Ask HN: What's the strangest place you wrote code? - GlenTheMachine
======
WDCDev
In the field at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, next to old WWI style bunkers that
were prob. full of mustard gas or chlorine gas 100 or so years ago, in a tiny
trailer filled with server equipment ... with a failing AC unit, in the August
heat of Maryland.

Did I mention the power line run to this trailer couldn't handle the load we
were putting on it, and the circuits would break every 15 minutes or so?

So yeah .. I am sweating, literally, and our field test is about to begin.
This was an anti-IED system, using passive biometric collection capabilities.
I had written a big piece of the software to integrate everything.

Then ... 10 minutes before we begin, we get a nasty bug. General Such and Such
is arriving, followed by Cnl. Whomever. Then the AC cuts out. I am in this
trailer, and have to code up a fix in 10 minutes, literally, in 105 degree
heat, dripping in sweat, with PMs and more important ppl staring over my
shoulder.

I did it ... while dripping sweat all over the keyboard. Hooray for me! I
saved the day!

Craziest ... most intense coding I have ever done.

Still fail white board interviews though. =/

~~~
ryan-allen
That's pretty bad ass. Were you part of the military or a contractor?

~~~
WDCDev
Contractor ... Biometrics firm. I loved this company and would still be there
today had they not lost so many ppl with the draw downs in Iraq and Afgh.

BTW ... this is a true story. One of my career's shining moments.

~~~
ryan-allen
Ah, I was asking to try and figure out the fear level, if enlisted, I would
imagine there would be more fear? Either way. LOTS OF FEAR! Cool story :)

------
bkovacev
Bathroom of 7/11\. I was doing freelancing while still in college and we were
traveling for a tournament in Lewisburg. I realized that I let a bug slip into
production and had to get a fix out immediately. So there I was middle of
nowhere, PA, connected to nearby Wendy's committing code fixes, while the guy
in the stall next to me had crazy stomach problems. Somehow I still believe
that the smell of Wendy's burgers that guy had were responsible for me writing
about 50 lines + couple of tests in less than 10 minutes.

~~~
freehunter
I wasn't in the bathroom, but I've had critical bugs pop up on side project
while I was on vacation. Luckily I don't store code locally, my dev machine is
on an EC2 instance. We pulled over and switched drivers while I pulled out my
phone and loaded up vim over SSH and fixed the bug and pushed the update.

Not ideal, but it's one benefit of coding remotely.

------
lr4444lr
The maternity ward waiting for and after my wife gave birth. Don't judge if
you haven't been through it: with real life labor there is a LOT of waiting
before the big dramatic moment you see in the movies, and afterward, a lot of
sleeping for both momma and baby. You can go a bit stir-crazy from all the
excitement and confinement. Gotta calm down the nerves with something.

~~~
josephv
I've done it twice, you're wife is a saint to deal with you and your
addiction. But they all are because men seem to have zero understanding of how
not to be self-obsessed and "in the moment".

Induced vaginal births are horrifically time-consuming though. If she can
speak or hold her eyes open, it's not time to go to the hospital (from my
experience, i'm not responsible for your baby being born in a taxi, I live in
a suburb with multiple major hospitals within 5 minutes. Will Smith is not
going to show up and pull that little alien out of you.

~~~
Balero
"I've done it twice, you're wife is a saint to deal with you and your
addiction. But they all are because men seem to have zero understanding of how
not to be self-obsessed and "in the moment"."

OP's wife may well be a saint, but you certainly aren't. FYI it's normally a
bad generalisation if you're calling half the population of the planet "self-
obsessed"

------
GlenTheMachine
For me, it was on the NASA KC-135 zero-gee simulator aircraft, better known as
the “Vomit Comet”. Between parabolas, while experiencing 2 gees. While
throwing up.

~~~
viraptor
Q: why were you writing code there and not afterwards?

~~~
GlenTheMachine
We were collecting microgravity data. Found a bug. Couldn't waste the flight,
they cost $20,000 per flight.

