Lessons from 30 years as a software engineer

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Lessons from 30 years as a software engineer

• Richard Atkins

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Definition Crufty

• origin unknown poss. from crusty' or cruddy'
  1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The
  canonical example is "This is standard old crufty
  DEC software". In fact, one fanciful theory of
  the origin of crufty' holds that was originally
  a mutation of crusty' applied to DEC software so
  old that the s' characters were tall and skinny,
  looking more like f' characters. 2. Unpleasant,
  especially to the touch, often with encrusted
  junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut
  butter and catsup. 3. Generally unpleasant. 4.
  (sometimes spelled cruftie') /n./ A small crufty
  object (see frob) often one that doesn't fit
  well into the scheme of things. "A LISP property
  list is a good place to store crufties (or,
  collectively, random cruft)."
• This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and
  no one is sure of its etymology, but it is
  suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard
  University which is part of the old physics
  building it's said to have been the physics
  department's radar lab during WWII. To this day
  (early 1993) the windows appear to be full of
  random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people
  may well have coined the term as a knock on the
  competition.

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1 Get a job

• You need a job to get a job
• Work for free
• You are competing against the Chinese.
• Learn Chinese
• LEARN ENGLISH. The Little Brown Book
• Be creative, think, use initiative, volunteer for
  everything, get along with everybody

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Definition Heisenbug

• from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in
  quantum physics A bug that disappears or alters
  its behavior when one attempts to probe or
  isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly
  fanciful the use of a debugger sometimes alters
  a program's operating environment significantly
  enough that buggy code, such as that which relies
  on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves
  quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug see also
  mandelbug, schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten
  heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto
  variables, fandango on core phenomena (esp.
  lossage related to corruption of the malloc
  arena) or errors that smash the stack.

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2 Get along with everybody

• Smile a lot
• Make friends in low places
• Dont gossip
• Employ the Golden rule
• Address problems through channels
• Shut up and listen
• Reserve judgment
• Dont take sides
• Email is for cowards
• Wait 5 years for your promotion

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Definition RTFM

• Unix Acronym for Read The F Manual'. 1.
  Used by gurus to brush off questions they
  consider trivial or annoying. Compare Don't do
  that, then!. 2. Used when reporting a problem to
  indicate that you aren't just asking out of
  randomness. "No, I can't figure out how to
  interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have
  RTFM." Unlike sense 1, this use is considered
  polite. See also FM, RTFAQ, RTFB, RTFS, RTM, all
  of which mutated from RTFM, and compare UTSL.

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3 Iterative development

• 4,6,8 week cycles
• time boxing
• Do not slip schedule
• Feature lists

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Definition XYZZY

• from the ADVENT game The canonical magic
  word'. This comes from ADVENT, in which the idea
  is to explore an underground cave with many rooms
  and to collect the treasures you find there. If
  you type xyzzy' at the appropriate time, you can
  move instantly between two otherwise distant
  points. If, therefore, you encounter some bit of
  magic, you might remark on this quite succinctly
  by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily you can't
  look at someone else's screen if he has protected
  it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the
  system will let you do it anyway." "Xyzzy!"
• Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an
  undocumented no-op command on several OSes in
  Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would
  typically respond "Nothing happens", just as
  ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong
  spot or before a player had performed the action
  that enabled the word. In more recent 32-bit
  versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds "Twice as
  much happens".
• The popular minesweeper' game under Microsoft
  Windows has a cheat mode triggered by the command
  xyzzyltentergtltright-shiftgt' that turns the
  top-left pixel of the screen different colors
  depending on whether or not the cursor is over a
  bomb.

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4 Be agile

• Agile programming
• Extreme, XP
• Software Craftmanship Pete McBreen
• I sing the Body Electric
• Soul of the New Machine
• Mythical Man Month
• Dust or Magic

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Definition flame

• 1. /vi./ To post an email message intended to
  insult and provoke. 2. /vi./ To speak incessantly
  and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting
  subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
  3. /vt./ Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with
  hostility at a particular person or people. 4.
  /n./ An instance of flaming. When a discussion
  degenerates into useless controversy, one might
  tell the participants "Now you're just flaming"
  or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to
  cool down (so to speak).
• The term may have been independently invented at
  several different places. It has been reported
  from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many
  other places) from as far back as 1969.
• It is possible that the hackish sense of flame'
  is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was
  also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time
  he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most
  advanced computing device of the day. In
  Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida", Cressida
  laments her inability to grasp the proof of a
  particular mathematical theorem her uncle
  Pandarus then observes that it's called "the
  fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have
  been intended in context as "that which puts the
  wretches to flight" but was probably just as
  ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of
  wretches" would be today. One suspects that
  Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.

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5 Be good at CM

• Maybe 50 of bugs, schedule, cost is traced to CM
  errors.

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Definition smoke test

• 1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to
  electronic equipment following repair or
  reconfiguration, in which power is applied and
  the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other
  dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See magic
  smoke. 2. By extension, the first run of a piece
  of software after construction or a critical
  change. See and compare reality check.
• There is an interesting semi-parallel to this
  term among typographers and printers When new
  typefaces are being punch-cut by hand, a smoke
  test' (hold the letter in candle smoke, then
  press it onto paper) is used to check out new
  dies.

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Big CM

• Little CM
• Version control
• Access control
• Change Control
• Process enactment
• Build support
• Notification

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Definition plokta

• acronym Press Lots Of Keys To Abort To press
  random keys in an attempt to get some response
  from the system. One might plokta when the abort
  procedure for a program is not known, or when
  trying to figure out if the system is just
  sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used
  while trying to figure out any unknown key
  sequence for a particular operation. Someone
  going into plokta mode' usually places both
  hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down,
  hoping for some useful response.
• A slightly more directed form of plokta can often
  be seen in mail messages or Usenet articles from
  new users -- the text might end with
• XC q quit q C end x exit ZZ D ? help as the
  user vainly tries to find the right exit
  sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at
  the end of the message....

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Summary

• Discover where you came from.
• Get a job
• Inventory your social skills
• Take CM seriously
• Be agile