What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
Oof. As someone who has never participated, every time a post like this shows up I&#x27;m reminded of how weird the twitterverse is. Such a microcosm of weirdness, the handles, the academic references (I don&#x27;t care if you went to MIT for undergrad), the ego jockeying, the shared language of &quot;almost-memes&quot; like &#x27;not all heroes wear capes&#x27;, &#x27;this is why we can&#x27;t have nice things&#x27;, and &#x27;this is what peak performance is&#x27; etc et al. And tech bros navigate it as a game of sorts trying to embody some online peak performance version of themselves to signal &quot;yes I&#x27;m part of the tech master race&quot;.<p>But! External cultural tear downs aside, I&#x27;d like to show some internal cultural self awareness:<p>Being mostly an academic but having done stints &#x27;in industry&#x27; or collaborating with &#x27;real&#x27; coders I can say without a doubt that all the jankiest tech lives, and thrives, in academia. Scripts that were written by some professor with no coding background in the early 90s continuing to output data for analysis today. Entire mega projects written by single-minded individuals trying to be the academic version of a 10x developer but they&#x27;re creating 100x spaghetti code (I&#x27;m looking at you RHIC&#x2F;CERN). Single matlab scripts that are 10s of thousands of lines long that take voltages and currents and output a number with an &quot;uncertainty&quot; that nobody has really ever bothered to externally validate or quality control besides the grad student who never finished his thesis 10 years ago (from an optics lab I worked in).<p>The list goes on and on. Hilariously, the most beautiful pieces of tech&#x2F;code I&#x27;ve ever seen have also been in academia that will never see the light of day. There was this ~1000 line piece of OO code that ran a Kalman filter in near-real time on the all of the particles produced in Gold-Gold atom collisions (and simulations!) at RHIC that was probably the most elegant piece of work I&#x27;ve ever seen, written by a coffee chugging burnt out grad student that sat alone in the corner day in and day out.