------
abatilo
I had an assignment in a group project in school, and a few hours before the
assignment was due, people started all saying that they weren't going to be
able to get their part done. Since I didn't want to bomb that assignment, I
started working on it, but then the internet at my apartment went out. So it's
like 9pm, assignment is due at 12am, and I didn't know where to go to get
internet, so I take my laptop and go to campus but all the buildings were
closed except one. So I got into the building, and then realized my laptop was
almost out of power. So I went searching for an outlet and finally found one
in the bathroom. So I wrote the rest of the group's assignment on the counter
top in the bathroom.

~~~
tim1994
Did you make it?

------
alexpotato
I coded every day I went to work on New Jersey transit into New York City with
the following setup:

\- Ipad Mini in a case on the coat hook on back of the seat

\- Amazon Essentials Bluetooth keyboard

\- RasepberryPi3 with two wifi cards

\- IPad connected to one wifi card from above and other wifi card hooked into
my phone's hotspot

It was great because I could have the IPad at eye level and my keyboard in my
lap.

~~~
animesh1008
Great! I am new to this and this might be a stupid question as well. But I
wanted to know that how did you get the wifi working in the subway station as
the cellphone signals are not that great for phone's hotspot to work.

Please let me know.

~~~
alexpotato
To be clear: I was doing this on the NJ Transit above ground commuter rail.

The setup was like this: -Pi WiFi card #1 acting as hotspot

-IPad connected to network above

-ssh into Pi from the IPad

-Do coding and local git commits in the shell on the Pi

-Running IPhone with local host spot on

-Pi's 2nd Wifi card connects to the IPhone hotspot

-Pi also has packet forwarding/routing turned on so the IPad can connect through the Pi (acting as a router)

I would do the coding logged into the Pi from the IPad via ssh and do local
git commits.

The cell service was generally good enough for git to connect to GitHub so I
could do pushes etc

In turn, the Pi's 2nd wifi card

------
dudleypippin
Patched production via a blackberry on a merry-go-round at the state fair. My
daughter insisted on ride after ride and production was down.

~~~
ryan-allen
You may have won this one!

------
subway
Standing on top of Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source storage ring.

My group managed a number of clusters around LBL, some belonging to scientists
who felt more comfortable being able to see and pet their cluster, than if it
were hiding away in a datacenter.

For clusters belonging to some of our beamline scientists, this meant hpc
staff got to wear hard hats and dance around "Caution: Radiation Area" signs
should the cluster need to be locally serviced.

[https://i.imgur.com/PeLI0Ls.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/PeLI0Ls.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/3SzSfOi.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/3SzSfOi.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/SJtpj1m.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/SJtpj1m.jpg)

------
jacquesm
Programming a last minute fix on an SGI Indy on top of the ticket booth in a
porn theater (Club Casa Rosso) in Amsterdam minutes before a live stream from
the stage went out to the unsuspecting internet with the theater full of
press. First live stream to the web on record. A hilarious moment involved
some Hells Angel that apparently did guard duty there discovering me and
thinking I was burglarizing the place trying to pull me down. Fortunately
someone intervened before he succeeded :)

------
EliRivers
Hollowed out mountain in Switzerland owned by a Russian oligarch somewhere in
the world's top 100 richest people. Real James Bond villain style; elevator
that rises out of the ground, several stories down etc.

I was working on his tennis court computer. When it was sunny, the roof of
that section (several stories high to allow for a decent game of tennis) could
slide open to let the sunshine in. He took us to a local restaurant for lunch
afterwards.

------
blendo
Me, as an Air Force Staff Sergeant, on a USAF C-141 parked on the tarmac at
Elmendorf AFB, AK. In 1986, we had flown out of Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, as
part of a "fly-off" antenna test on two C-141s, and the software was HP Basic
on an HP 85e. We found a bug in either the RS-232 tape controller piece of the
code, or the IEEE-488 frequency input selector code, so I had to patch in on
the fly before the next two flights (Elemendorf to Thule AB, Greenland, then
Greenland to RAF Lakenheath, England). Once patched, I copied the code and
installed it on the similar C-141 parked next to us, and it worked fine for
the rest of the trip.

I was just a small cog in a big machine, but it was a big career confidence
builder, and has stayed with me over the years. Our base office was the Rome
Air Development Center Propagation Branch at Hanscom AFB, MA.

