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Right I'm guilty, and annoyed at myself, and making a change... Though I might still keep this as a tab on posts... I AM NOT GOING TO USE THE TERM "SOFTWARE ENGINEER" anymore....
This makes my degree certificate wrong, as it clearly states "Software Engineering", but even though that is indeed what I do every day, and what I read about every night, it is not what; nor who; I am... I am a programmer, a hacker (in the traditional sense), a tinkerer and a student of all things software.
Many other writers have call us programmers out on this, and finally, I'm going to eat humble pie and agree, when one sits down to write code one is not doing what the great engineers did, we are not forging rail-ways, bridges, hulls of great ships or physical tangible results which must stand the test of time.
We are building a more ethereal, almost smoke and mirror concept, results through the action of our instructions through another, that is programming it is what I do.
Why do I want to make this distinction? Well, as you may tell from some of the recent posts around here, I've been involved in merging parts of teams and companies, meeting both incoming and shifting personnel to fit them into the matrix that spells "results" for a company.
No code has yet been cut, but a new team, and new ideas might very well be needed. In turn I have reached out there and been talking to others, to recruiters, to other companies, and indeed I've sat before other people.
My friends also call upon my expertise, as one of the few from our graduating class still working in Software or indeed technology, I am often called upon for a little technical guidance.
Results have been mixed, but the determinable difference I have had between success and failure has relied, nearly exclusively, on the other party understanding the term "Software Engineer", it does not mean we can programme your VCR, set the clock on your Microwave, or save your phone contacts to your SIM card. It means we are able to employ structured methods, to define procedure, and to design, write and test then document code as products for use or sale.
This does not include our being Electrical, Mechanical or Structural Engineers!
I am not trying, willing, or able to build the next Channel Tunnel, or Skylab, or HMS Bullshit. I am able to cut code to make an existing system, or device, bend to the will of requirements upon it, I am able to look at the said device and decide whether it is fit for the purpose or not, I am not creating that device!
Creating said device is Mechanical or Electrical Engineering, I am Software, the use of the "Engineer" moniker is causing some confusion, some blurring of lines and so to help delimit this boundary and stop this confusion from now on I will self identify as a Programmer, and cease to try to explain all that this entails.
I am a Programmer, a Lead Programmer, a Systems Programmer, a Device Programmer, a Prototype Programmer, a Senior Programmer, a Team Leading Programmer, a Development Provisioning Programmer, no longer am I an Engineer!
Recently, I was challenged, almost to a fault, to enthuse myself about "modern development"... The quiz master expected me to extol about the virtues of distributed code verses centralised, to effervesce about sprints, about round tabling, about all these other buzz words and cockeyed concepts. I simple asked the quiz master, quite what they meant by "modern development" ...
So surprised were they that they broke through a little bit of their shell and just talked to me, it was a refreshing change, moving away from methods and procedure, we talked about the system itself, avoiding even the language they were working in. It soon became apparent we both worked from the same hymn sheet, just perhaps mine is an older copy... For you see, to me a good development job, doesn't necessarily sit with the work at hand, it sits with how you are allowed to approach that work, if you are just bombarded with red-tape and requirements and micromanagement, then the person micromanaging you may as well just do the job on their own; and I have worked as the poor soul doing the work in just such a situation. And it soon became clear this was the problem with the team this person was controlling.
It appeared they had gone through personality, philosophy and finally technical clashes, to the point that the four developers on the team didn't do much more than talk to one another about computers and draw their cheque each month. The manager was doing all the work, not because she wanted to, not because she was female and they pushed it onto her, but because she had set high standards and promised delivery, but was getting no input from those below her. In a paradoxical, and pretty toxic, situation, she was enabled to hire one more head, but not able to fire the useless four... She had ideas I might be that fifth chair, not a thought I relished as the conversation expanded into the actual problems she faced.
