Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Among those dark satanic mills

While I was in McDonalds[0] earlier I had the surreal pleasure of hearing a recording of the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ sung in Japanese chorus. This is so deeply wrong that I want a copy.

[0] Yes, I know, but it was another late night at the office, following a 30minute phone call to Finland to try to clear up some of the mess we’d made during the hour long phone conference earlier in the day…never tell people their code is a hack unless you know that (a) they think it is, (b) they will appreciate you saying it, or (c) you don’t care whether they ever produce code for you again.


Categories: Memories.

/ 3 Comments

3 comments

  1. saiira

    I let it slip in a video conference once that we all thought our belgian counterparts code was a pile of arse. That took quite a lot to clean up…

    In fairness though it was, it didn’t work and we were being sued by our customers for being so behind!

    Reply
    • neilh

      This code was previously unadvertised, we weren’t expecting new functionality in this part of the code now, we are soon to market and really don’t want to change these fragile things right now. We’re now on the third patch in as many days for this particular problem and we’re still convinced they’re solving the wrong problem.

      The words I used to our liason person were ‘veheremently opposed’ to including these code changes. Which involved a little explaining what veheremently meant.

      Now, though, I’m a little happier that they’ll at least try to test the next patch before they send it to us…

      Reply
      • maluse

        It could be worse, I remember a colleague getting so fed up that he denied cvs commit access to one of the “partner” coding teams on his project since it was the only way to get the code stable for a release! I can’t remember what the political fallout of this move was…

        Reply

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