In the field at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, next to old WWI style bunkers that were prob. full of mustard gas or chlorine gas 100 or so years ago, in a tiny trailer filled with server equipment ... with a failing AC unit, in the August heat of Maryland.
Did I mention the power line run to this trailer couldn't handle the load we were putting on it, and the circuits would break every 15 minutes or so?
So yeah .. I am sweating, literally, and our field test is about to begin. This was an anti-IED system, using passive biometric collection capabilities. I had written a big piece of the software to integrate everything.
Then ... 10 minutes before we begin, we get a nasty bug. General Such and Such is arriving, followed by Cnl. Whomever. Then the AC cuts out. I am in this trailer, and have to code up a fix in 10 minutes, literally, in 105 degree heat, dripping in sweat, with PMs and more important ppl staring over my shoulder.
I did it ... while dripping sweat all over the keyboard. Hooray for me! I saved the day!
Craziest ... most intense coding I have ever done.
Contractor ... Biometrics firm. I loved this company and would still be there today had they not lost so many ppl with the draw downs in Iraq and Afgh.
BTW ... this is a true story. One of my career's shining moments.
Bathroom of 7/11. I was doing freelancing while still in college and we were traveling for a tournament in Lewisburg. I realized that I let a bug slip into production and had to get a fix out immediately. So there I was middle of nowhere, PA, connected to nearby Wendy's committing code fixes, while the guy in the stall next to me had crazy stomach problems. Somehow I still believe that the smell of Wendy's burgers that guy had were responsible for me writing about 50 lines + couple of tests in less than 10 minutes.
I wasn't in the bathroom, but I've had critical bugs pop up on side project while I was on vacation. Luckily I don't store code locally, my dev machine is on an EC2 instance. We pulled over and switched drivers while I pulled out my phone and loaded up vim over SSH and fixed the bug and pushed the update.
Not ideal, but it's one benefit of coding remotely.
The maternity ward waiting for and after my wife gave birth. Don't judge if you haven't been through it: with real life labor there is a LOT of waiting before the big dramatic moment you see in the movies, and afterward, a lot of sleeping for both momma and baby. You can go a bit stir-crazy from all the excitement and confinement. Gotta calm down the nerves with something.
I wasn't coding, but I gave a client presentation with screen sharing while I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital while my grandpa was having heart surgery. I agree, it was a nice change of pace from the worry and waiting for procedures that can take some time. Best to keep your mind off of it so you don't go crazy.
My wife spent two months in the hospital prior to the birth of our twins (and the twins spent another two months in the NICU after that). I've written a _ton_ of code in a hospital at this point (ironically, that was before I started working for an EHR platform).
I've done it twice, you're wife is a saint to deal with you and your addiction. But they all are because men seem to have zero understanding of how not to be self-obsessed and "in the moment".
Induced vaginal births are horrifically time-consuming though. If she can speak or hold her eyes open, it's not time to go to the hospital (from my experience, i'm not responsible for your baby being born in a taxi, I live in a suburb with multiple major hospitals within 5 minutes. Will Smith is not going to show up and pull that little alien out of you.
"I've done it twice, you're wife is a saint to deal with you and your addiction. But they all are because men seem to have zero understanding of how not to be self-obsessed and "in the moment"."
OP's wife may well be a saint, but you certainly aren't. FYI it's normally a bad generalisation if you're calling half the population of the planet "self-obsessed"
Do you know what "back labor" is? When we showed up, she was 6 cm dilated and in excruciating pain. After a valiant effort to avoid an epidural for about 6 hours with the contractions plateauing, the doctors recommended that she not risk excess fatigue, to stay calm and rest a while before trying again. I was left to watch heart monitors and wait for a nurse who popped in once every 20 minutes.
After it was all over, our bundle of joy was eventually kept under close observation before discharge for a few hours at a time at various points to check on the vitals, and we weren't allowed into those wards, left to do nothing but wait and pull our hair out.
Any more judgment you want to pass on my situation without knowing the specifics, doctor?
For me, it was on the NASA KC-135 zero-gee simulator aircraft, better known as the “Vomit Comet”. Between parabolas, while experiencing 2 gees. While throwing up.
I had an assignment in a group project in school, and a few hours before the assignment was due, people started all saying that they weren't going to be able to get their part done. Since I didn't want to bomb that assignment, I started working on it, but then the internet at my apartment went out. So it's like 9pm, assignment is due at 12am, and I didn't know where to go to get internet, so I take my laptop and go to campus but all the buildings were closed except one. So I got into the building, and then realized my laptop was almost out of power. So I went searching for an outlet and finally found one in the bathroom. So I wrote the rest of the group's assignment on the counter top in the bathroom.