Now I've run into dysfunctional teams, but I know in the end the work either gets done or you all get fired, sometimes both. But to sit and provocatively do nothing in the manner these folks did was tantamount to embezzlement, when I was introduced to them, they just sniffed and looked at me; I was egging myself onto ask them technical questions, but I was whisked into a private meeting room where this sad talk unfolds from. After twenty minutes lamenting the problems I asked "What do you use as a way to leverage the work, what is that pedal you press to put on the pressure or get results?"... She looked at me rather blankly, almost as though I were a magician showing a dog a card trick, as her eyes blinked she started to reel of a bunch of methods... Waterfall this and sprint that, and engagement in progress... yadda yadda yadda.... I put my hand palm up and asked again "not what procedures, what do you physically do?" She didn't do anything, she sat in her office away from them all day and did code. She never got out her chair and challenged them, she never spoke to then, she never pushed them in person... "Why not?" And I was flabbergast to hear an intelligent, clearly able, mid twenty something, graduate and clearly decent programmer trying to manage a team say to me... "Because I'm a woman, they don't listen". She was serious too! Going on to explain that when she started she worked for a chap about my age, and they listened to him, she was one of them, but took a lot of ribbing, she moved into the supervisory role, still in the same room as them without issue, then was appointed to manage this new project when the other chap left... And that's where the problem started. I wasn't sure whether it was green eyed envy at her progressing above them, or just because she had boobs, but whatever the reason I thought it extremely uncomfortable. I saw her wanting, desperately to have a puppet in a more senior position to the team, to invoke her will upon them, and wanted myself (clearly 10 years older than them, and twenty something years her senior in age) just as a sort of enforcer and inquisition. And I thought, her idea was "modern development", lots of buzz words and concepts, she had lost the "just talk to people" vibe. Sadly because she was being intimidated, perhaps even sexually harassed... That, was the sad state, I found modern development in... Sickening and not a place I wanted to involve myself.
TLA... TLA... A kingdom for your TLA... That's three letter acronym by the way... Well, strictly three letters is not the limit, but I'm extremely annoyed this week at hearing all these random seeming strange acronyms being thrown around...
I've heard....
CCNA, ITIL, MSCE, CIT, BACCT and EMECH today alone...
Some I have heard of, some I've not, the last is so generic as to be equivalent to "I read a book, once".
So lets cover my opinion of a few of these, the Cisco certification, it's clearly fine and required to work with their kit, I've always found reading Cisco manuals to be a torture; but as a pfSense convert I no longer have many issues with Cisco kit.
ITIL, I actually myself started to read this course, it was... It wasn't that useful, practicality wise at least, it relied a lot on Microsoft specific software, run to Linux and be set free!
MSCE, this was the classic "well you did graduate a few years ago, but now you need this" qualification.... However, now... Not so much, at all... Especially when you use a compiler other than Microsoft's more often than not!
The rest, well... I'll be honest I'd never heard of them... However, I don't take an effective CV as being one containing a whole bunch of these acronyms. I am not the kind of reader, or reviewer, to just think "shit I don't know that acronym the writer of this CV must be real smart!"... No, I actually look it up, and you know if I google for your qualification and can find only adverts for places offering the course, I think the course is only good for those selling it, it's not actually very good for those of us trying to decipher your ability....
Lets draw a line under this discussion and just focus on something else...
I just talked about your ability, if you want to quantify your ability go right a head, but I'll personally take your worth, how much do you value the work, how do you communicate your wish and will to succeed?... That's more important than any paid to read cookie cutter course in my opinion.
Let me preface this post with, I AM NOT A DOCTOR, but I would love to hear from one about my thoughts...
I've just got through reading this article, it's very brief, on the BBC... Which talks about the study of genetically identical mice being tested for Parkinsons, and that gut microbes played a huge part in making one set begin with the disease, indeed being one of the root causes above and beyond the genetic pre-disposition to developing the disease.
This is a huge break through, however, the article talks about this being "discovered for the first time a biological link between the gut microbiome and Parkinson's disease". Which may very well be true, but it goes onto talk about the microbes in question were "break[ing] down fibre into short-chain fatty acids"...
