Recent Feature Articles

Aug 2022

Internal Networking

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Circa 1999, Drake C was working on a video game for a large publisher. The game in question was a flight simulator with multiplayer dogfighting capabilities. Or at least, it was supposed to have multiplayer capabilities- in Drake's case, it just had a series of ugly crashes.

The networking library came from the publisher, so Drake reached out to Karl, the developer of said library. They spent some time going back and forth over the phone and email, trying to troubleshoot it. Eventually, Karl tapped out. "I'm stumped," he admitted, "but I'll tell you what, we've got another team working on Weighty Cogs II, and they've already got multiplayer working. I'll get them to send you their code, so you can take a look. Should have it to you by this afternoon."

21 comments - Last comment @ 2024-03-31

C, But Worse

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LCD TFT Screen Closeup

Alyssa worked in a shop building small runs of custom hardware. Recently, she tackled a project that involved an Arduino talking to an LCD screen. Since several programmers had just left their jobs, she was the last programmer standing and thus on her own for this assignment. One of the engineers who'd worked there before her had really liked a particular brand of programmable displays because they came with software that allowed non-programmers to design serial-driven user interfaces, and had its own onboard processor. That was what Alyssa wound up using for this project.

30 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-19

Padded Mailers

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Veteran developer and frequent contributor, Argle, once worked for a company which handled shipping. On April 3rd, 1988, a C function which used to work stopped working. What's so special about April 3rd of that year? Why, that's when the United States Post Office changed their rates.

The post office changed their rates on a fairly regular cadence, of course. The previous change had been in 1985. Thus the developers had planned ahead, and decided that they wanted to make the rates easy to change. Now, this was mid-80s C code, so they weren't quite thinking in terms like "store it in a database", but instead took what felt like the path of least resistance: they created a lookup table. The function accepted the weight of a piece of postage, checked it against a lookup table, and returned the shipping price.

41 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-24

The Mailroom Elevator

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Bruce W's employer was best described as The Mega Bureaucracy. It's the kind of place where it takes twenty weeks to provision web servers, because of the number of forms, checkpoints, and management sign-offs involved. The Mega Bureaucracy did all of this because it kept their environment "stable", and equally important, "secure".

Speaking of security, the Mega Bureaucracy needed to expand its offices, and went out and constructed two new fourteen story office buildings which would serve as their headquarters. These offices needed to be validated for security, and Bruce was invited to be on the team that would perform the assessment. The first area they visited was the mailroom which served both buildings.

21 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-19

The Contract Access Upgrade

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Microsoft Access represents an "attractive nuisance". It's a powerful database and application development platform designed to enable end users to manage their own data. Empowering users is, in principle, good. But the negative side effect is that you get people who aren't application developers developing applications, which inevitably become business critical.

A small company developed an Access Database thirty years ago. It grew, it mutated, it got ported from each Access version to the next. Its tendrils extended outwards, taking over more and more of the business's processes. The ability to maintain and modify the database decayed, updates and bugfixes got slower to make, the whole system got slower. But it limped along roughly at the speed the business required… and then Larry, the user who developed, retired.

40 comments - Last comment @ 2022-08-11
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