Practitioners of the (Software) Dark Arts, Unite!

[Sean DonCarlos]

So I've noticed that we seem to have a lot of people here who are, were, or claim to be involved in software development in some way, shape or form - be it coding, architecture, testing, support, whatever. I thought maybe it would be nice to have our own thread to swap war stories, nominate people for the Most Ignorant Coworker/Customer Award (please change names to protect the nominees - I would not want anyone being accused of libel!), have more advanced discussions of TPA's design/structure/issues without causing everyone else's eyes to glaze over, etc. Whatever we want to talk about, really.

I'll start. I'm in the "was" category; software is no longer my primary job focus, but I still do some coding just to keep my skills up in case the economy throws me out of work. In my previous life, I worked with getting digital video surveillance systems to work with other devices (everything from card access systems to cash registers to factory controllers), and later on added some remote diagnostic/repair capabilities to the systems. A lot of C++, some SQL as well. Best part was getting to watch what the cameras picked up when video had to be verified for court cases - everything from parrot theft to driving a car through the doors of a convenience store.

My two questions for the group:

1. If there really are more software-type people here than would be expected in a similar-sized random group of people, why is that so? What's the connection between software development and pinball?
2. In the making-of-TPA video, there are several points where code is displayed on the monitors in the background. Did anyone else freeze the video at those points and examine the code, or am I the only one that twisted?

 

[Matt McIrvin]

The answer to the first question might be subcultural/generational. Technically inclined nerds who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s often came to an interest in software via videogames. In the Eighties, the golden age of video arcades, that was where you generally found the most impressive videogames, and arcades usually also had pinball.

I remember reading articles from that era that spoke of pinball struggling to meet the challenge of videogames for arcade mindshare and quarters (I remember a great one in Science 80 magazine that covered, in parallel, the development of Black Knight and the classic vector game Star Castle). I think it's interesting that, by the early Nineties, the pinball machines had actually found ways to hold their own; really, both pinball and coin-op arcade videogames were doomed by the decline of arcades themselves, under competition from home consoles.

 

[Jeff Strong]

I've made my living coding php/mySQL...building custom database-driven web applications (admin panels and that sort of thing). I've really slowed down over the past couple years though due to health issues, so now I only do a job here and there, which is fine with me because I don't enjoy the stress that goes along with working with the customers and their ever-changing requests, not mention the stark contrast between their urgency to have the project complete and their pokiness to pay me.

I think Matt makes a great point in regards to your 1st question. As for the 2nd: You're not alone! However, I've never delved very far into C++, C#, etc., so Farsight's code snippets were out of my league

 

[Rooter]

Web Developer here with my last war story. I do mostly financial sites because of the area I live in. I prefer PHP, then .NET, then Java. Of course I am currently working in Java.

Last week I got reamed out because my project was not completed on Monday. I received the requirements the following Friday. The person causing a fuss was the person that was supposed to give me the requirements. I pointed that out to him and he told me that they had not decided what they want yet. I asked if I should buy a mind reading device or a time machine. We were scheduled for two weeks of coding followed by two weeks of testing. Due to the delay, they had to cut back a week somewhere, so they decided there should be only one week of coding and two weeks of testing. No one would approve any overtime, so in order to make things go faster, a business person would ask me my current progress every few hours and make me fill out an Excel spreadsheet with the status of every requested feature. Status updates would take 40-60% of my day.

Not sure if that is a war story or just complaining. It's pretty much par for the course. Thanks for the thread, the venting felt good.


Update: gave my notice! Booyah!

 

[Tabe]

QA Lead here. Have worked on financial/banking software and am currently doing healthcare software.

Here's a war story:

So we were handed a list of components to be tested for a software package and were asked to provide time estimates for testing each. No problem. I'm going through the list and I see a component/category called "Other". I go to the manager and ask "Am I supposed to provide an estimate for this?" Answer: "Yes". Me: "How am I supposed to estimate 'other'?" Answer: "Just do it." WTF?

Like Rooter, I've also been involved in projects where "improved" management seems to just be annoying the crap out of the people working on it more often. I was on one where they wanted updates every 15 minutes. Gimme a break.

Tabe

 

[Sinistar]

The extent of my experience is : I build my own PC s , basically scraping together parts and making them work as a PC. I'm a volunteer Beta tester , but not in the same way the general public gets invited to hype up new games and they call those "tests" , Im in the invite only , last project was for THQ . I've dabbled with map making , in the PC version of Star Wars Battlefront 2 , strictly a fan thing, nothing professional.

 

[RetroDude]

Software developer here.
Did my first ameteur programming, such as it was then, back in the dark ages... in 1973 or 1974, via a remote teletype terminal. Used punched paper tape to be able to save output to load again later.
Since then, have done everything from batch driven keypunched cards to the latest stuff.
All sorts of languages, from assembly on 6502 to IBM mainframes, to the latest .NET.
Databases from ISAM files, dBase, MS SQL Server, to Oracle, etc. ...


Yet I am not much of a video game person at all.
I have three video game consoles:
Magnavox Odyssey 100
Sears Tele-Games Pong Sports IV
Wii

I only got the Wii because I came across the Wii version of the PHOF (and I got it super cheap on a Black Friday special)
I have both the Gottlieb and Williams collections for Wii and enjoy them.

I did have the Pro Pinball games and the Microsoft Pinball Arcade games on some older machines, but haven't really played any of them much lately.
I did re-install TimeShock on a modern system and played 3 or 4 games recently, but that's about it.

Don't have an iPhone.
Don't have an iPad.
Don't have an Android anything.
No PS3.
No Xbox 360.

Just PC.
(Several PCs)
I'm kind of old-school that way.

sooooo.... I'm still waiting for the PC version to drop before I can play something better than the PHOF versions.
Being a developer, I try to respect IP rights, so have stayed away from VP and the like.

I most sincerely hope that FarSight makes the PC version to where it can be used to build a pin cabinet like some of the VP people do.
That would be super sweet.
I've been tempted to get an Xbox 360 or PS3 just to play the currently released TPA games, but realize that every buck spent on those systems are dollars that won't be used on the cabinet build.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

I'm a professional coder; my career path has been pretty odd. I programmed as a hobby as a kid, and went from there via the high-school science-fair circuit to a summer job in the late 1980s writing visualization code for scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

But I wanted to be a particle physicist, or at least to learn particle physics, and I studied that and got my Ph.D. Toward the end I realized that competing for scarce academic jobs in that straitened environment was probably not for me, and when I got out I activated my backup career in computer graphics.

I worked in laser printers for a while, writing graphics code for page description languages, mostly in C. After 6 1/2 years doing that, I switched to mobile phone OS programming in varying mixtures of Java, C, C++ and C#, working for a variety of companies. These days I'm working with Android tablet apps. I love writing code that runs in things, and that has results you can see; there's a viscerally appealing quality to it. Somehow I never quite have complete faith that my code is doing anything until I see a graphical display.

I'm not sure exactly how this connects to pinball, except that obviously pinball has appeal for a student of physics, and for someone who likes gadgets where software collides with the physical world. As stated elsewhere, I actually got into pinball while goofing off when I was a graduate student.