So, this is not the first time such a link has been biologically established, we've already seen this in studies of adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), many people know this story from the Hollywood movie "Lorenzo's Oil", the story of the struggle of Augusto and Michaela Odone to find a cure, or therapy for ALD for their son Lorenzo.
Augusto undertook a mammoth research task himself to prove that using said "oil" worked to block the break down of Myelin (around nerve cells) in the body.
Surely therefore that this new research is related, the biology of the body is holistic after all, no system within is truly unconnected from the rest. So, is there not a cross over, or a commonality between the research of the Myelin Project and their proven research that restricting the intake of long-chain fatty acids (perhaps so as bacteria have nothing to work on), flooding the system with non-harmful short-chain fatty acids, and the fact that the bacterial directly now proven to lead to the onset of Parkinsons are creating short-chain fatty acids as well?!?!
One could leap to a conclusion, or a link, and I hope I'm not giving the impression of that, but I find it so curious that there's no mentioned cross over here, or no seemingly holistic look at the action of bacteria or other digestive processes breaking (very-long chain fatty acids) down and that affecting changes in the brain & nervous system. There might be such research that I'm simply not privy to...
As I said, get in touch if you know... I am literally all ears!
A fair while ago, I posted about my Virtual CPU code, that code (still not complete) just does addition (and my association subtraction), the point was to lead into code which emulated actual logic gates and indeed I write (somewhere in these pages) a half-adder followed by a full-adder emulation logic in C++ code.
The purpose of this was actually related to my giving a talk to some school children, it was ever intended for these pages, the kids could not wrap their heads around not being able to "just multiply".
They had studied computer memory, and wrote documents in word bigger than the actual memory foot-print of the machines they were talking about.
The teacher, a friend of mine, wanted to demonstrate this to them.... I therefore hoved into view with my 12Kbyte Commodore 16... And challenged the kids to write a program for it... They then had the massive struggle... One bright young chap found a C16 emulator online, and he wrote out a long program in Commodore Basic, which amounted to little more than a text-editor...
It was very impressive work from the young chap, and I've kept his number for when he graduates (in 2021), unfortunately it worked fine on the emulator, as you could assign more memory to the machine... After typing the program into the actual machine... It ran out of memory! The edit buffer was only 214 bytes...
He had only tested with "10 print 'hello' 20 goto 10", but typing any lengthier program in and it essentially started to overwrite the previous lines of code.
You might call this an oversight, but it was semi-intentional as after all the project was about memory.
So having learned how expensive and precious memory was, and is, in this world of near unlimited storage the kids moved onto assembly, learning about how the lowest level of a machine worked.
This is where my work came into help, because they could not wrap their heads around "not multiplying". In some chips a multiplication call might be many thousands of gates ("to multiply was 200,000 gates, over half the chip" - 3Dfx Oral History Panel - See video below).
Hence I wrote the code of a CPU only to do addition, to multiple one had to write assembly which did a loop of additions! I left the kids to write the assembly for division, which is why you never see it here in my code.
It worked, but I find so many commentators have missed this piece of computing history, have missed that machines used to NOT come with every function, you had to emulate some functions in software with the bare-set of commands present.
Some have confused this with the idea of RISC, this isn't what RISC is about, but I distinctly remember being taught about the RISC based machines at school (Acorn machines) and that RISC meant there were "less instructions". Sofie Wilson herself tells us that this isn't the point of RISC...
Having just spoken to my friend about the possibility of presenting these ideas again to a class of kids, I'm wondering whether I need to clean up all my code here, to actually make-sense of all these disparate and separate sources and write one paper on the topic; histories of this which are readable by kids seem to be sadly lacking, or they start from the point of view of a child of my time, born in the late 1970's whom remembers a time when you have limits in computing.
Kids today see no such limits, and find it hard to relate to them, my own niece and nephews, whom are just turning 15, find it hard to fathom such limits, even when they can sit down with me in front of a 12K machine, or a 512K machine, they can't relate, these pieces of history, these things which previously one had to work around are alien to them.
