There’s been an awful lot of revisiting on this blog.
I don’t usually view the pompous, arrogant comments that your typical Proggit elitist writes, but a link about pet projects was nothing but comments, so I had no choice.
The question posed is: “Pet-Projects: Do you ever finish them?” I now don’t feel so guilty anymore for several false starts and eventual abandonment of my pre-employment side project.
From the EIP Chipotle Operations Center, somewhere in America’s Finest City, it is your humble host. You received fair warning that Nowhere To Run was likely finished for 2008, and this is likely true. Let me tell you how my Saturday went.
Depart Philadelphia International at 12 PM ET. Arrive Bush International in Houston at 3 PM CT. Scheduled departure for San Diego: 6 PM CT. Actual departure time: 8:30 PM. Arrive in San Diego 11 PM PT.
So yeah, my Saturday was ruined, and so was my Monday, due to a sore throat and fever, no doubt acquired while in my four-hour layover in Houston. Or maybe it was because I went from blue state to red state to blue state in the same day.
There comes a time in every technical blog when the author must write about the future of the industry. Consider this to be the obligatory post. Where is this going?
Components
The first of the two waves of the future was offered by my former professor, Larry Bernstein:
| We are moving from compile-link-run to find-build-verify |
Survey says: partially.
The soul of productivity in this industry, and probably any other, is abstraction. In normal-person’s terms, less work. I have seen time and time again the exponential gains in productivity that resulted from the first Assembly language, the first C compiler, and the introduction of garbage-collected languages.
I will say that find-build-verify is part of the future of this line of work when it comes to accidental complexity.
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.
That is from, of course, Fred Brooks. There is no silver bullet. I’m old school. I don’t think essential complexity can be tackled by abstracting it away into a blurry mess of ambiguous boxes and arrows.
Code Agitator, elected to be the villain, certified a menace