------
kevin42
Halfway up a radio tower on a butte in Arizona. I was fixing some networking
code on a network radio that we were developing and I just had a close
encounter with a mountain lion on the ground, so I worked on my laptop while
strapped in with a harness up high while I waited for someone to come pick me
up.

------
rob23
\- 1000m below the surface in an active underground mine, pitch black,
surrounded by operating heavy diesel machinery, only illumination was the
"think light" on my IBM thinkpad x60

\- On a remote glacier in the Yukon

\- In the Amazon jungle, fairly remote, being serenaded by monkeys and
swatting mosquitoes and huge ants

------
naspinski
In some old security shack next to a Helipad in downtown Baghdad. Writing
software to help track training of Iraqi soldiers as a contractor.
Surprisingly fun work with people from all over the world.

An occasional explosion or mortar/rocket attack had us put on our armor, but
overall it was pretty safe.

------
seba_dos1
I was coding a lot basically everywhere around 2008-2010 on my Neo Freerunner.
In a tram, on a school break or boring lesson, in a shopping mall, on a beach,
in a forest, in a hospital, near the church; basically anywhere I had some
idle time (mostly waiting for someone else or commuting) and the battery
wasn't flat.

The on-screen keyboard took some time to get used to, but having a complete
GNU/Linux system with full development environment all the time near you was
awesome. I've coded mostly in Python there, but not only. Ocasionally used SSH
and VNC, but most of it was local - internet access wasn't as common and cheap
back then as it is now, so basically used it mostly for quick fixes on the
server while on-the-go.

Awkwardly, when I switched to Nokia N900 it turned out that its hardware
keyboard was actually a disadvantage when it comes to coding - while great
when typing natural language, it was too much hastle when reaching to special
characters compared to typical qwerty on Illume's keyboard in SHR, with a rest
point for the finger on Freerunner's screen bezel, which also was missing on
N900.

Of course this all was when I was very young (15-20 yo). Now I have learned to
apprieciate some rare idle time with just idling :)

------
cblades
In a stuck elevator in a run-down medical office on the way to a dentists
appointment.

------
lsiunsuex
Fixed a bug while on honeymoon. Got a text message something was wrong; was at
the forum shops at Caesars Palace. Googled for the closest Apple store (laptop
was back in the hotel room at Mandalay Bay and I wasn't about to walk all the
way back to get it - store was in the Forum Shops / 5 min away). Got on a
laptop at the store; installed the software I needed (transmit trial, sublime
text, etc...); fortunately I had all passwords memorized; fixed the bug;
removed the software, cleared browser cache (and they say their wiped every
night anyway) and went back to shopping with the wife.

------
Klathmon
I fixed a one-line bug while on a plane using my phone through the plane wifi,
remoted into a desktop machine that actually had the permissions and power to
do a build, test it, and kick it over to the CI system.

I would not recommend it!

------
dingle_thunk
In the shower. Realised I had committed an out by one error the previous
night. Fixed it on my (waterproofish) phone.

------
negativ0
literally, sitting in the street, next to the Vatican to fix a bug before a
demo with the Holy audience

~~~
jkingsbery
If you don't mind my asking, what was the demo?

~~~
negativ0
a web-based administration software to handle various things related to the
Vatican's library and university, like physical access, people registration,
accounting etc. kinda boring but still exciting for the good and the bad of
working in that environment

------
PortableCode
You might find this interesting, a story about the development of a popular ZX
Spectrum emulator Warajevo:

"The grenades fell everywhere, there was little electrical power (at one time
even the hospitals didn't have power for two months!). When we had electricity
it was only for 2-3 hours during the night."

[http://www.worldofspectrum.org/warajevo/Story.html](http://www.worldofspectrum.org/warajevo/Story.html)

------
johnbellone
I was failing over a web application/services to another datacenter from my
house during Hurricane Sandy. The power had went out and I was tethered to my
cell phone.

