Software: A Rant About Change for Changes Sake

In software engineering I am one of those people who like to embrace change, I will in my own projects and even in professional situations (time permitting) stand up a new version of existing functionality in a side-by-side manner to try out new things, seek better solutions or performance or simply to understand how someone else's solution solved for the problem at hand.

This mentality broadly sits under the "Prototyping" method of software engineering, however, prototyping itself often says you should create a prototype in a wholly other language or platform than your target; a little like when planning to make a game in a brand new custom game engine you might want to prototype in an existing one, so benefit from both your own engineering expanding your eventual product, but building confidence and a marker post for performance & the content to which you can work.

The same is then true when I just want to elaborate on a single target piece of code and rework it.

I say all this because I like change.

What I can not abide however is change simply for changes sake, changes or reengineering something for no purpose.

The biggest villian in this space for me, sadly, has to be Microsoft with the Windows Operating system.

The only reason I even still run windows is to test games I'm working on (not even to run those games in most cases).

And today they've drawn my ire by reengineering, for no purpose to me, nor benefit to any user the Lock Screen.

You could just Windows Key and L your way to exiting to lunch or to go away securely from your desk, it's a natural reaction for me to lock the screen, even when I'm working at home!  So ubiquitous was I taught about security, through hard learned lessons and practical jokes.

So it irks me massively to return to my machine just now, find it has installed an update and now when locked I come to wake the machine it sits.... and sits... and does nothing... and nothing happens.... and you wait....

To the point I believed the machine was locked up or crashed.

When really it's opening four widgets on the lock screen.... Four..... Inane news articles which do not interest me, junk adverts and even the weather app I must have uninstalled three times on this machine, yet it returns constantly.

The delay?  Yeah, it was off loading whatever framework it needed to show these embedded widgets.... Some Javascript framework taking a gig of ram no doubt, which has taken the lock screen of instant, consistent and functional usage to a dismal mess I am going to have to disable for my own sanity.

Microsoft, just NO, stop doing this.

Why the widgets? And then you remove them, after trying to figure out what's wrong and even with the value set to "NO" do not show me these widgets it still adds another app to the list of things it can show, it's so insidious; not to mention slow.  And when you finally do disable these needless widgets?..... Oh it's still massively slow and doesn't work as it did before.

Yeah you sould press any key and wake the locked screen to give you a log-in prompt... now only escape seems to give me a log in screen.... I have no idea why that change was done, I presume whomever was tasked with this change just likes or was themselves used to using the escape key; but it's the many tiny little changes the gas lighting of "this used to work <that> way" only to find it changed - without any visual reconfiguration it just now works differently - it all just beggars belief. 

Black border.... KitKat

What have Nestle done?... I see on the packet it says "Now with more Milk & Cocoa", but the chocolate is bitter, catches the back of your throat, and it's not as nice or mellow as it used to be.... What have they done?

It's the end of an era...

The end of KitKat, I doubt I'll ever eat one again...

Development : The Art of Fungibility

Fungibility is about being able to substitute one thing for another seamlessly, let us say you have a paint sprayer which contains red paint today, but tomorrow you want to paint the wall blue, you simply swap the paint... The unit remains unchanged... The paint is fungiable.

When it comes to software, especially in the past, it was of paramount importance to write your code to conform to the system, you had to write code which was compiled for one processor only, you had to conform to the calling conventions of the underlying architecture and most importantly the OS... Software was generally not very portable.

High level languages, like C, were created to get over this problem and indeed the Unix system as created by Dennis Richie could be recompiled from source on various platforms, however, things were sill very specific and the "portability" was the case of recompiling and overcoming the localisation quirks of each underlying platform.

However, with the advent of portable interpreted languages like Java or Python, and manageable tool-chain assistants like Docker and Kivy you can write your code once and have it move between systems without effort.  The first of these which I encountered really was Java, I had this run on both a Sun Sparc station and a PC, and when I wrote my degree dissertation (Parallel Computing in an Open Environment) in order to open up that platform the interop module was all Java, running on a Windows PC or any other Java 1.1.4 (AWP) functional system.

Little did I understand, at undergraduate level, how important a trend this cross platform context for an application would become.  Smart Phones, Tablets, Consoles, various PC Hardware, Linux, Windows... At one point I was even writing work in Personal Pascal on the Atari ST, then porting it to Turbo Pascal on the PC for profit, when I didn't own a PC myself, so one had to be careful and thoughtful.  There were not so many avenues for a system to truly be the same on one platform or the next.

So, as I learned to program you had to sit down with a pencil & paper, with a process flow chart stencil and work out how you wanted to lay the system in order.  To order what was being written when.

This lead to bring frugal with your time, and ultimately lead me to see fungiability as a key component of my way of working.  Because it was such hard work to cover all the bases and to make your code truly portable across machines.

As great as Java was, and python is now, or technology like Docker & Kivy are though, I believe they are pushing fungiability into decline, sometimes with it not even being considered, take my post of a few weeks prior, replacing an older system with a new, I simply looked at the API being exposed, boiled it down to a few function calls then re-implemented them and the system came back up.  Replacing the code inside the functions was hard work, but the API swapped over for me.

I've since learned that other, younger, developers would simply have re-written all the code, they'd not have cut out what wasn't needed; because they have the tools, they have the machine power (ram and processor) to support continuing with the added load, they don't pair things down, they don't binary chop what's not required, they only create and ever expanding gaggle of code (If you are young and don't do this, please don't think I'm painting all with the same brush!)

So as you start to consider scale-ability, on demand computing and cloud computing, keep fungibility in mind, think and design like for like replacement of systems, can you swap the service back end from an instance of Ubuntu on AWS to running on your local XEN host?  Can your developers in Canada send their data to dedicated local machine today, but deploy to a virtual instance hosted by yourself in the UK tomorrow?

Consider your file system advanced RAID arrays offer a form of Fungibility, that you can swap bad disks out and replace them with new, ZFS does this in software in the same manner, so long as you include your disks into the pool by disk-id.

Fungibility, in code, in provision, in hardware... It's an art which is sadly not often mentioned, indeed it's not even in my spellchecker's dictionary.