Any programmers/ software developers that can share their experiences

WindCraft · February 20, 2019

Hello all,

I am a student who is studying GCSE (England). I am studying computer science and I will study computer science in A-Level. I am thinking of getting a job related to computer programming. Can anyone share experiences of being a programmer or a software designer?

p.s. I do apologize for my bad English

Radium_Angel · February 20, 2019

1 hour ago, WindCraft said:

Hello all,

I am a student who is studying GCSE (England). I am studying computer science and I will study computer science in A-Level. I am thinking of getting a job related to computer programming. Can anyone share experiences of being a programmer or a software designer?

p.s. I do apologize for my bad English

Sure, way back when, I was a COBOL dev (COBOL stands for Considered Obsolete By Other Languages. Not really, but it is an acronym, and it was a terribly verbose language to work in) and dealing with COBOL is what drove me away from programming.

Fast forward to the year 1999, December to be exact. I'm a systems support guy and one of my clients has a massive medical database that turns out isn't Y2K compliant. Fearing data loss, the company contacted the software maker, who apparently couldn't fix the bug in time.

So they asked if I could do anything. I thought about it for a bit, and started looking through the application files, only to discover the thing was written in COBOL.

So, dredging out from the depths of my memory, my COBOL skills, I proceeded to fix their bloody mess.

About a week after Y2K hit, the actual devs sent out a patch (along with other "bug fixes") which, amusingly enough, turned out to undo my work, break things even further, and render the system non-Y2K complaint again.

Good times, good times.

rcmaehl · February 20, 2019

10 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Sure, way back when, I was a COBOL dev (COBOL stands for Considered Obsolete By Other Languages. Not really, but it is an acronym, and it was a terribly verbose language to work in) and dealing with COBOL is what drove me away from programming.

Good times, good times.

I'm sure you can easily still make hundreds of thousands by many banks still running 80s era systems.

Radium_Angel · February 20, 2019

28 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

I'm sure you can easily still make hundreds of thousands by many banks still running 80s era systems.

Indeed I can, but my sanity is worth me not doing that

Radium_Angel · February 20, 2019

1 hour ago, WindCraft said:

Hello all,

I am a student who is studying GCSE (England). I am studying computer science and I will study computer science in A-Level. I am thinking of getting a job related to computer programming. Can anyone share experiences of being a programmer or a software designer?

p.s. I do apologize for my bad English

One other quick story.

Around the same time, I had an engineering firm who had a remote survey team, doing land surveying. They would capture the data, then dial into the mainframe and upload it to their CAD software. Only the software had stopped accepting input. In a panic, they called me to examine the issue.

The CAD software was making the right connection and taking in the data, but it would abruptly terminate at the very last line, and fail.

So I whipped up a quick data capture program (in basic, of all things) to capture the remote team's data.

Data comes down in plain text with a weird glitch in the data at the very end (the cause of the CAD software refusing the data) so I scripted a program to strip out the last garbage line, and input the data to the cad program. Mission accomplished and saved them a lot of grief.