What did Don do?

First things first, we're going back to the latter half of the 90's here; and I've mentioned Don before in one of my older posts, skidding into hero mode.

Don was a programmer, he was kept in a little plexiglass bubble of his own and spent all day in what looked like vi (certainly a terminal based text environment) writing what I think was C for the NCR minicomputer running Sco Unix I mentioned before.

Whether this is actually true, I don't really know, for he spent a lot of time sitting with his hands crossed over his head waiting; at the time I didn't know what he was waiting for, at home I had a Pentium 100Mhz rocking 16mb of RAM and running Borland Turbo C++ for DOS I had a lovely little progress window showing me it was compiling; I had not met the glory of GNU yet.

So Don would stare at a massive (like 19 inch) monitor, he had a Wyse VT100 next to him too, and he would not stare at that very often.  He would also make copious notes on paper and seemed to program very deliberately, looking and reading through the information at hand.

He did this, almost without interacting with anyone else for the whole year I worked with him; looking back on it I wished I had been more proactive and just asked him more about it, as he was clearly programming C around a Unix system, which is a) uber cool and b) uber cool.

It always struck me quite how long he thought about and maybe designed anything before acting.  You could say this was because he was mulling and considering the problem, he was being a good engineer, with forethought and wanted to get things right?

No, see I think he was really just in fear of how long the compile would take...

Just like me with the project I'm working on twenty five years later.

Programmer Between Jobs...

Announcement time, I'm unemployed... Yes, as of the 28th December 2018 I have not been gainfully employed.  But fear not, I am starting my new job on Wednesday 2nd January.

I've covered this in a nattering brief on my YouTube, which I now link, but stick with this post for more information.

I've never really spoken directly about the job I've had and how its evolved over the years I've been with it, so I was at that role for 14 years.  That's a very long time, especially in today's markets, but as you all know I keep myself busy and informed on these very pages.

I did work in what's euphemistically called "the pay to play industry", this is the gambling industry to the rest of the world, but saying that I didn't write the actual games.  I was a systems engineer, so I wrote software which drove the money accepting and paying hardware, and especially software which worked to store the current state of a machine, avoid frauds, count, collate and communicate metrics to central servers or offline (USB) uploads.

And I did all this according to a set of quite strict legal guidelines and requirements, so we're not talking about the much media covered "crack cocaine of gambling the FOBT", we're talking at most about £1 stake machines, family game machines, questions and answer style stuff.  The more cuddly end of the market if you're asking me.

I am leaving that industry, all that knowledge of BACTA standards and other stuff has been slowly ebbing out of my pores and leaving me, as I actually resigned in early October and in late October (when it became public knowledge in the office I was leaving) they placed me on gardening leave.  We'll gloss over that as some folks got their righteous fury out and pointed it in my direction; needless to say, being on gardening leave this long has let the move happen seamlessly, but it will be a shock to return to early morning rising to get into Nottingham City Center... Plus, no more day time tele... Oh thank god, no more daytime TV!

So, where am I going?  Well, I'm going to a company called The Multiplayer Guys, this is an actual game company, a computer game, console game crew with close ties to an actual game house Super Punk Games.

Now I can't share anything about what I'm going to be working on, but I'm carrying my C++, Windows and Linux experience high on my shoulders.  I'm eager to learn more about the Client Side structure of modern game engines and leverage my server-side and networking experience with the high-speed low latency efficient demands of a modern game.

So, yes, I know what game I'm going to be working on, that's the bit I can't share with you, maybe over time, but right now, nada, nothing, no comment... Move along, move along.

P.S.  I got an e-mail at 16:42 that my Laptop shipped, from China (despite being told the Lenovo reseller was in the Republic of Ireland) by UPS Global... I'm wondering if it'll be here within the week now, I really am.

Alright, alright, here it is....

Happy New Year...

Now fuck off and stop saying I'm not festive!

