Uh, airline tickets to India?

I spent a summer in south India a few years ago during monsoon season. I was fucking miserable in my jeans and shirts until I switched over to wearing loose, flowing clothes made of bleached kahdi (loose homespun cotton) like the locals. It keeps the sun off you and even when it gets soaked it doesn’t cling to your skin, and then whenever the rain stops it dries completely very quickly. Other westerners I met made fun of me for pretending to go native, but they had no clue how effective it was.

He knew the secrets: blame your tools and be the same religion as your bosses. He was also, to his credit, a fantastic softball player, which helped the company team win the championship every year.

And this wasn’t even his biggest disaster as long as you don’t count the potential for death. The baseball-throwing gig was just him and his manager; for his next project he led a team of five developers that turned three months into three years and never produced working software. The only revenue it ever produced was an initial $50K from the client that was later refunded to preempt a lawsuit. For the project he chose Ruby-on-Rails despite the fact that neither he nor anybody else on the team - nor anybody else in the entire state for that matter - had any experience with RoR. I have to give him credit, though: he was a true Renaissance Man in the sense that he could fuck up a project in any language or platform.

We got hired by a company that was developing a remote-controlled baseball launching machine. The machine itself was just the standard two spinning wheels (although the max rotational speed of 125 mph was a lot for this sort of thing), but it could also pivot 360 degrees and also angle itself between straight up and 45 degrees down towards the ground, so it was capable of simulating any hit ball in baseball. The idea was that you would put this machine at home plate and then the coach could walk out among the players and use the remote (which was a Windows Mobile PDA) to generate any kind of hit, like a grounder to short or a pop fly to right field etc. Because the wheels could be independently controlled, you could put any kind of spin you wanted on a ball by having one wheel spinning faster than the other.

Really a cool device and a cool project, but my coworker who got the gig was a remarkably terrible programmer who spent more than a year fucking things up in various ways. At one point, for example, he spent three months trying to develop a Physics engine to control where the ball went, despite the fact that a) he knew nothing about Physics, and b) the Physics of a spinning baseball is actually incredibly complicated and well beyond the processing power of a PDA circa 2005. Not to mention that the balls used varied tremendously in how old and scuffed up they were, which would have defeated any attempt to calculate where they were going with any kind of real precision.

Despite being well over budget and past the original schedule, he had things sort of working (sometimes) and the client asked him to produce a variant of the software that would let the machine be used by Little League coaches. My coworker in addition to writing the version to scale back the speeds appropriately, also decided to completely change the API that was used to communicate with the machine. Previously, the speeds had been specified by short integer values between 0 and 32768, but he decided it would be better to use floating-point values between 0 and 1. All well and good, except his way of dealing with the huge amount of compiler errors this generated was to cast all the hard-coded short int values as floats and clamp the result between 0.0 and 1.0.

As bad as this was, he also decided to test this version - for the first time - on a field with actual Little Leaguers (in his defense - but only slightly - we rarely had access to the actual machine itself, so proper testing was always difficult). The coach sent the command for a slow grounder to the shortstop. This should have produced a horizontal ball with about a 30 mph speed on the bottom wheel and 35 mph on the top wheel to give it some topspin. Instead, his hard-code int values were about 10000 and 12000, which got cast and clamped to 1.0 by the API call - in other words, maximum speed (125 mph) on both wheels. This ejected a ball with no spin going 125 mph, the most deadly knuckleball in human history (human pitchers throw knucklers at maybe 50 mph and they’re nearly impossible to hit or even catch). At least he had the angle and azimuth “right” so this was fired straight at the shortstop! Had it hit him, the kid for sure would have badly concussed and very possibly killed, but fortunately it sailed just over his head.

This was my entire 25-year career. No way in hell would I want to watch a show like that.

Although if there were a show based on my career, I’m sure the highest ratings would be the show where my coworker fires a 125 mph knuckle ball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. It was the only time in my career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between my boss and the client.

expressly designed to carry on regardless

I’m surprised they didn’t borrow On Error Resume Next from Visual Basic. Which was wrongly considered to be the worst thing in Visual Basic - when the real worst thing was On Error Resume. On Error Resume Next at least moved on to the next line of code when an error occurred; On Error Resume just executed the error-generating line again … and again … and again … and again …

That is absolutely (n > 1) * ("ba" + 0/0 + "a")

I spent a lot of time there the first couple of years, mostly answering questions. I was in the top 20 or so of users for a while - I remember when Jon Skeet was right below me in the rankings and I thought “huh, I’ll show this guy”. I did not in fact show that guy. I’m still in the top .1% but I haven’t done anything there in almost a decade.

D365 CE is a platform for Sales teams to organize and track leads, quotes, contracts, etc.

Huh, I would have thought “CE” stood for “compact edition” like it did for Windows CE back in the day. Which was unironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft.

I just went through that for a while and saw nothing that doesn’t look exactly like C#. If it’s based around .NET and looks exactly like C#, why the fuck not just use C#?

As somebody who first started coding BASIC on an Apple IIe in 1981, I am just so tired of new languages. They all do basically the same shit and there’s just no real point to any of them.

caused irreparable harm to the company as the whole product has to be redone from the ground up

Lol this is most projects for most companies I’ve worked for, long before AI came on the scene. Somehow these multi-year multi-million dollar disasters were never fatal.

I also don’t know what vibe coding is, but my guess is it’s coding while high.

The term dates to 1974 (1968 if you accept “Application Program Interface”). The concept is decades older than that. My boss was just a fucking moron.

I’m going back to TurboBASIC.

AI is good for the early stages of a project … when it’s important to create the illusion of rapid progress so that management doesn’t cancel the project while there’s still time to do so.

Wait, are they doing a Boeing over there at Microsoft?

What, killing whistleblowers?

I guess Bootsy Collins was wrong … sometimes you do learn.

I was actually referencing Fatboy Slim referencing Dune.

You’re thinking of “gangster app”.