------
nicolashahn
Was working as a research assistant for my university's NLP department. Had a
script to process a few gigabytes of text, knew it was going to take all
night, so I ran it before I left. The code was still rattling around in my
head on the bus and I realized I had made a mistake that would cause the
output to be useless. Opened up JuiceSSH on my phone, logged into the server,
fixed the code and ran the script, next day everything was peachy.

------
votingprawn
In the back of the van, parked up on the side of the runway at an airfield. We
were flight testing a UAV and the data logging system that should have been
finished weeks before....wasn't. So we were bodging stuff together so that
there would be at least some data logged from the flights.

Right in the middle of summer too, but luckily in Wales so actually quite a
pleasant temperature in the back of the van.

------
xamuel
A lecture hall in front of a couple hundred students of "Topics in Mathematics
for Engineers" (i.e., grab-bag of ODEs, PDEs, and linear algebra). I hadn't
prepared a lecture for the day, so instead I did a live implementation of
reduction to reduced-row-echelon form, in C.

------
foobarbecue
Inside fumarolic ice caves on top of Mt erebus, Antarctica. Also many other
caves and erupting volcanoes.

~~~
qume
Wow more info please

------
pit2
Not a code to deploy but on the address bar of an old kiosk browser. An ugly
JavaScript script to escape the computer lockdown and access the filesystem.
Always nice to debug a one huge line of JavaScript that outputs HTML/ActiveX.

~~~
seba_dos1
My parents used to leave me near the computers in shopping malls when I was
little. Shopping bored me to death, but I liked to fiddle with all the
computers on the display. Trying to bypass some locks, just for the fun of it
(and sometimes even succeeding! :)) and typing JavaScript into IE's address
bar to display some fun stuff was always my main occupation :D Plus I didn't
have to go with parents around the whole shop and they knew where to expect
me.

I also vaguely remember escaping some "internet cafe" kiosk at some hotel
during one of the abroad school trips. The kiosk had "broken" sticker on it
and seemed actually broken, but some functionality still worked and after
escaping the kiosk UI I was able to actually fix it (as we actually wanted to
use it) - don't remember what was it though :( Some technician was probably
either grateful for a null job afterwards, or lost an order due to me ;)

------
github-cat
Is this place strange enough? [https://www.pixelstech.net/fun/58-How-hard-is-
programmer-wor...](https://www.pixelstech.net/fun/58-How-hard-is-programmer-
working)

------
frantzmiccoli
I had been brung almost by force in a karaoke place in SF where we were the
four only customers. When I noticed that production was down the engineering
team was sleeping in Europe, so I opened the laptop.

------
scruple
In a Conex shipping container on the side of a mountain outside of Portland,
OR. Was at a customer installation site and had to do some custom work on-site
to implement a feature for them.

------
benzesandbetter
On the porch of a the mud hut in a Bahir Dar, a village in the north of
Ethiopia. Getting wifi from the neighboring hotel. The power would go out
intermittently, and they would start the diesel generators. Fighting off
mosquitoes. Eating toasted chickpeas and plum tomatoes. Drinking super strong
fire-roasted ethiopian coffee. Good memory. And I finished up the code for the
system I demo'd a few days later in Addis.

------
bio_end_io_t
While in the hospital receiving chemotherapy. But I don't think this even
comes close to beating blackberry + merry-go-round.

Also, does "in a dream" count?

------
elorant
Inside a church while it was at service. Good thing there weren't many people
attending otherwise I guess it would be quite uncomfortable.

------
Intermernet
While driving, typing on a remote connection using my phone. One key-press per
minute (I was late to an urgent appointment).

Also, while sitting on a beach on my birthday with the wife of the CEO
screaming at me down the phone line (Still not sure why she was involved, but
it was a small family business).

Both outcomes were positive, but stressful (and in the first case, illegal) at
the time.

------
simonpure
I regularly code on my phone in the park these days -

[http://www.instagram.com/p/BicfdE6AwsK](http://www.instagram.com/p/BicfdE6AwsK)

------
uptown
In the back of a limo, tethered to a Motorola Q device, fixing ticketing code
for a non-profit film festival which was kicking off that night.

------
yagop
During the university we had to write code on paper for exams. Nowadays I
think how weird it was.

~~~
smnplk
In Soviet Russia, paper executes the code.

