staff designers provided me with an html template to make it render, then because they made me threaten legal action to get paid for the contract where about 80% of the work was performed as a volunteer in the first place, i lost my volunteer access.
the acm are actually a bunch of assholes who mostly spend their members' dues buying hardware and software licenses, much like the government, but it's nice to see that at least they have kept around the work i did which was focused on making the site performant and reliable, which seems to have stuck around for the better part of a decade.
but they are at times a beacon, and it's neat to just be surfing the web and stumble into something you've built.
the cool part was that i got to have an e-mail exchange with steve bourne, because he was at the time the past president of the ACM. i mean, we'll obviously never be friends because i had to throw a fucking tantrum over an entire year of income, but it was kind of like:
hey, steve, thanks for writing that unix shell we all use a clone of. by the way, i would fucking really like to get paid since i was living on the couch in fema housing babysitting my friends' kid after katrina the entire time i worked for you guys.
what's great is that i started doing the work as a volunteer and was aggressively pushed into a contract, which they later didn't want to pay, though they had no issues paying for piles of HP servers that went unused or oracle licenses to solve problems that could probably have been solved with mysql.
but hey, i'm still alive, so: yo, motherfucker, wheee!
the acm are actually a bunch of assholes who mostly spend their members' dues buying hardware and software licenses, much like the government, but it's nice to see that at least they have kept around the work i did which was focused on making the site performant and reliable, which seems to have stuck around for the better part of a decade.
but they are at times a beacon, and it's neat to just be surfing the web and stumble into something you've built.