#story

Posts tagged #story

1. Experience

   The SELECT * that stopped month-end at our bank, and the change ticket that saved me

   Friends, a story from month-end, because I am telling you, every bank sysadmin has one of these and mine finally has a happy ending. Last day of the month, 11.40 pm. Our core banking batch on Oracle runs interest, fees, GL postings, and at the end the ATM and card settlement files for the switch. The batch window is tight. At 11.52 pm the batch stopped moving. Monitoring showed the TEMP tablespace at 100% and the…

   Chaminda PereraJul 16, 20269likes8comments

2. Experience

   1981, a ZX81, 1K of RAM and the RAM pack wobble

   Back in 1981 my dad came home with a ZX81. I was 13. It had 1K of memory. Not one gigabyte, not one megabyte, one kilobyte: about the size of this paragraph. It plugged into the telly and you saved your programs to a cassette recorder, at roughly 250 bits a second, give or take, with a screech that made the dog leave the room. The keyboard was a flat membrane you pressed like a lift button. In FAST mode the screen…

   Peter HughesJul 15, 20266likes9comments

3. Experience

   Freelancing for Paris from Beirut: generator hours, a UPS and the bank that ate my savings

   hi kifak, ça va? People ask how I work for French and German clients from here. Short answer: around the generator. Long answer below 🙃 Electricity. State power comes some hours a day, when it comes. The rest is the neighbourhood generator, the "ishtirak", a subscription you pay to a guy with a very big diesel engine and a very big network of cables over the street. It switches over a few times a day and every…

   Rami HaddadJul 11, 202616likes12comments

4. Experience

   One year after the twelve days: what I changed in how I work

   Last June, for twelve days, there was a war over my head. I do not want to explain Iran in one post, I cannot, and people who ask me to do it in one comment are usually not asking a real question. I only want to write what happened to my work, because many developers in many countries may need this one day, and I hope they never do. The first nights we heard explosions in Tehran. My parents went to my aunt in the…

   Arash KarimiJul 4, 202612likes11comments

5. Experience

   The Pi Zero that cooked itself in my letterbox (and what lives in there now)

   G'day legends. This one's a confession. Last January I built a "you've got mail" notifier. Pi Zero 2 W, a reed switch on the letterbox flap, a magnet, a little Python script that pinged Home Assistant over MQTT. Took an arvo. Worked first go. Felt very clever. Then Brisbane did Brisbane. The letterbox is black powder-coated steel, faces west, and sits in full sun from about 1pm. I had the Pi logging vcgencmd…

   Matt O'BrienJun 26, 202616likes7comments

6. Experience

   A normal day at a Japanese SIer, explained as politely as I can

   Good evening. Several members asked me in the comments what a "normal day" is like at a Japanese system integrator (we say SIer). I will try to explain honestly. I am sorry for my poor English and for the length. I wrote it on the train. 7:40 I take the train from my home in Sakai to the office in Umeda. It is crowded, but it is very punctual. The train is the most reliable system in my life, I think. 8:45 Chōrei…

   Kazuhiro YamamotoJun 24, 202613likes10comments

7. Experience

   Our software house lost five days of internet in July 2024. Here is everything we changed after

   Actually I wanted to write this for two years. I will not write about politics in this post. Only about what a shutdown costs a small outsourcing company, and what we changed. We are 34 people in Dhaka. Most clients are in Norway and Denmark. In July 2024 mobile internet went off first, then broadband. For about five days we had nothing. No Slack, no email, no GitHub, no way to tell clients why we disappeared. The…

   Rafiul IslamJun 24, 202617likes8comments

8. Experience

   90 days with a smartwatch and I'm back on a $20 Casio

   I owe y'all an honest update, because I hyped smartwatches pretty hard on the channel back in the day. In March I bought a flagship smartwatch (my money, $429 with tax) and committed to wearing it every day for 90 days. No switching, no "review mode". Just living with it. On day 91 I put on a $20 Casio and I haven't taken it off since. What actually happened Charging became a chore I hated. Every night or every…

   Trey RobinsonJun 23, 202638likes9comments

9. Experience

   The truncation that underpaid interest for eleven years

   I have been asked a few times on here what the worst bug of my career was. It was not mine, but I was the one who found where it lived, so I will tell it. In 2009 a retired schoolteacher walked into one of our branches with a passbook and a pocket calculator. She had been computing her own savings interest every month since 1998, out of habit, and for eleven years our figure had been a few cents lower than hers.…

