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Re:Eric Engstrom, co-creator of DirectX, has died by ciriarte on Monday December 14, 2020 @08:02PM (#25425713)
That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing. It reminds of a similar experience I had.

A few years back one of the systems I ended up inheriting stopped working on January 1st. As most people, I had taken the day off, but my manager called me to fix the issue in prod.

After much researching, I found out the assembly causing the issue. Similarly, the original dev had left and the source code was lost. So I used ildasm and found out the year was hardcoded. I patched the binary and went home.

Rest in Peace, Eric.

Re:Eric Engstrom, co-creator of DirectX, has died by tonyedgecombe on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @01:27AM (#25427607)
Similarly, the original dev had left and the source code was lost.

This seems surprisingly common, I hear it a lot from my customers.

Re:Eric Engstrom, co-creator of DirectX, has died by MaXtreeM on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:42AM (#25428288)
> So I used ildasm and found out the year was hardcoded.

Deliberate time bomb or honest mistake?