SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Greetings again.....

This is from personal experience in the business world, although the same happens in game development - it's just less of a problem.

Developer is asked to make a change to something complex. They do so, they test it, it seems to work. User use it, no one complains about a problem. Maybe a handful notice something odd but they just accept that's what the system does now without questioning.

Ten years go by......

Turns out some 'tax feature' wasn't implemented 100% correct which....compared with getting screen resolution pixel positions wrong in a gui for a game....is much more disastrous for a company....and there's no way anyone could have known since none of the people involved knew anything about tax law when they were implementing the particular change.....

Worse though is when you know that in your coding sessions, when you know there are people who are reviewing your code, who know you're making a big error, but they just ignore it and wait for you to see it yourself. They know there's an error there, they don't speak up, they simply wait for you to come to see it yourself so that you think you fixed it without any help. I hate it when people know there's an error with something and don't speak up and just wait for you to discover it yourself. Ticks me right off.

Well it could be worse. A company that wanted to charge £35 for someone that discovered a serious security flaw just for the privilege of reporting it. And for the life of me I cannot remember where I read that story. But have a good guess which company that was, and the companies name didn't start with an 'A' either.

When I was working at the Nissan plant doing fire maintenance in there, the system that controlled all the fire guff was called "Vega", it was ancient, one of them "out of sight, out of mind" to the big-wigs upstairs... If Karen, the head of HR wanted a new refurb for her neck of the office woods, sorted, how much? Request an update to the software and fire panels that are the whole umbrella of the plants fire protection... "Fooking joking are'nt you, seen how much it'll cost? Denied!"

Seriously, my bosses there would literally have to trawl on eBay and other places for spares and repairs to the rickety panels, buying spares from as far as Australia!

Anyway, I was at work, got a radio message through from one of the gaffers... Get to the north gate security ASAP... Got there, and, well, the whole lot was gone... The lot was down, I say down, the sprinklers were still active of course, but if a flow switch or pressure switch went after an activation... No sod would know unless there was a bit of shouting by people kicking about the area, but, call points wouldnt work, smoke/heat detectors wouldnt be able to communicate with the panels, smoke vents wouldnt work, the list is endless!

Nigh on every device would of fell silent, major major issue, like, there are systems in the plants paint shop that suck every drop of flammable liquid out of the shop upon activation, your talking paints and primers, solvents among some more god awful chemicals which you would want to combust or be caught in a major fire.

Anyway, the plant has two... TWO tech support teams, so when this pretty much major incident occurred, they were notified, it was simply... We need help here!

And here is the rub, because the system was that old, the software wouldnt run on a version of Windows from Vista upwards, so it was running on WinXP!

And you never guess what these "tech teams" said... Baring in mind the whole plant was exposed, they turned around and said...

"We don't support XP"

And that was it!?! 

The language was terrible mind, as you can imagine, there was a few cross words!

We were pretty much left on our own to sort it... Three days it took to drag it's arse out of the doldrums... Three solid days and then god knows how many hours went into continuing testing devices where usually we would test some every quarter/half yearly or annually depending.

Utter nightmare.

On a positive note, it finally became not out of sight anymore as they lost quite a bit of production time, so when the topic arrived, which it did pretty quickly after the event, the whole system had an overhaul, cost them an absolute fortune, I wasnt privvy to the true cost because my pay band didn't cover being told stuff like that, but, I imagine there was a big chunk of the maintenance budget gone in a oner, which, they could of implemented a new system over time, because it was possible to do such a thing... But they chose to ignore it for all them years.

My point is, sometimes you know, you can point the obvious out until your blue in the face and be ignored, you can hit a major snag and be back heeled from people who should be ultimately there for you... But no... Ultimately, there are times when you are indeed... On your own, and, you've just got to deal with it!

Dabz

Quote from: Matty on February 22, 2025, 17:58:34Turns out some 'tax feature' wasn't implemented 100% correct which....compared with getting screen resolution pixel positions wrong in a gui for a game....is much more disastrous for a company....and there's no way anyone could have known since none of the people involved knew anything about tax law when they were implementing the particular change.....

i just took the time to show / explain an error in the 'coinbase' (crypto exchange) interface, 23 months ago already, which may cause an error to calculate the plus-moins value (capital gains-losses) after a convertion from crypto to fiat.
nothing has been fixed yet... nobody cares apparently..

