Dave Plummer

All the machines that are unused run tests all night long and they try to crash themselves.

And if they manage to crash themselves, it will drop into a debugger with a serial cable to another machine.

And you can connect to that other machine and remotely debug the crashed machine.

So you come in and they will have triage bugs.

You know, there was a crash in the start menu.

So we'll assign that to Dave.

And so you come in and that's your first thing is to connect because you got to get that machine back to the guy that owns it and unlock the machine.

So that's your first hour of your day is basically triage for bugs that have come up from stress overnight.

And then at that point, it's probably back to coding, which unfortunately 80% of the time is fixing bugs, especially in my career.

It was porting code and fixing bugs.

I wasn't writing a lot of new code.

There were exceptions.

I wrote a lot of new code on the side to get it out of my system from a day-to-day grind of always fixing bugs in other people's code, which is amazing learning.

Yeah, we took the entire Windows 95 user interface and we ported it to NT, which meant making it Unicode for one thing.

So everything that was 8-bits is now 16-bits.

So pointers, it's quite a mess when you switch the code over, as you can imagine.

It's like breaking into somebody's house and going through all their stuff and seeing the stuff in their drawers that they didn't want you to see.

You find all the good stuff, the pretty pictures hanging on the wall, and you find some disturbing stuff in the nightstand.

I saw code that was like 200-some characters wide with profanity and swears in it.

It eventually got all cleaned up over the years by the time I left, but it was not always the most professional code in the world.