I should add, reason I connected into the RaspberryPi was that cell service sucks on the line into Secaucus because a. you're in the middle of swamp land and b. everybody and their mother is trying to get on from the train.
Having the Pi (running raspbian) was great because it was like having my own little full fledged mobile Linux server.
Great! I am new to this and this might be a stupid question as well. But I wanted to know that how did you get the wifi working in the subway station as the cellphone signals are not that great for phone's hotspot to work.
A regular "lipstick" size portable battery was usually enough for a ride in and ride out (2 hours total) and then I eventually switched to a bigger "cigarette pack" size battery that lasted a couple days.
I can put together a blog post with all of the details if people are intersted.
Standing on top of Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source storage ring.
My group managed a number of clusters around LBL, some belonging to scientists who felt more comfortable being able to see and pet their cluster, than if it were hiding away in a datacenter.
For clusters belonging to some of our beamline scientists, this meant hpc staff got to wear hard hats and dance around "Caution: Radiation Area" signs should the cluster need to be locally serviced.
Programming a last minute fix on an SGI Indy on top of the ticket booth in a porn theater (Club Casa Rosso) in Amsterdam minutes before a live stream from the stage went out to the unsuspecting internet with the theater full of press. First live stream to the web on record. A hilarious moment involved some Hells Angel that apparently did guard duty there discovering me and thinking I was burglarizing the place trying to pull me down. Fortunately someone intervened before he succeeded :)
Hollowed out mountain in Switzerland owned by a Russian oligarch somewhere in the world's top 100 richest people. Real James Bond villain style; elevator that rises out of the ground, several stories down etc.
I was working on his tennis court computer. When it was sunny, the roof of that section (several stories high to allow for a decent game of tennis) could slide open to let the sunshine in. He took us to a local restaurant for lunch afterwards.
Me, as an Air Force Staff Sergeant, on a USAF C-141 parked on the tarmac at Elmendorf AFB, AK. In 1986, we had flown out of Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, as part of a "fly-off" antenna test on two C-141s, and the software was HP Basic on an HP 85e. We found a bug in either the RS-232 tape controller piece of the code, or the IEEE-488 frequency input selector code, so I had to patch in on the fly before the next two flights (Elemendorf to Thule AB, Greenland, then Greenland to RAF Lakenheath, England). Once patched, I copied the code and installed it on the similar C-141 parked next to us, and it worked fine for the rest of the trip.
I was just a small cog in a big machine, but it was a big career confidence builder, and has stayed with me over the years. Our base office was the Rome Air Development Center Propagation Branch at Hanscom AFB, MA.
Halfway up a radio tower on a butte in Arizona. I was fixing some networking code on a network radio that we were developing and I just had a close encounter with a mountain lion on the ground, so I worked on my laptop while strapped in with a harness up high while I waited for someone to come pick me up.
- 1000m below the surface in an active underground mine, pitch black, surrounded by operating heavy diesel machinery, only illumination was the "think light" on my IBM thinkpad x60
- On a remote glacier in the Yukon
- In the Amazon jungle, fairly remote, being serenaded by monkeys and swatting mosquitoes and huge ants
In some old security shack next to a Helipad in downtown Baghdad. Writing software to help track training of Iraqi soldiers as a contractor. Surprisingly fun work with people from all over the world.
An occasional explosion or mortar/rocket attack had us put on our armor, but overall it was pretty safe.
I was coding a lot basically everywhere around 2008-2010 on my Neo Freerunner. In a tram, on a school break or boring lesson, in a shopping mall, on a beach, in a forest, in a hospital, near the church; basically anywhere I had some idle time (mostly waiting for someone else or commuting) and the battery wasn't flat.
The on-screen keyboard took some time to get used to, but having a complete GNU/Linux system with full development environment all the time near you was awesome. I've coded mostly in Python there, but not only. Ocasionally used SSH and VNC, but most of it was local - internet access wasn't as common and cheap back then as it is now, so basically used it mostly for quick fixes on the server while on-the-go.
Awkwardly, when I switched to Nokia N900 it turned out that its hardware keyboard was actually a disadvantage when it comes to coding - while great when typing natural language, it was too much hastle when reaching to special characters compared to typical qwerty on Illume's keyboard in SHR, with a rest point for the finger on Freerunner's screen bezel, which also was missing on N900.
