What was your greatest achievement in coding?

For me I think it was the time we had a production stopping deadlock. I had never seen a real deadlock outside of the classroom. We were using SGI Indigo talking to a Celco film recorder. The Celco had a DR-11W interface but the interface card was an ISA bus, while the SGI was PCI, so there was a PCI to ISA conversion along the way. I examined a lot of code, and finally found a control register that was not correctly set. Changed just one bit, and the problem cleared.

Ten years later someone spotted my name badge at a trade show, and stopped me to ask if I was "that guy" that fixed the deadlock. Do I get a prize for the smallest change to code?
 
blackbird9 said:
It's hard to believe they had the nerve to try to get you to sign something like that. Unbelievable.
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I had a few contract offers that tried this tactic (Not IBM) but in the UK there is a law from the 1970's concerning unfair contracts. Before signing I would send back my contract terms in writing that would include a reciprocal condition for a retainer fee of 50 weeks pay to be paid in advance annually for every year while the intellectual property clause was in effect. That clause effectively prevented me from working for anyone else so was in scope for unfair contract. Some customer's deleted their clause to extinguish mine, those that didn't hired some other fool.

I remember a huge argument with my ex-wife when she found out I had walked away from a lucrative six-month contract with a 'forever ours' clause that did not agree to my 'forever paid' reciprocal clause. I think around 10% of my contracts tried this, and about half of those I would walk away from. None of them ever accepted my reciprocal terms, they just deleted that IP clause.
 
bgavin said:
After I left IBM, I was offered a similar contract stating all intellectual property I created at any future time belonged to IBM.
I refused to sign that one.
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I somewhere still have the ToS for hotmail which MS had tried to put unto their custormers, laying a claim to all IP, patents and maybe firstborn. They dropped that like a hot potato when someone (cameron diaz?) sued them because she had fake nudes mailed to her, and according to the ToS those belonged to MS with all rights attached.
 
The project most memorable to me was the JES/2 dynamic proclib project in 1989-1990. It was a key 0 supervisor state (kernel mode) extension to IBM's JES/2, part of MVS (mainframe O/S). It was over 100K lines of IBM mainframe assembler.
 
For coding - I was 11-12 in the 1990s, and I coded some stupid game in class which would pop up some ASCII symbols on screen and you had to run around and eat it with the cursor haha.
As for DEcoding - I decoded the Russian buzzer radio (UVB-76: link).
I'm just an amateur...as you can see I am pretty new to FreeBSD too (see my avatar, I'm a baby Beastie).
 
Hahaha, I recognise that one. I had something like, oh, I don't know, maybe 1000 lines of 'congealed vomit' perl that had been snowballing for the last several years, that was part of an automated multi-phase build system, that they asked me to patch for the latest build target variant. No one knew how it worked, it had been hacked on over and over by a variety of contractors and permies who had since moved on, all we had left was the code, no comemnts of course. Instead of bodging more code into it I trashed the whole unmaintainable mess, and replaced it with an xml file and about 100 lines of perl that parsed the xml and made the whole thing table driven; so instead of cutting and pasting a new block for each new build target variant, you add a clause to the xml file and the script itself stays unchanged. I had a bit of help from a junior colleague who designed the xml schema for me. So I didn't quite replace it with a single line function, but it wasn't too far off!
 
Me? I have wasted years just to start a C program with curses. It is just a racing car program and the player steers with the arrow keys. It shows the air view of the car. The point is to go one lap around in the fewer keys pressed.
 
Hey everyone, all your stories are awesome; I like to read your achievements 👍

I can add one about myself about 20 years ago: after starting out with QBasic, I switched to x86 assembly and I tried to make an OS (an obsession of mine...). Of course, I didn't have the skills to complete it successfully, but I managed to create a bootable 3"1/2 floppy disk that displayed an image when booted. Speaking of this, I remember INT 10, great memories :)
 
When I were a teenager (many many... years ago), I bought a (Creative) SoundBlaster to install on some Intel 486 or 386 on MS-DOS! It was apparently a waste of money, until the day...

I were the technical responsible of the calculations of the rankings of a National Competition of Hairdressers Trainees. 3-4 competitions each year with 100-200 contestants, making multiple rounds with different styles of haircuts. There were multiple judges and the total scores to insert were some thousands. I created my Clipper application. I were reliable, but often they waited a little too much, before all the rankings were ready.

Then, one day, I had the (Creative) idea to enter the scores using special keypad shortcuts, and using the SoundBlaster for the audio feedback. I punched one score by second, at the rhythm of mine registered sped-up, high-pitched WAV, sounding like a castrated rapping Donald Duck. I were at the same time the fastest data entry clerk of the scoring basement; the creator of the application; the one who interfaced Clipper with the SoundBlaster using a C module; the CEO calculating how much time he was saving respect the time spent in extending the application :)
 
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