this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

Excel is a whole OS unto itself. Like Emacs except you can get out of it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Stop... Stop... I'm already dead

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It wasn't a server failure. Someone rm -rf on the root of the server. The server did what it was told.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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.