Of course this all was when I was very young (15-20 yo). Now I have learned to apprieciate some rare idle time with just idling :)
Fixed a bug while on honeymoon. Got a text message something was wrong; was at the forum shops at Caesars Palace. Googled for the closest Apple store (laptop was back in the hotel room at Mandalay Bay and I wasn't about to walk all the way back to get it - store was in the Forum Shops / 5 min away). Got on a laptop at the store; installed the software I needed (transmit trial, sublime text, etc...); fortunately I had all passwords memorized; fixed the bug; removed the software, cleared browser cache (and they say their wiped every night anyway) and went back to shopping with the wife.
I fixed a one-line bug while on a plane using my phone through the plane wifi, remoted into a desktop machine that actually had the permissions and power to do a build, test it, and kick it over to the CI system.
a web-based administration software to handle various things related to the Vatican's library and university, like physical access, people registration, accounting etc. kinda boring but still exciting for the good and the bad of working in that environment
You might find this interesting, a story about the development of a popular ZX Spectrum emulator Warajevo:
"The grenades fell everywhere, there was little electrical power (at one time even the hospitals didn't have power for two months!). When we had electricity it was only for 2-3 hours during the night."
I was failing over a web application/services to another datacenter from my house during Hurricane Sandy. The power had went out and I was tethered to my cell phone.
Was working as a research assistant for my university's NLP department. Had a script to process a few gigabytes of text, knew it was going to take all night, so I ran it before I left. The code was still rattling around in my head on the bus and I realized I had made a mistake that would cause the output to be useless. Opened up JuiceSSH on my phone, logged into the server, fixed the code and ran the script, next day everything was peachy.
In the back of the van, parked up on the side of the runway at an airfield. We were flight testing a UAV and the data logging system that should have been finished weeks before....wasn't. So we were bodging stuff together so that there would be at least some data logged from the flights.
Right in the middle of summer too, but luckily in Wales so actually quite a pleasant temperature in the back of the van.
A lecture hall in front of a couple hundred students of "Topics in Mathematics for Engineers" (i.e., grab-bag of ODEs, PDEs, and linear algebra). I hadn't prepared a lecture for the day, so instead I did a live implementation of reduction to reduced-row-echelon form, in C.
Not a code to deploy but on the address bar of an old kiosk browser. An ugly JavaScript script to escape the computer lockdown and access the filesystem. Always nice to debug a one huge line of JavaScript that outputs HTML/ActiveX.
My parents used to leave me near the computers in shopping malls when I was little. Shopping bored me to death, but I liked to fiddle with all the computers on the display. Trying to bypass some locks, just for the fun of it (and sometimes even succeeding! :)) and typing JavaScript into IE's address bar to display some fun stuff was always my main occupation :D Plus I didn't have to go with parents around the whole shop and they knew where to expect me.
I also vaguely remember escaping some "internet cafe" kiosk at some hotel during one of the abroad school trips. The kiosk had "broken" sticker on it and seemed actually broken, but some functionality still worked and after escaping the kiosk UI I was able to actually fix it (as we actually wanted to use it) - don't remember what was it though :( Some technician was probably either grateful for a null job afterwards, or lost an order due to me ;)
I had been brung almost by force in a karaoke place in SF where we were the four only customers. When I noticed that production was down the engineering team was sleeping in Europe, so I opened the laptop.
In a Conex shipping container on the side of a mountain outside of Portland, OR. Was at a customer installation site and had to do some custom work on-site to implement a feature for them.
On the porch of a the mud hut in a Bahir Dar, a village in the north of Ethiopia. Getting wifi from the neighboring hotel. The power would go out intermittently, and they would start the diesel generators. Fighting off mosquitoes. Eating toasted chickpeas and plum tomatoes. Drinking super strong fire-roasted ethiopian coffee. Good memory. And I finished up the code for the system I demo'd a few days later in Addis.
While driving, typing on a remote connection using my phone. One key-press per minute (I was late to an urgent appointment).
Also, while sitting on a beach on my birthday with the wife of the CEO screaming at me down the phone line (Still not sure why she was involved, but it was a small family business).
Both outcomes were positive, but stressful (and in the first case, illegal) at the time.
Did I mention the power line run to this trailer couldn't handle the load we were putting on it, and the circuits would break every 15 minutes or so?
So yeah .. I am sweating, literally, and our field test is about to begin. This was an anti-IED system, using passive biometric collection capabilities. I had written a big piece of the software to integrate everything.
Then ... 10 minutes before we begin, we get a nasty bug. General Such and Such is arriving, followed by Cnl. Whomever. Then the AC cuts out. I am in this trailer, and have to code up a fix in 10 minutes, literally, in 105 degree heat, dripping in sweat, with PMs and more important ppl staring over my shoulder.
I did it ... while dripping sweat all over the keyboard. Hooray for me! I saved the day!
Craziest ... most intense coding I have ever done.
Still fail white board interviews though. =/