Development : The Cathedral & The Bazaar

Recently I had to explain to a none-developer how we had been working on a project, that is to say he and I.  I explained that our common boss worked very much in terms of the Cathedral, everything is big, grand, old, with set sources for supplies and almost dogmatic adherence to their ways of working.  Whilst he and I had been working, with extraordinary success, in a much more agile manner, in the manner of the Bazaar.

Anyone could bring items to us, he could filter some queries, I could filter some others, between us we then worked in an Agile manner to achieve a result.

I myself ran the development, and I pushed builds, lots of builds, releasing at least twice daily.  Any problem was picked up, worked on, solved and the next build had it, leaving a train of progressively better builds step by step, until we sit today with a fully functional system and we await input from multiple other sources.

The main source for things we are awaiting is the Cathedral, we have waited a long time, seven weeks of hard work by ourselves far out stripped the expectations of the Cathedral model of working, and once we superceded that model it was too heavy, too slow, too stiff to catch up with us.

The net result is somewhat of a pocket of confusion, work was demanded, it was delivered, yet now it sits unused.

The bazaar delivered, whilst the Cathedral struggles.

("The Cathedral & the Bazaar" is a famous musing upon software development from the perspective of old slow methodologies to the exploding Agile methodologies which suffuse the Linux development and open source development movements).

Development : No Tests before a Prototype

I am NOT a fan of test driven development, does this mean there isn't a place for tests whilst you work?  No, it does not, I believe there is a place for tests whilst you are working, however that place is beyond the initial hard development and broad strokes of laying out the project.

When you first begin a new project there are so many things to consider, settings, scopes, layers, inherited domains just so much you need to physically take from the design pages through your teams brains and down to the keyboard.

I could even define this as a "pre-sprint" within Scrum to push out a product that the owner can then give you that first feedback on; especially if they are none technical and from this point on, from this first step you can cycle through Scrums into Sprints and with that change you can seed your development into more expansion and maintenance of code, when you do that, when you have something to test against then you need to add those tests and start to use them as a tool.

They should not drive your development, they should drive your keeping the developed work in order.  N-Crunch, N-Unit, G-Test... All these frameworks on certain languages (like C# and Java) work very well as you can reflect out the language, but before you can reflect out something with languages like C++ or C you are stuck over-engineering your tests before that first evolution of the project.

There is a name for this first evolution, it's called a Prototype.

Not many teams value a prototype, indeed Scrum itself never mentioned them, you are meant to jump from idea to stories to backlog to releasable code, and in my opinion this is not easy, it's not really communicative of what you are doing either, especially when the product owner is the only person within the development stack whom can redirect the team, but without that first tangible something many product owners can be literally lost.

Earlier this month I talked about the idea that a product owner needed to use the software life-cycle, an old idea, but a good one... Today I'm saying before you can really start to use inline tests within your IDE and before you can start to run scrums you need a prototype, arguably an even older development paradigm.

So what is my point?  Why do I keep bringing this kind of topic to the fore?  Well, simply put I believe there are far too many teams with far too many people in them not willing to push the envelop, whom are not willing to ask questions of the process they are following, not willing to bend or twist or shape the working environment to their way of working whilst simultaneously keeping up the bests practices those processes are there to enforce.

I suppose a Scrum Master should help with this process, but I find far few do, because the division of my problems with these Agile development mantra lie in the disjoint between idea and actually hitting the keys.  At times I see teams which are literally headless, they are a dozen monkeys typing a dozen keyboards, and they're being cheered on by the Scrum master, beyond those walls however they've no idea how it applies to the company, they have no interest or feedback on the return on investment that the Product Owner is all about.

A prototype, beyond a discussion, beyond the initial design, it can form the best kind of spring board and drive the best kind of Product Owner feedback down that chain, but it has to be created unfettered, unburdened by the micro-management of a scrum or sprint, it has to be created in a linear no-none-sense holistic head-space and used as a tool.

This is not being done very often in the teams I see around me.  Perhaps because it is thought of as old school, as a "has-been", however, if you look the hyper success of some products; say Minecraft; it maybe managed however Microsoft want now, it maybe teams running sprints, however Notch started it all with a Prototype.