Hacker News Reader

Comment by theqult | Hacker News Reader

I worked on that, jesus fucking christ the amount of shit that i've seen

I’d love to hear stories! I used it in many restaurants between about 2001-2013, and have to say besides probably less than 3 outages, I never noticed a single issue due to software (how it was set up by mgmt is another issue but never got in the way that much). Probably the worst problem was with touch screen calibration, but even having to touch an inch down and to the left of what I needed, I could still fly through the UI.

I remember designing my own POS/inventory tracking concepts, and thinking back on it, knowing what I know now after about the same amount of time as a professional developer as I spent in restaurants, I’m impressed with how well it performed IME.

So for all the pain I’m sure you felt, still, hats off to you!

One story that comes to mind is the difficulty of change management. It’s possible to configure Aloha locally but beyond a certain number of locations a configuration tool called Configuration Center is used. It basically stores configuration information on a server (as a tree with the rough idea of inheritance) that stores connect to and pull down into the various configuration formats used.

In the tool there isn’t a concept of approvals. We had an admin disable receipt printers at all stores. There wasn’t a reliable global refresh so we had 10 people logging in remotely (through another horrible tool that was a front end for a reverse VNC connection) and calling stores to reset their configuration which brought their system down for 2 to 10 minutes during a Friday lunch rush.

We fixed this with process but NCR made it easy to shoot oneself in the foot.

It's great for front of house staff but the inventory control/back of house feature set is extremely limited (disclaimer: I moved off of using Aloha day to day in 2016).

Like what? Just curious

30 years of undocumented legacy code, we had to reverse engineer the binary ouput to interact with it.

Also all cloud additional services run trougth a zip that it produces at the end of the day with a full snapshot of the restaurant that day. From 5 to 30 MB a zip, a day, for 500K restaurant. We were moving TERABYTES over SMB

Reply on news.ycombinator.com