So guess what, you will probably learn next that quick and dirty is an amazing thing. Sometimes the morbid, buggy stuff is exactly what's needed and a well designed solution wouldn't scale to it's task or wouldn't be used because it's so clean.
> Building 20 was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Radiation Laboratory member said, "At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building".
> Due to Building 20's origins as a temporary structure, researchers and other occupants felt free to modify their environment at will. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, "Its 'temporary nature' permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission — you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall".
http://www.usablebuildings.co.uk/Pages/Unprotected/MITBldg20...
could it be that MIT happened to have a lot of smart people and they created good things while working in building 2.0, and they would have created just as many great things if they worked in another building?
maybe im just extra skeptical because im currently reading "Fooled by Randomness" :)
For example, I bet they didn't replicate its temporariness or the fact that you could make holes in it.
The lesson I take from the story is that the smart people had extreme freedom to pursue their research. I don't think a university can just create a dumpy building and hope to produce some Nobel prizes. <:)
Soon I was voluntarily transferring the paper to spreadsheets and printing them out. Next was a starbase db with a simple form on a laptop.
A year later I had built a custom system with a mysql database, barcode scanners at the arrival and departure gates and automatic email reports to the owner.
It is because of this that I was able to get to move on to another company to be hired as a software developer without a college degree.
Apparently a few years ago they had a minor panic because they realised they had no idea where the database was actually stored. I'd gotten some MSSQL space from the (outsourced) DB guys- the guy who gave me the space had also, of course, left. Fun times...
i personally don't care for vb.net because of its notation, but i don't think it's THAT bad. you're making it sound like it was written in vb6
It's important to have good tools, but a robust design beats all imho.
All this happened while I was still an "administrative assistant" on a temp wage. After a time, I left- it was time, and in any case they'd said that my work was going to be replaced by an integrated SAP solution that would span the entire company's workflow. I moved on, got a much better job and have been programming off the back of that original job ever since.
This was in 2006. I spoke to a former co-worker for the first time in years about six months ago, who told me to my jaw dropping surprise that they were still running my application. Aside from anything else, I was blown away that the thing still worked. There's a certain morbid curiosity that makes me want to look at the code I wrote back then, I'm sure I would cringe. But hey, it's still going.