Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I first spelunked through UNIX sometime in 1985/1986; my employer decided to sell Altos UNIX systems along with their CP/M offerings. No documentation, just a running system and a password although one person hinted that man man would help.

We used it for our accounting system along with Peachtree? It turned out we didn't have good backups because the system's disk drive was dirty and misaligned. I fixed it.

The backup scripts couldn't deal with going over one floppy and failed anyway.

I learned a lot of very useful things on that system - like when I created an extra copy of etc with an unprintable character in the name (etc^?) I got to learn all about using stty to set your erase character, ls -lq to find files with unprintable names and inodes along with ls -li and find -inum to fix my errant /etc^?.

Unfortunately for my accountant I didn't learn how to make a backup span multiple volumes until some time after I also learned a very hard lesson about unix device names and wiped the system drive while trying to mkfs on a new volume to expand the system.

He ended up rekeying all our accounting data from printouts and I ended up buying him more than one lunch.

"rekeying all our accounting data from printouts"

I am cringing.

If you think that's bad, ~12 years ago I worked on a project that was an online insurance form. The output from the application form was going to be printed out and then submitted to the existing paper-based workflow for handling applications - which involved scanning the application and then workers typing in the data from the scanned form.

Not more than 2.5 years ago I wrote a script to take the bill of materials from a CAD program and cross-reference it with a flat-file database (read: Excel spreadsheet) that contained information on how 'old' part numbers mapped to 'new' part numbers. Shame the CAD program couldn't just be scripted to do this. Anyway, the final output of this was a bill of materials that said what you'd expect: I need X quantity of Y parts, here are the part numbers for each.

This was emailed to a "warehouse" specialist, who then, I found out, printed out my BOM, then compared it to that day's (printed) inventory of parts, came up with what needed to be issued directly and what needed to be ordered, and then he manually entered that into the actual warehouse logistics system.

And lest you think I was lazy, I asked to be allowed to script all this out, too, only to be told "there is no way for us to submit anything to our logistics system that way, everything has to be entered manually."

This wasn't some no-name company, this was a major aerospace company.

I managed to get employee of the quarter because the company I worked for (a major company that made inkjet printers) had been tasked to find out more about third party ink cartridges from their service system.

This company had a Pick database, and rather than extend it normally someone had the bright idea of storing each ink cartridge record in a .INI file. That's right, each record was a .INI file and the fields were stored as column=value.

To get at this data, they tasked one of their employees to open each file, copy the first field to an Excel spreadsheet, then copy the second field to the Excel spreadsheet, etc. There were something like 10,000 ini files, and it took about 6 weeks for the guy to input the data.

I was rather young and bored on the call centre helpdesk, and I had been fooling about with Linux and Perl. When I heard what he was doing, I rather naively said that this was what Perl was designed for. The guy deliberately said he didn't believe me, and I took that as a challenge so that night I went home and whipped up a Perl program that processed the ini files into a CSV file. I then installed ActiveState's Windows port of Perl and ran it over a copy of the ini files. About 5 seconds later it produced the csv file.

I told the guy to not tell anyone as I wasn't really meant to install ActiveState's program on any corporate computers. He ignored this and the next thing I know I was made employee of the quarter.

I think the highlight of this story is that the company had the culture to reward you instead of burying your achievement under policy-violation blanket.

It was a tiny bit more complicated than that I'm afraid. I suspect they did it to ensure that someone else didn't get the award...

There are few more soul killing for a programmer to be told that "its just more cost effective to have someone type this into the other system".

Yes!

I'm not a programmer by trade. I just seem to be one of the few engineers in my tiny little specialized domain that doesn't mind writing a little bit of code now and then to solve a problem.

Won't be Airbus then, as their main CAD system has fairly powerful scripting bits. ;)

You can imagine how it felt at the time - 18 years old and I had just destroyed the accounting system for a sales-driven organization. Was convinced that was my last night at the company and had to stew in my own juices from that evening until telling my boss about it the following morning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com