Poetry and Software

Gabriel’s enthusiasm for the notion of programming as creative writing is not purely abstract; in the 1990s, he took three years off from his career to get an MFA in creative writing and to write a poem a day. He discovered that we ask more work of students who want to become writers and poets than those who aim to become software developers: They must study with mentors, they must present their work for regular criticism by peers in workshops, and they’re expected to labor over multiple revisions of the same work. “i think we need to be ashamed of this,” Gabriel says. “What we put forward as computer education is a farce.”

Got this paragraph from Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code. Richard Gabriel(who made the observation above) is a  Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and advocates Master of Fine Arts in Software.

The Switch

The only constant thing is change. There is only one thing constant in the CRS. In its history it has changed language, RDBMS, management and programmers. But there is only one part of it never changed. There were attempts to replace it but nobody succeeded(buhay pa din ang sumpa ni “EP”).

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Rommel has blogged about the recent developments in UP’s registration system. While reading it I remember the phase when we were migrating from ASP(VBScript)/MS SQL Server to J2EE/PostgreSQL. It was one of the most tumultuous times in my life. I was thinking back then if we could actually pull it off. All of us were new to the platform and we need to maintain the old system in parallel plus I constantly need to go to meetings with the administration(which I find really draining).

While I do not like what the new UPCC administration did(switching platforms with flimsy reasons), I just hope them the best. It will be the students and UP’s pride who will suffer(so I have no choice but to wish them the best). I also hope that in the case something fails they should be man enough to take responsibility for their actions.

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One of the things that I don’t like about UP’s administration back then is their insistence on real-time enlistment. While it makes for a good show the ROI is not that good. In a financially constrained organization I think it is better to concentrate on computerizing the OUR’s system.

Bad trip talaga yung amo ko nitong nakaraang mga araw. Di ko mawari kung bakit nya ako pinag-iinitan. Dalawang beses nya akong pinuna dahil gala daw ako ng gala sa opisina. Tinanong din nya kung bakit ako mukhang laging masaya at tawa ng tawa gayong may problema sa project. Problema na nga problemahin ko pa ba. Higit sa lahat kakaiba ang ngiti nya kaninang umaga nang inabutan nya akong nagkakape at kumakain ng Yan Yan. Para bang sinasabi nya na dapat akong nagtatrabaho at hindi nagme-merienda.

Tingin ko dahil hindi nya kasi ako nakikitang “under pressure”. Pasensya sya. Trabaho lang yan. Walang dahilan para kunsumihin ang sarili ko. Basta ginawa ko ang dapat kong gawin sapat na yun. Hindi bale sana kung para sa “world peace” o para sa Inang bayan ang project namin.

Gundam Theory of Software Engineering and other dark tales from the trenches

There has been a lot of activities lately in the mailing lists that I subscribe to. One of the topics is the availability of senior software engineers in the Philippines. They remarked that the Philippines is becoming a country of junior software engineers. Most senior software engineers are abroad(Singapore and US being the favorite) creating a vacuum in the Philippine job market. The good news is it is raising the salaries of senior software engineers.

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The other topic that was interesting is that today less and less CS skill is being used in programming because majority of the projects today are business applications(web/db). The only fun part is creating tools or learning new frameworks.

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My friend and I were talking about the state of software engineering in the Philippines and we both agreed that instead of creating more web/database software engineers and compete with China and India, we believe that the Philippines should concentrate on niche market(anything that needs decent amount of R&D like security products). This is the Gundam Theory of Software Engineering. Why create hundreds of cannon fodders when you can create a Gundam that can wipe them all?

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My friend told me one coding horror that he experienced:

The code:

bean.setProperty(a);

bean.setProperty(b);

bean.setProperty(c);

The question: Why am I only seeing the value of c when I call the getter method of the property?

Another coding horror story from one of my friends:

The code:

for(int i = 0; i <= list.size();i++) {

}

The question: Why is there a NullPointerException?

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The project is in a bit of a pinch and the manager asked who will be responsible for the quality of the code and of the application. One of our team lead said, “we(he and the other team lead) will be responsible”. For taking responsibility they got my respect.

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Observation:

If during your first day at work and the manager gave you a wonderful presentation of their software development process(powerpoint with very nice graphics and very detailed diagram) it is usually a bad sign.