Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in?

Re:Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in? by nl on Sunday April 12, 2009 @09:10AM (#558395)

A hot, noisy hotel room, dial-up internet, 4:00am writing in _VB6_ to connect to some weird COM+ service that used VB calling conventions, then a C++ COM wrapper for that, then a C wrapper to connect to a Java JNI service. At 8:00pm I didn't know VB, either. And it had to work by 9:00am when some system it interfaced to started up. Oh - and I couldn't actually test it against anything but stubs.

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Re:Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in? by wallflower on Sunday April 12, 2009 @10:28AM (#558460)

How did that turn out? What was your margin of safety? I hope they appreciated the heroic effort you put forth.

I haven't done anything that crazy but have debugged (and fixed) a few memorable, painful, stressful software (usually system integration) problems on frantic conference calls mere hours before the paid-for-and-scheduled on-site training on the software commenced.

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Re:Ask HN: Worst working conditions you have written code in? by nl on Sunday April 12, 2009 @08:38PM (#559185)

Worked fine, stayed in production use for years - might still be there for all I know. And no, it wasn't appreciated of course....

"Safety margin"! What's that? ;)

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