[bm98]

>The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times.

And then you go off to college, and one day the program stops working because of one problem or another, and they call you in the middle of studying for final exams, and that's when you learned about technical support and technical debt and all the things that make programming less fun!

Some people have recurring dreams in which they show up to school or work in their pajamas... my recurring dream is that some program I wrote in high school is still being used twenty years later, and they come calling because something broke...

[mdip]

You and I sound like we had very similar childhoods . . .

I wrote a tool that managed a bunch of information related to the AP Computer Science exam[0] which my High School continued to use for 10 years after I graduated. I had received a call on it once, five years after I graduated, from a guy filling in for the teacher I wrote it for and I ended up working with one of his students to figure it out ... while at the Atlanta airport, traveling for work. :)

[0] I don't recall the details, but it was a surprisingly involved text-based pascal program.

[curiousllama]

I'm gonna be honest, if I'm just sitting in the airport with not much to do, this sounds like fun. No pressure, just taking a call and debugging an old script, with a chance to give a kid a good story/learning experience...

"C'mon kid, I had it working for 5 years and you broke it? What'd you do!" :)

[mdip]

Oh, man, the only thing better would have been if one of my colleagues was there with me... I was very young in this job (19, first real job, next youngest was 26). Waiting on my bags, traveling for business as a 19-year old kid and fielding support calls for software I wrote on the side. Even without any witnesses, it felt pretty damn awesome. I remember the incident very well because the flip side was that I was scheduled to work at the switch site in Downtown, which meant I was staying at a really nice hotel and besides the software issue, I had a much more pressing problem of Northwest Airlines[0] having managed to lose my bags on a direct flight and I had failed to pack the usual emergency items in my carry-on[1].

[0] Yup, it was that long ago.

[1] Someone told me "they don't lose bags on a direct flight". Very wrong. Lost them on the way back, too -- same fscking trip. But Detroit opened a new terminal and was having a "holiday baggage handling crisis"; after a few weeks they compensated me and sometime the following summer my bag appeared on my front porch. The "crisis" only affected international flights, so I wonder if my luggage had a better trip than I did. It was seriously more than 6 months lost.

[ivanhoe]

And one day you learn about charging yearly support fees, and that makes your dreams of someone using your app for 20+ years much more pleasant...