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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I was a mobile developer and worked on Windows Mobile and Windows CE (un-ironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft themselves) applications some twenty years ago. It was basically just Windows with a lot of unnecessary cruft stripped out. The basic UI was indeed absurd, with the standard Start menu and utterly dependent on the fucking stylus to work. But for applications it wasn’t actually necessary to even use that shit. You could actually write applications that ran in kiosk mode and had nice big buttons so that users never had to deal with the Start menu or use the stylus at all. And in that mode it was actually extremely powerful – you could do anything that you needed to do programmatically. I never once encountered a situation where something that I needed to do programmatically wasn’t still available in the stripped-down WinCE API.




  • I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

    Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).