trainers, who had a complex method for determining how they would be paid. For the sake of argument, this was bonus pay. There was a one-person department that did all this processing. As the company expanded, it was taking this one person nearly the full month to process the payments for the Personal Trainers. The company was worried that they soon wouldn't be able to make payments in time, so I was hired to analyze the process and build a solution. The computer program that I developed solved the problem, reducing the process from weeks to days (data entry was now the most consuming part of the process). Everyone was happy, except when they decided to lay off the person who originally did the process. Yes, it was sad, but that wasn't my call. This was the last gig I did for the fitness company before I moved on to another gig. Maybe not a good ending, but it was a big accomplishment.
LucidDev wrote: There was a one-person department that did all this processing. As the company expanded, it was taking this one person nearly the full month to process the payments for the Personal Trainers. Reminds me of a major company I used to work for. When they had trouble, they hired a management consultant who talk to the employees, then wrote a report detailing what we told them. Their conclusion? Due to interruptions for special management reports, We were kept busy for 15 months producing the annual budget and had no time to do productive/profitable work. Not sadthat I left there. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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With my retirement later this year, I've been thinking about the most meaningful projects I've worked on. Top of my list is the work I did for the 1984 Olympic games held in Los Angeles. I was working on the operating system of the IBM S/38 back then. IBM was a corporate sponsor of the Olympics. My task was to make some modifications to the operating system so we could print a special bar code that we were not making generally available. This was printed (by a dot-matrix printer) onto the employee and athlete badges. The badge had a dark red square where the black bar code was printed -- so even though it was machine readable it was not easy to read with one's eyes. I felt a lot of responsibility as a 25 year old. Of course the application worked well and there were no security problems. It's a special memory. Best wishes everyone - Craig
I'd say my most meaningful project was development of a real time metalic rod inspection system running on a 386 PC in 1990. The previous system was run on a PDP minicomputer. It read data from serial port and needed to detect flaws of 1/64th of an inch with the rods moving at 1 foot per second. It's fairly simple to calculate how many readings per second are needed. I read the data and did an FFT to spot out-of-expected range responses. The most challenging thing was the need to fire a paint gun to mark the flaw.Knoswing the distance to the gun nozzle, determined the time delay required. Then there was the need to archive all the raw data for later review. Obviously, at those speeds, there was no way to spit the data to disk in time to get the next reading. I had to devise a way to detect the end of a rod, then vomit the data from a buffer to disk before the start of the next rod.Therewas generally a 1 foot space between rods. I write it in C, then optimized in assembly to crank the most out of every CPU cycle. The system was in place and used in production for years. In fact I was told it is still in use after all these years. CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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With my retirement later this year, I've been thinking about the most meaningful projects I've worked on. Top of my list is the work I did for the 1984 Olympic games held in Los Angeles. I was working on the operating system of the IBM S/38 back then. IBM was a corporate sponsor of the Olympics. My task was to make some modifications to the operating system so we could print a special bar code that we were not making generally available. This was printed (by a dot-matrix printer) onto the employee and athlete badges. The badge had a dark red square where the black bar code was printed -- so even though it was machine readable it was not easy to read with one's eyes. I felt a lot of responsibility as a 25 year old. Of course the application worked well and there were no security problems. It's a special memory. Best wishes everyone - Craig
two projects come to mind. One was doing class scheduling at a college for students. I created a way for them to search and select which classes they wanted based upon a variety of factors and to enable them to then wholesale sign up for the classes. Took a ton of work off of people so they could then focus on getting the right classes. I wrote it 20+ years ago and the code is still in use at its core by the college. That was fun 2nd was helping people to concentrate on their job. working at a very large farming organization. they had a monthly "dashboard" that was compiled given to their upper management. It took 4 people most of a month to put together and kept them out of their real jobs and being productive. They had to run around and interview a variety of people on differing projects about status etc... Took like 6 months but essentially made a real "dashboard" that was updated real time with the data from the various project managers. The best part about this was that no one lost a job and I got a huge bonus because of time saved for the company. It was such a good feeling. there are a host of other projects that might have been harder or what not but these two stick out alot.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer