a Bahá'í, software engineer, and nature lover in Austin, Texas, USA
Aside from being a fascinating inside-look at some of the challenges faced by the mainframe programmers of the sixties, The Mythical Man-Month presents many lessons-learned that are no less applicable today. This is the second article in a series exploring some of these lessons, in particular: conceptual integrity.
We ran out of regular coffee, hence drinking instant this morning (Pampa brand from Mexico). The smell of this brand takes me back to Haifa, where I went on Pilgrimage a year ago. The B&B we stayed in had an electric kettle and kept us well-stocked with packages of instant coffee. On mornings where we had to get moving before the cafe downstairs opened, that was my wake-up.
When last I worked with C++, it was while working on my master’s thesis ten years ago, using a basic text editor in a Red Hat Linux 5.0 installation. A new task in front of me: replace a Reporting Services report, which was exporting to CSV, with a new solution that will allow me to create multiple files, with max 150,000 records each. The first challenge is speed: with that many records, only bulk copy will be reasonable. The second is splitting the file. I thought about calling BCP from a C# process, because unfortunately managed code only offers bulk loading into a SQL Server database, not from database to file. But C++ is another story, thanks to the Bulk Copy Driver Extensions made available by Microsoft. So, time for a C# developer to brush up on C++, and learn it the Visual Studio way!
Dr. Brooks is my new… well, I can’t think of an appropriate noun. Certainly not a deity. One book does not make him a favorite tech author. Static text cannot make him a mentor. Maybe tech hero?
This is a strange sort of spring we’re having. And a small part of me died a little death watching the new Lorax trailer this morning.
This year’s drought has brought the stark reality of water availability front-and-center in Texas. The state has faced droughts before — but by all accounts, this is one of the most severe, and the population continues to expand rapidly. Water is not entirely taken for granted in this state, especially in central and west Texas, but this year’s experience seems to have struck home for people in a profound way. Even as we have begun to get some sporadic rain, the talk of stage 4 water rationing continues. And yet there are also stories of people flouting the rules, watering away in their yards. I wish I could accompany those folks on a visit out to John Bunker Sands Wetlands Center.
Currently I’m working on updating the main blog at safnet.com with a refreshed look and feel (the design was last changed “way back” in 2008), then I’ll move on to this technical blog. In the meantime, this garish built-in template will serve to remind me that work needs to be done.
New tech-blog entries have been rare primarily because I have been spending much of my technical-writing time on internal documentation at work: trying to build-up a thorough set of documentation in a SharePoint Wiki. Most of that content is proprietary, and would not be useful outside the company anyway. But I do hope to start posting comments here again soon, starting with a few entries after recently reading the classic The Mythical Man-Month.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow is what happens when a classic geek extrapolates the cyberpunk future of a reputation-based economy combined with the extrusion of an open source ethos into the management of everyday affairs, tosses in immortality and lean project management, and sets it all in the context of the semi-religious experience of Disney World.
The organic-bandwagon (and “green” in general) can often seem like a holier-than-thou verbal assault to the average consumer who does not take production processes into account when making purchasing decisions. Moralizing and preaching from the crunchy-granola crowd is not appreciated. And yet there is a point to it all, and we granola eaters need to be armed not merely with facts but also empathy and moderation. That said, often times we are armed merely with anecdote and conjecture, not even fact. Two recent pieces of research present compelling additional facts behind American society’s — and by extension, increasingly the world’s — over-reliance on technology without consideration of the long term effects:
This afternoon I heard an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh, from the public radio Humankind program, that is helping me frame a response I’ve been thinking about over the last few days. On Facebook, I posted: “Over-preparation only guarantees that you don’t have time to live in the moment. That you don’t have time to make a better world today, or to appreciate God’s handiwork just beyond your nose and all around. From a comment to a friend after I asked for advice on pursuing an MBA. Thoughts?”