

Ask HN: Programming war stories? - bestnoodles

Hey veteran engineers of HN, what are some good war stories and lessons you care to share?<p>In lieu of the &#x27;old dev&#x27; story, I think older, experienced programmers have a lot wisdom to pass down to the guys just entering the game.<p>Thanks in advanced
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canterburry
One of my first clients ever as a freelancer set up an online donations site
for charities. This was back in 2002-4.

I wrote the entire site from scratch for him in ASP 1.1 with VB script.
ASP.net wasn't even around yet. The entire site ran on a DELL box in his
office with Comcast Cable internet serving hundreds of charities and taking
credit card transactions and ACH transfers online. This was all before any
kind of PCI requirements. The only requirement from the bank was SSL.

The worst part of this job was that he was too cheap to have a separate dev
and prod environment so all my dev and updating was done on a live site with
live credit cards flying by. If I happened to hit save in the middle of a
transaction, the whole processing flow might change mid swipe. I was a nervous
wreck every day going home. My biggest point of pride is that out of the 2-3
years working with this client, I only lost 1 table of reference data in the
DB. That was the biggest disaster I had.

The ironic part of all this was that even through he cared very little about
the transactions he lost due to the prod site also being dev, he was
absolutely fanatic about HTML layout and pixel perfect design. Since it was
difficult to guarantee consistent cross browser look and feel back then, the
just converted all text and layout to images...so each page was just an html
table with images in each cell.

Oh...he also believed his firewall was slowing down his cable internet so he
turned it off. Got hacked once mid sales presentation.

I swear this is all true.

~~~
csixty4
I believe it's all true, because around that same time I bought some web
design software at Microcenter. When I got home, I learned it was a cheap
Photoshop clone that output a giant image and an imagemap. It was pixel-
perfect, but completely useless.

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csixty4
You inspired me to write up another one: Entry-level programmers, non-breaking
spaces, and user experience [https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/entry-level-
programmers-no...](https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/entry-level-programmers-
non-breaking-spaces/)

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csixty4
The "W" Screen, the story of an Easter Egg :
[https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/the-w-screen-story-of-
an-e...](https://davidmichaelross.com/blog/the-w-screen-story-of-an-easter-
egg/)

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cledet
I recommend checking out book Coders at Work[1].

[1]: [http://www.codersatwork.com](http://www.codersatwork.com)

~~~
bestnoodles
this is great just ordered

