Life of a Programmer

Zed Shaw's "Rails is a Ghetto" puts together his rants toward Ruby on Rails and his frustration with other programmers -- which is similar to what I've experienced in my career: too many managers and programmers who have little or no clue of what they are working on.

Unfortunately, most companies do get by with such poor understanding of their own product(s). Sad but true: there are many project failures documented at places like the Risks digest while many others that should have failed but have been released as products. I won't name names like Zed but I've seen my share, too.

How can this be improved? Good question and I certainly don't have any good answers today. Sigh.

Copyright 2008, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Crackberry on Ice

Blackberry confesses software bug for email blackout:

Ruling out those causes, the company has "determined that the incident was
triggered by the introduction of a new, noncritical system routine that was
designed to provide better optimization of the system's cache." In computing
terms, a cache is a temporary storage area for that allows data to be served up
quickly.

Those "easy fix" can quickly turn into a meltdown. Never underestimate the power of a software change to completely bring down a system. I remember my (former) boss making a quick, simple patch for our manufacturing folks (he used to maintain the code but was away from it for some time when he did the fix) but didn't thoroughly test it and guess what? It broke the system so bad, there had to be another fix made while holding up a production in the meanwhile. My coworkers and I had a good chuckle over that one...

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.