No More Hustleporn: War Stories on Jankiest Piece of Tech People ever Worked On
Tweet by Brandon Rohrer
Data science. Algorithm and feature design. he/him. Currently at iRobot, formerly of Facebook, Microsoft, DuPont Pioneer, Sandia Natl Labs, MIT.
War stories please.
What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
You all are making my day.
The hits keep coming.
Technical debt as performance art.
This is the scariest thing I've read today.
Not all heroes wear capes.
(Although if you do wear a cape Simon that's cool and I don't judge.)
The replies are an escalating hall of horrors.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Sometimes I get weighed down worrying about how far my systems are from ideal, but it's good to remember that my real goal is just to make them a little less horrible.
On dark days when your own tech debt makes you cringe, you can come back to this thread for comfort.
Responses keep blurring the line between entertaining and terrifying.
This is now in my head playing out as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
The House of Cards IRL
Under the category of “happened in a company you’ve definitely heard of”.
Rube Goldberg, hold @patio11’s beer.
This is the best definition of “janky” I’ve seen.
The entire computing world is held together by duct tape and bailing wire.
You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.
Some sins are unforgivable. But still kind of understandable.
“…before finally catching fire…”
I hope one of you is currently writing a treatise titled
On the Causes of Computing System Fragility and Why It’s Never Ever Going Away
We’re living Mad Max but digital
And these are only the tip of the iceberg
It’s looking more and more like these stories are the rule, not the exception
This backbone thread is just a taste. Get a drink and read the other replies. They are exquisite.
If this thread were a Western
Literal war stories
paper clips