[COFF] [TUHS] Interview question

[Adam Thornton]

> On Jan 2, 2023, at 1:36 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> The /bin/sh stuff made me think of an interview question I had for engineers,
> that a surprisingly few could pass:
> 
> "Tell me about something you wrote that was entirely you, the docs, the
> tests, the source, the installer, everything.  It doesn't have to be a
> big thing, but it has to have been successfully used by at least 10
> people who had no contact with you (other than to say thanks)."
> 
> Most people fail this.  I think the people who pass might look 
> positively on the v7 sh stuff.  But who knows?

Huh.  That is a surprisingly tricky question, depending on how you want to construe "entirely you".

v1 of https://atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=2023 (before Thomas Jentzsch optimized the display engine) was ... stuff I did, but obviously neither the idea nor the execution was all that original, since I used Greg Troutman's Dark Mage source, which in turn was derived from Stellar Track.

There's a certain very large text adventure I once did, which I would certainly not bring up at a real job interview since it's riotously pornographic, but it is 200,000 words of source text, got surprisingly good reviews from many people (Emily Short loved it; Jimmy Maher hated it), and I put it all together myself, but the whole thing is a hodgepodge of T.S. Eliot and The Aeneid and then a few dozen other smaller sources, all tossed in a blender.  Not going to directly link it but it's not hard to find with a little Googling.  The arrangement is original, sure, but its charm--such as it is--may be that it is in some ways a love letter to early D&D and its "what if Gandalf and Conan teamed up to fight Cthulhu" sort of ethos.  (Jimmy Maher found the intertextuality very dense and unappetizing, whereas Emily Short really enjoyed the playfulness.)

There's https://github.com/athornton/uCA which fits the criteria but really is a very small wrapper around OpenSSL to automate SAN generation, which is a huge PITA with plain old OpenSSL.  Now, of course, you wouldn't bother with this, you'd just use Let's Encrypt, but that wasn't a thing yet.  Such as it is it's all me but it is entirely useless without a functional OpenSSL under it.

I'm not sure that ten other people ever used https://github.com/athornton/nerdle-solver because there may have been fewer than ten people other than me that found Nerdle all that fascinating.  It was fun talking with that community and finding out that the other solver I'm aware of was completely lexical, rather than actually doing the math.  But again: it's a thing that makes no sense without someone else having invented Nerdle first.

Or there's https://github.com/athornton/tmenu; probably also not actually used by ten other people, but it's the front-end of https://mvsevm.fsf.net (which certainly has been enjoyed by...uh...let's go with "at least a dozen" people).  It's original work, insofar as it goes, but it (like uCA) is really just glue between other things: a web server front end, a Javascript terminal emulator, and telnet/tn3270 clients.
 
Which of these, if any, do you count?