..last year, july-aug time, local factory around here (rice packing, steamed cookies/buns, etc) needed a repair, as some of the boiler controllers was fried (30 years old)..as im sort of, known in this field around here, i have been contacted, so i proposed solution where ill be designing new electronics hardware in order to properly interface all sensor inputs, filter data and then feed custom data to one of PLC units that are previously fed by fried controller..i was rejected as my solution is too expensive, and it takes about 1 month to complete (its custom build electronics/firmware, so i think 30 days is fine as original replacement cant be purchased anywhere on this world)..so, long story short, job was taken by dude who interfaced whole thing with some of arduino boards, plugged thing in there and same night boiler exploded, nobody was injured except boiler room and all hardware in there..apparently, dude didnt think that endianness in byte stream means a lot to PLC..5 days later, i was contacted again and offered to replace whole thing and wire it all up to new boiler..money was good too..

Quote from: Naughty Alien on March 05, 2025, 03:52:20..last year, july-aug time, local factory around here (rice packing, steamed cookies/buns, etc) needed a repair, as some of the boiler controllers was fried (30 years old)..as im sort of, known in this field around here, i have been contacted, so i proposed solution where ill be designing new electronics hardware in order to properly interface all sensor inputs, filter data and then feed custom data to one of PLC units that are previously fed by fried controller..i was rejected as my solution is too expensive, and it takes about 1 month to complete (its custom build electronics/firmware, so i think 30 days is fine as original replacement cant be purchased anywhere on this world)..so, long story short, job was taken by dude who interfaced whole thing with some of arduino boards, plugged thing in there and same night boiler exploded, nobody was injured except boiler room and all hardware in there..apparently, dude didnt think that endianness in byte stream means a lot to PLC..5 days later, i was contacted again and offered to replace whole thing and wire it all up to new boiler..money was good too..

I do hope that the company and the person that wired it all up got penalised by local authorities. The U.K. has some very strict regulations with boilers, that if not adhered to, can end with a heavy fine (regulations in certain fields in the UK tend to be part of another regulation, meaning if you break one, you break the other and get fined for both), or spending quality time in one of his Majesty's all expenses paid for holiday camps if there is damage to property, or any kind injury to any persons.

The funny thing is, though there are regulations in place for commercial, social housing and landlords to have their boiler maintained yearly. There are no such regulations in place for private houses. But house owner can still end up in court if a boiler fails with serious consequences.

..over here (South East Asia), there are still many grey zones, and there are plenty of factories that are operating really far and remote (Palm fields, sugar cane stuff, raw rubber fields, etc etc)..plenty of machines are 40+ years old (mechanically robust and sound but lack of any automation, which is where i found 'niche')..regulations are not a key as long as nobody complains about it and factory owners usually dont bother making a 'call' in case something goes wrong as many of them doesnt follow regulations at all (factories nearby large cities does comply with regulations)..oil platforms that i have done plenty of work for and entered that field (thanks to Covid time), are all 30+ years old, but they do follow regulations and scheduled maintenance of key equipment (Sapura Energy)..i have seen quite a lot of really weird solutions over time, that are far beyond any regulations..lol..

That is really cool Alien. I took a year off programming amid covid 19 . Wish I would of continued and regard it as a wasted year. Six months prior to that and I was heavily into PB and I was getting burn out up until covid. Mind/Brain was knackered.  Tried starting back with PB and got nowhere for a few weeks, tried AGK S
and a couple of weeks later and I'm back into the groove.  some time later I spent a year learning PB before modernization and found a couple of things that I did not like.  Anyway two years on and Fred has done it, the latest OGRE very nice. At the moment I'm gonna press on with AGK S as this is what I know more of and it makes sense for now. So I'm gonna keep PB as backup should I need it. The new ogre examples look awesome.

Back in the 90's I joined an insurance company that had just implemented its first computer systems. I was employed by the accounts department to "support" their computers but soon found myself supporting computers in all the other departments and eventually networking them together... Anyway, one of those departments was "Actuarial" that maintained the mathematics behind the policies and they had a programmer who wrote them a Pension system in CA Clipper using their algorithms.

Each time the pension application was updated, a complete archive was taken of the source, documentation, algorithms and all the parameters used. This was duplicated on floppy disk and put in two different safes in different locations in case they ever needed to refer back to it. After the initial programmer left; I updated the algorithms for them and maintained the archives (including yearly copies of the software to ensure the media had not deteriorated).

Years later; long after the company stopped selling pensions they needed to access those archives and because I still maintained the archives; I got involved in every case where pension mis-selling enquires were required (This was a big issue in the UK with some companies paying out huge compensation claims). My job had changed after all those years but they still wanted me to do it!!!

After 25 years, I was finally allowed (legally) to dispose of the archives.

Keeping CA Clipper for DOS running so we could duplicate the pension forecast on the same version at a particular date in history was challenging at times but it was nice to stay around long enough to see it through.

Programming in a business environment gives you a completely different perspective on software.

Si...