What was "the incident" at your work place?

LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 260 points –

Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.

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Software company before git. The source server corrupted and the product code was lost. 5 guys had to get together and figure out the latest version between them (everybody had different changesets) and produce a new "current" version. At the end we lost all history prior and ever since all changes prior to 2008 have been attributed to 1 guy.

I used to work at an accounting/consulting firm who were dead set on writing business applications in VBA within Excel. The code was embedded in the notebook, and to distribute the software was sending the latest version of the Excel file. This made version control virtually impossible, and we would instead combine our work manually.

I cannot recommend having tech-illiterate people lead software projects.

The amount of times I hear people telling me that "I should just do it in Excel". Excel. Is not. A database.

Excel is a single-assignment dynamically-typed functional programming language with a really obtuse editor.

Good software starts in Excel honestly. But oh god should you not stay there... Its not designed as a database indeed.

Access is the worst of both worlds.

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution

Close enough when your actual database system is written in fucking COBOL.

Gotta respect that save. Reminds me of the Toy Story 2 assets being lost from a server failure and they were saved by one employee having a copy on their personal computer at home.

Drive Savers rescued an episode of The Simpsons. Back when that show was good.

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More impressive than the fact that you saved a repo once is that the same repo still exists today with the complete git history. At the rate companies abandon products for new ones, old repos are rare.

Our repo is old as time. Carried through from SourceSafe to TFS to Git

Subversion has existed probably for longer than your company, the fucking managers couldn't be arsed to read a damn book?

They were using SourceSafe back then. But any source control that isnt decentralised has the same problem. If the central server gets deleted so does all history

I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.

Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.

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