It was released in 2004. I had a co-worker who was hugely into it in 2005. Entirely coincidentally, he was also into absurdly overcomplicated code and clusterfuck projects that failed after years and millions of dollars.
He was also the only programmer I’ve ever known whose code literally nearly killed a child.
The code was to remotely control (from a PDA) a baseball-throwing machine that had a top speed of 125 mph. This dude fucked everything up for more than a year but somehow was kept on the project. They then had him write a version of the software to be used for Little Leaguers. He decided to test out this version for the first time on a field with actual Little Leaguers - the first ball from the machine was supposed to be a slow grounder to the shortstop, but was instead a 125 mph knuckleball a foot over the kid’s head.
If you don’t know baseball, a knuckleball is a ball with no spin so its movement is incredibly random.
Edit: incidentally, the reason this happened is that the guy’s code originally specified the speeds of the two wheels (a baseball-throwing machine uses two wheels with tires spinning at high speed and a baseball is inserted between them and shot out thereby) using Ints with positive values between 0 and 32767. At some point he decided this was clunky (true) and changed the API to accept Float values between 0.0 and 1.0. All well and good, but this produced a big mess of compile errors in his code which he “fixed” by wrapping every call to the speeds method with Clamp ( CFloat ( iSpeedParam, 0.0, 1.0 ) ). His Little League code passed formerly reasonable integer speed values of, say, 5000 and 6000 (which should have produced something like a 20 mph ball with a bit of topspin) which were then cast and clamped to 1.0 and 1.0, meaning both wheels spun at maximum speed, ejecting a ball at 125 mph with no spin.
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It was released in 2004. I had a co-worker who was hugely into it in 2005. Entirely coincidentally, he was also into absurdly overcomplicated code and clusterfuck projects that failed after years and millions of dollars.
He was also the only programmer I’ve ever known whose code literally nearly killed a child.
Explain that last sentence please
He was also the only programmer I’ve ever known whose code literally nearly killed a child.
You can’t just leave it at that…
The code was to remotely control (from a PDA) a baseball-throwing machine that had a top speed of 125 mph. This dude fucked everything up for more than a year but somehow was kept on the project. They then had him write a version of the software to be used for Little Leaguers. He decided to test out this version for the first time on a field with actual Little Leaguers - the first ball from the machine was supposed to be a slow grounder to the shortstop, but was instead a 125 mph knuckleball a foot over the kid’s head.
If you don’t know baseball, a knuckleball is a ball with no spin so its movement is incredibly random.
Edit: incidentally, the reason this happened is that the guy’s code originally specified the speeds of the two wheels (a baseball-throwing machine uses two wheels with tires spinning at high speed and a baseball is inserted between them and shot out thereby) using Ints with positive values between 0 and 32767. At some point he decided this was clunky (true) and changed the API to accept Float values between 0.0 and 1.0. All well and good, but this produced a big mess of compile errors in his code which he “fixed” by wrapping every call to the speeds method with Clamp ( CFloat ( iSpeedParam, 0.0, 1.0 ) ). His Little League code passed formerly reasonable integer speed values of, say, 5000 and 6000 (which should have produced something like a 20 mph ball with a bit of topspin) which were then cast and clamped to 1.0 and 1.0, meaning both wheels spun at maximum speed, ejecting a ball at 125 mph with no spin.
Haha that sounds like the epitome of testing in prod 🤣
Technically, kids are in development.
I really wanted to have at least one kid so I could name him “Developmestuction”.
Oof