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1. Neil G4DBN (g4dbn@mastodon.radio)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 09:25:08 UTC Neil G4DBN

   • Dave Rahardja

   @drahardja My team worked for two years on identifying and eliminating shitty applications written by idiot coders who had zero foresight. The business had over 300 apps and a huge shadow IT problem. By the time we hit Y2K, we'd wiped out almost half of the apps and most shadow IT apart from the crappy local databases. Embarrassing the crap out of the hobby coders who thought they knew what they were doing, and holding them accountable for being a significant business risk was mildly satisfying

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   • Neil G4DBN (g4dbn@mastodon.radio)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 14:01:36 UTC Neil G4DBN

     in reply to

     • Dave Rahardja

     @drahardja Every time some cretin mentioned that Y2K was a hoax, the entire team would respond and suggest that they take their uninformed opinions and go elsewhere. Even 20 years later, we were easily triggered and responded with overwhelming rage. I've almost moved on and now just add them to the idiot pile and treat them with due caution. Two years of our lives wasted on fixing the work of idiots. Marvellous. See also C/C++ coders who didn't understand bounds checking. Idiots everywhere!

   • LisPi (lispi314@udongein.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 14:01:36 UTC LisPi

     in reply to

     • Dave Rahardja
     @g4dbn @drahardja What puzzles me is why they thought it was a good idea to micro-optimize time-keeping in the first place.
     
     Or considering just how absurdly finnicky time gets when one gets into the depths of it, why they improvised something instead of using one of the standards by folks who bothered to try and deal with all the edgecases & annoyances.
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   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 14:01:38 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • Dave Rahardja
     • LisPi

     @lispi314 Many were systems from the 80s that penny-pinched every byte they could find whether it made sense or not (some of it *did* make sense at the time), and proper time libraries may not have been available for their language at the time of implementation.

     Probably some "how hard can it be" ignorance as well. =)

     @g4dbn @drahardja

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 14:01:54 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • Dave Rahardja
     • LisPi

     @g4dbn Then you were one of the sensible ones, with a manager that allowed you to be sensible. 😊

     @lispi314 @drahardja

   • Neil G4DBN (g4dbn@mastodon.radio)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 14:01:55 UTC Neil G4DBN

     in reply to

     • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
     • Dave Rahardja
     • LisPi

     @clacke @drahardja @lispi314 I wrote code in the early 1980s that took full notice that two-digit year fields were a liability and that some folks who were in the datasets were possibly *born in the 1800s* and that the dataset might endure past the end of the 1900s or require forward calculations into the then-distant 2000s. Agreed there were some systems that had so little memory that date compression was needed, but we used binary fields for time, not truncated text dates.