   Walt HendricksJun 20, 202642likes12comments

10. Article

    My first mainframe job was the night shift, and a woman named Dolores taught me everything

    Some of the younger folks here asked me, after a comment I left on another thread, how a person ends up doing COBOL for thirty-nine years. The honest answer is that I needed a job in 1986 and an insurance company on the Southbank was hiring night operators. I want to tell you about that job, and mostly about the woman who ran the night shift, because I have been thinking about her a great deal since I started…

    Walt HendricksJun 16, 202638likes15comments

11. Article

    Recapping an Amiga 1200 and evicting a Varta: a weekend log

    Back in 1993 I bought my A1200 from a little shop on London Road in Sheffield with money I had been told was for a new boiler. The boiler waited. The Amiga did not. Thirty-odd years later it had started doing two things that every A1200 owner learns to dread: the sound had gone thin and quiet on one channel, and when I opened it up there was a faint fishy smell. If you know, you know. This is my log of putting that…

    Peter HughesJun 11, 202613likes11comments

12. Experience

    A retired banker's first Raspberry Pi: a weather station on my terrace in Chennai

    Dear friends, I retired two years ago after 34 years in the IT department of a public sector bank. I began with punched cards, spent most of my career with COBOL, CICS and DB2, and learned Java in my fifties because the bank said so. My grandson, who is 17, informed me last year that COBOL is "basically dead" and that I should learn Python. I informed him that COBOL processed his grandmother's pension this morning.…

    S. RamanathanJun 3, 202623likes10comments

13. Experience

    The Novell server under the desk that nobody was allowed to reboot

    In 1997 I took a job looking after the systems at a mid-sized firm in Hobart. On my first day the office manager walked me round, pointed under a desk in accounts at a beige tower with a handwritten sign taped to it, and said: "That one runs payroll. Nobody touches it." The sign said DO NOT TURN OFF in capitals and was signed by a man who had left the company two years earlier. It was a NetWare 3.12 server. It had…

    Graham WhitfieldMay 25, 20267likes8comments

14. Experience

    My first computer was a kit, a soldering iron and a very patient dad (ZX81, 1981)

    Somebody asked in the chat what everyone's first computer was, and I started typing a reply and it got out of hand, so here it is as a proper post. Put the kettle on. Back in 1981 I was thirteen, and my dad worked shifts at a steelworks in Rotherham. He was not a computer man at all, but he had seen an advert for the Sinclair ZX81 in the paper and worked out, on the back of an envelope, that the kit version was…

    Peter HughesMay 20, 202613likes10comments

15. Experience

    Dear friends, a story from 1984: a power cut, 40,000 punched cards and the word CHECKPOINT

    Dear friends, My grandson tells me that nobody reads long posts any more. I have told him that I am 62 and I have time, and so, kindly, do you. This is a story from my first year in the bank, and it has a lesson at the end which I believe is still useful, although the machines have changed beyond recognition. I joined the data processing department of our bank's head office in Madras (it became Chennai only later)…

    S. RamanathanMay 16, 202613likes9comments

16. Experience

    Eleven months retired and I still wake up at 3:12 am

    For thirty-four years I carried some form of pager. First an actual pager, a Motorola thing on my belt that went off in the middle of my sister's wedding speeches in 1997 (a Novell server, naturally). Then a Nokia, then a BlackBerry, then whatever the company issued and the on-call app that screamed like a smoke alarm. I retired eleven months ago and I want to write down a few things nobody told me, because some of…

    Graham WhitfieldMay 11, 20265likes7comments

17. Experience

    Gadgets I regret buying: let's open the graveyard properly

    Y'all, I made this topic two days ago and the first thing I want in here is pain. Real pain. Money you will never see again. 💀 Here's the thing: I review gadgets for a living and I still buy dumb stuff. So I'll go first. Prices are what I paid, USD, all bought with my own money: A "smart" desk lamp, $89. Needs an app. Needs an account. Needed a firmware update before it would turn on the first time. It's a lamp. My…

    Trey RobinsonMay 11, 202652likes17comments