Steve Wetherill on Nostr: I wrote this as response to a LinkedIn post which asked about things that make you ...

I wrote this as response to a LinkedIn post which asked about things that make you disproportionately proud. Here’s my story, in 1996 I figured out a bug in the Microsoft DirectX installer that would brick certain Windows 95 machines with certain Creative Labs sound cards. It was the single remaining blocking issue preventing mastering and release of Command & Conquer Red Alert, and there was a lot of pressure to ship. It was a configuration issue in the official MSFT DirectX installer, I figured out the problem (empirically, lots of midnight hours), reported urgently to MSFT, with steps to repeat. They claimed they could not repeat the issue. I told them unless the issue was resolved we could not ship. They would not budge. I modified the installer and we shipped that version. They threatened various things, including sending any customer service calls related to this to me directly. A few weeks later, they wrote to apologize and told me they’d finally managed to repeat the issue, that my fix was correct, and that they would update the DirectX installer to include the change. All in all, it was a tense few weeks one way or another, but it turned out OK in the end and we did ship Red Alert on time. :)