They don't need to work around them, and this leaves me meeting modern graduates whom lack some of the lowest level debugging and problem solving skills.
Indeed, I see these great efforts to publish frameworks to make modern developers test and think about software, because new developers have never had to get things right the first time...
I did, I'm one of the seeming few, who had to get it right and first time. This is not bragging, it's actually quite sad, as how do you prove your code is good? Pointing to a track record counts for very little, especially when the person you are trying to persuade has no interest in you, just your skills.
My most recent anathema, Test Driven Development, seems to be the biggest carbuncle in this form of "modern development"... Write me some code... They might ask, and you can write the code, and show it's correct, or you can write the tests which test the range, the type, the call, the library... Then write the code?... One is quick, efficient, but requires faith in the developer... One is slower, aims to forge faith of the code out of the result... Both end up with the same result, but one requires a leap of faith and trust.
Unfortunately, bugs in code, over the history of development have destroyed that faith in the developer. There are a precious few developers whom are trusted to act on their own initiative any longer. I know I work in a part of my employers company where I am trusted to act on my own initiative; with temperance that I have delivered very many years of good working products.
But I'm seeing, and hearing, of so many other parts of companies around us which do not trust their developers, and I would argue, if these developers had had to struggle with some of the historical problems my own generation of developers had struggled with, then they would be trusted more, and be freer to act, rather than being confined and held-back by needing to check, recheck and double check their code.
Trust in one another, a peer review, and where necessary a sentence of text on the purpose of some function or other, should really define good development, the code itself can tell you it's purpose, not the tests, certainly not by just running the code employing observation.
I therefore propose I get off my pontificating bum, clean up all my "virtual CPU" stuff, document some of these issues, and we as part of the development community try to get new developers to challenge themselves against Old Computers... ComputerPhile already demonstrate this with their Crash Bug examples with the Atari ST...
Whilst investigating a problem with the Socket 775 to 771 Xeon hack machine I found it would no longer boot, it then would no longer post, and finally would no longer even accept power (indicated on the 3v rail LED)... This was a disaster, I've been sorting out the network at home for the last few weekends, and yesterday morning was meant to be a delve in & fix session (at 830am on a Sunday, this is a feat).
Unfortunately it immediately escalated, the motherboard showed distinct signs of corrosion, which is really strange as it's been in a dry airy room, there looked like (and tasted) like salt condensed on the board... I do wonder if this board had had a life near the coast in former days (it was second hand), and the salt just slowly precipitated out of the fibre glass?
Whatever the reason, there was salt all over the board, I cleaned it all with isopropyl alcohol to no avail, it would not post.
So I stripped it out and went to my junk pile, two other motherboards were already dead, the third... Well I know it works, after a fashion, it's an EVGA nForce 680i SLI board, my previous main workstation board actually... But I retired it for my Core i7, and it had been off with a friend of mine, it has at least one faulty RAM slot too...
Inserting my test Celeron D it came on, and I could run a memory test until it overheated and thermal shutdown occurred... So, I pulled out the Xeon from the hack board and got it into the nForce... Nothing... Dead... But, a BIOS patch later (with a floppy disk!) and everything was working...
So the Xeon went into the EVGA nForce 680i no problem! 4GB of RAM installed in the two working slots, and with new thermal paste I left it soak testing... Everything seems fine...
And this is equivalent (if not better) than the previous board, because I know its history, it's got six SATA headers dual gigabyte LAN... It's actually the perfect little server board, except for the lack of the working memory slots.
A new one of these boards is still like £50, so that was out of the question, I did order a new one from ebay a Gigabyte branded on, which can take up to 16Gb of RAM but only has a single LAN connection, it will have to do.
Until then though, the server is getting re-installed on the EVGA nForce 680i, and I'm going to keep my eyes on ebay for another of these boards to replace the already dead set from my junk pile.
On the topic of drives, I wanted to set up a series of physical mirrors with ZFS, however, I don't have matching drives, so I'm wondering what's the best order to set up the disks...
