Post #2350602
2026-02-25 08:27 UTC
Replies (26)
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@thirstybear@agilodon.social 2026-02-25 08:35
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Yep. It’s that joy that I love about engineering in general. Which is why I don’t subscribe to the current fad of using random text generators. Altman can pry that joy from my cold, dead fingers.
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@mayintoronto@beige.party 2026-02-25 08:46
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social This was a great story. :cat_clap: Moral of the story: talk to the fucking customer.
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@nek0@chaos.social 2026-02-25 10:48
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Thank you for sharing this story. It was a very good, insightful and entertaining read. My takeaway from this anecdote is: always consult a potential user of the software you are developing.
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@knowprose@mastodon.social 2026-02-25 12:33
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social as someone who once worked on calibrating software for inertial navigation units... Yeah. Your story is epic. 🙃 🤣
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@phl@mastodon.social 2026-02-25 13:05
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social This was an amazing read, thank you! :D
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@renardboy@mastodon.social 2026-02-25 13:10
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social That's a great story, thanks very much for sharing.
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@rysiek@mstdn.social 2026-02-25 13:10
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social what a fantastic lesson in humility. Much needed in our industry.
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@autiomaa@mementomori.social 2026-02-25 13:18
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social The challenging part for using PC hardware for icebreaker navigation (in the 1980s) was the amount of physical shock computers have to continuously survive. It is about the same if you have ~1000+ kg piece of metal on a long stick and drop that to swing down (from a side) to a box of PC hardware. First times the PC goes to the wall in pieces, because it can't last the impact. It takes a lot of engineering to make a PC case that can survive that amount of stress. It was done back in 1980s, with the hardware of those days (with traditional HDDs).
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@sakhavi@aoir.social 2026-02-25 15:38
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social amazing story for multiple reasons (we have comedy officers!?!) — wonder if you ever read Madeleine Akrich? Her 1992 "The de-scription of technical objects" was an enormous influence on my field of STS, basically from the same story of good-idea-at-the-time design failing to inquire about local conditions of use. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242461431_The_De-scription_of_Technical_Objects
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@pixel@oldbytes.space 2026-02-25 15:39
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social fantastic story thanks for sharing!!
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@daniel@social.braxo.se 2026-02-25 16:39
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Wonderful story, thank you!
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@cks@mastodon.social 2026-02-25 19:26
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social I should totally write up probably my greatest failure as a programmer, where I may have quietly killed a professor's research project (well, one of them) by developing on a too-small machine. And I got to learn that I'd developed on a too-small machine in person in an awkward way. (Someday I also have to write up my most successful program, which was more or less an accident that snowballed and I didn't even discover how successful until years and years later.)
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@agdosil@infosec.exchange 2026-02-25 20:01
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social this was a great read, thanks for sharing
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@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-25 20:06
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Thanks for sharing! It’s always good to be reminded of how many ways clever software can easily be defeated by real world conditions!
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@CyrilBrulebois@mamot.fr 2026-02-25 20:07
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Amazing! Thank you for sharing!
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@StompyRobot@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-25 20:47
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Awesome story! Did anyone then suggest "what if we added a Kalman filter to integrate the sources?"
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@Rhube@wandering.shop 2026-02-26 07:45
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social 😂 Fantastic story. Would you mind if I screenshot it and share it on Tumblr - I would link back to your posts as a source.
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@tsturm@famichiki.jp 2026-02-26 07:47
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Thank you for this great story. As so often, we programmers don't get access to clients soon enough to catch these kinds of unclear/misleading requirements. I don't think I can count the times where at product delivery the client has crucial insights that nobody told me about. ...and I never even got a helicopter flight out of those situations. 😁
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@sgtpepere@ludosphere.fr 2026-02-26 08:31
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Thanks for the story ! :)
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@caffetino@social.pikaia.org 2026-02-26 10:17
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social great story. Thanks for sharing.
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@buwel@social.tchncs.de 2026-02-26 10:20
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social thanks for the write up. Really cool.
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@bocs@toot.wales 2026-02-26 14:18
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social wonderful story, well told. there are special skills, and wrangling multiple serial datastreams is among them. these days I'd lazily convert separately, drop into database and hide all the complexity in totally separate software that can only read the db. How times have changed...
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@idbrii@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-27 00:48
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social That was a great story. Thank you!
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@adityakhanna@mathstodon.xyz 2026-02-27 01:59
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social your writing is so engaging, I had a lot of fun reading it. Thank you for sharing! Anywhere else you put up your writings?
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@matt_diamond@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-03 17:51
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social You have no idea how much I needed this story at this exact moment. It’s easy to get depressed about perceived failures, and the longer you are alive, the longer that list will be. But there are other ways to look at it. The successes also stack up— it just takes more effort to remember those, some days.
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@jlin@cosocial.ca 2026-03-14 09:21
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social thanks for this great accounting and storytelling! amazing history and story.