In any case, the whole thing with Microsoft X-Box Live and now with their horrible Games For Windows has really got my goat on this front. Everyone knows it must be do-able in one way or another, they just seem to refuse to believe people move from country to country and that gamers actually get attached to their online persona. It basically shows how little Microsoft understand gamers, even after courting this market for so many years (after writing software for the Dreamcast)…

but also being an IT Professional I know that “Impossible” is almost certainly untrue.

Confessions of a Software Engineer…

I was once sitting in on some meetings with some project management types at a customer’s site discussing bugs and feature requests for some bespoke proprietary product.

The feature request under discussion was for the web front-end and there was a requirement to intercept certain control character key presses before IE6 swallowed them and pass them along to the SVG DOM provided by an end-of-life Adobe ActiveX plug-in. But the feature is not what’s important; it’s flavour text. It’ll suffice to say I told the customer this was flat out impossible and having spent weeks preparing for these meetings I was absolutely convinced of this. I have never more confidently made any assertion in my life.

The next week I was chatting to one of my wiser, cleverer and more intelligent colleagues and he happened to mention he had a look at this requirement. The bastard had only gone and implemented it.

As the koan[1] says, “at that moment the student was enlightened.” I have never since, nor will I ever again say that any software engineering task is impossible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan