snoofle

After surviving 35 years, dozens of languages, hundreds of projects, thousands of meetings and millions of LOC, I now teach the basics to the computer-phobic

Nov 2017

The For While Loop

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Alex R. was the architect of a brand spanking new system that was to read inputs from numerous other internal systems, crunch a whole bunch of numbers, record everything in a database and spew forth a massive report file. He spent months designing the major details of the system, and more months designing the various sub-components. From all this came a variety of business-level data structures which spawned POJOs and the underlying DB tables to store assorted inputs, flags and outputs. He did a fairly thorough job of documenting all the interfaces, and provided detailed specifications for all of the next-level methods that were left as TBDs in the design.

Java Programming Cover

The project manager then assigned units of work to numerous offshored junior developers who managed to get virtually everything wrong. If they couldn't understand what a spec required, they changed the spec to reflect what they actually wrote. This caused Alex to start versioning the requirements document in order to catch the changes by the junior developers so that they could be rolled back.


Theory Versus Reality

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I went to college at the State University of New York at Albany, where back then, most of the Computer Science curriculum courses were entitled Theory of xxx. The programming assignments were the usual small-scope demonstrations of some feature of programming, typically something an experienced developer would code in 15-20 LOC.

My Masters project was to modify the TeX typesetting system (by Knuth) to leverage the more advanced features of a new typesetting system. It took me about two months to reverse engineer it only to find that the entire required modification amounted to a single character change.

Albert Einstein c1890s