| I have a few little trophies I go back to every once in a while when I'm feeling like a crappy programmer. - I worked out, on pen and paper, sorting networks on my own a few years before the Wikipedia article on them existed. I was looking for shortcuts in a Quicksort implementation. I hadn't read Art of Computer Programming yet, which is probably the only other place I would've been likely to read about it. It hadn't been covered in any of the other programming literature that I was devouring at the time. - I wrote a variable interpolator in COBOL. COBOL has no string operators or anything resembling a string data type. This one was tricky. I was working as a programmer/operator at a school district at the time and the central hub of their IT was a Unisys mainframe that ran COBOL and WFL. There weren't any punch cards anymore, but everything ran as if there were; for any given job to run, say, report cards, you had to go into the WFL job and edit a two-digit school code in half a dozen places, in "digital punch cards", which would then be fed one after the other into COBOL programs. This was error-prone and I wanted a way to define a couple of variables at the top of the job file and then have everything work after that. - I worked for a BigCo that used Remedy for its internal support systems. There were some latent training issues in the internal support department and support requests kept getting modified by unknown people, which would cause the requests to get mishandled and would irritate various other departments. I found a way to sneak some code into the Remedy forms system and I cobbled together a very rudimentary communications protocol between several forms so that all changes to any form got logged to another form, along with the user's id. Remedy had no loop logic at the time. That actually made it to a Remedy developer's group mailing list once and I was a big fish in a very tiny little puddle for a day. - I reverse-engineered portions of the .dbf format that FoxPro uses, and wrote software that could convert .dbf files into MySQL tables. The date format was tricky. It was an 8 byte field where the first four bytes were a little-endian integer of the Julian date (so Oct. 15, 1582 = 2299161), and the next four bytes were the little-endian milliseconds since midnight. This is not documented anywhere. Those are some of my favorites anyway. 30 years of programming, there's been some fun stuff along the way. |