this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
264 points (97.5% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26916 readers
1817 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CEbbinghaus@lemmy.world 103 points 2 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.

[–] MikeOxlong@lemm.ee 59 points 2 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.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 32 points 2 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.

[–] rovingnothing29@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

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

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 points 2 months ago

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

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 5 points 2 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.

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 months ago

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution

[–] Strider@thelemmy.club 4 points 2 months ago

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

[–] Dasnap@lemmy.world 25 points 2 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.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 months ago

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

[–] Avatar_of_Self@lemmy.world 6 points 2 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.

[–] Artyom@lemm.ee 4 points 2 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.

[–] CEbbinghaus@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

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

[–] Vivendi@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 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?

[–] CEbbinghaus@lemmy.world 4 points 2 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

[–] CodeMonkey@programming.dev 2 points 2 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.