[Shacs] Old friends (inventory of former CS students/SHACS members)

[Jared Lobberecht]

Now that we know the world of software is held
together with bailing wire, and we are not allowed to fix it, what should
we do? 

Jared

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From: Chris Gonzales <raptor_cg at yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 12:11 PM
To: Blake Householder <blake8086 at gmail.com>, shacs at shsu.edu
Subject: Re: [Shacs] Old friends (inventory of former CS students/SHACS members) 

Preach it brother.  I'm often surprised any code works in production, I did not graduate from SHSU, but I did attend for 3 years (1998-2001). I've work for Northrop Grumman (contracted to the USPS) in Tennessee and now work for Group 1 (owned by Pitney Bowes) in Maryland.      Another great one is when the source for an executable for a vital build process no longer exist and no one knows how it works.      Spaghetti code - especially for highly portable code, our code has to work on multiple UNIX plats, Windows plats, MVS, IMS, VSE, 32 bit/64 bit, big Endian/little Endian, ASCII/EBCDIC....so there are a quadrillion #if's making for very madding code.     Or my personal favorite, unique build process for different systems causing there to be multiple copies of the same code with slightly different names (to meet naming conventions dreamed up by the build team and/or system). A complete nightmare.         But that is why they pay us the big bucks baby!!!     Chris

Blake Householder <blake8086 at gmail.com> wrote:  I graduated Sam in May 2006, worked for a NASA subcontractor named Tietronix from June 06 - July 07.  I moved to Austin and got a job with a small startup named Minggl.com.  I did not enjoy my time at Tietronix very much, and I'm loving Minggl.  I currently develop with Groovy (for Grails), JavaScript, Lua, MySQL, and some Python.

You know how Dr. Burris (or whoever you take software engineering with) tells you to expect production code to not have the same... quality as the
 code you deal with in school?  I cannot possibly overstate how incredibly bad some production code really is.

You will have chains of includes that include other include files with selective includes that then pull a list of includes from a database and include those.

You will have a database table named SYSTEM_VARS and no one knows what it does anymore.

You will have configuration files named config.xml, config_real.xml, config_new.xml, config_bak.xml, config_use_this_one.xml, config_production.xml.

You will not even have source control.

Your bug tracker is a shared Excel spreadsheet that one guy always keep open so no one can edit it.

One project I worked on had a 37 step install process for the project, and the deploy process was "the lead developer has to spend his weekend deploying the project".

You're gonna love it.

  On Jan 30, 2008 11:01 AM, Jonathan Hill <jonathan.f.hill at gmail.com> wrote:
  Do we have some facility for tracking down former students of the CS department.
There was a guy Ali (the last name escapes me at the moment) that I was in classes with
and did some projects with while I was at Sam that I'd like to talk to again. I was there between
2001-2005 just for a frame of reference.

Anyhow, I think it'd be interesting to take an inventory of former CS students/SHACS members -- work environment, location, etc.

As for me, I landed as a lisp developer (yeah, really) at a small startup in Bethesda, Md. The name of the company is Preventive Medicine
and the product that we're developing is an interactive, personalized health and wellness system intended to be deployed by large health
insurance providers. As I mentioned,
 I develop in lisp on macs using emacs as my preferred text editor. (If anyone reading this has yet to
take the language translators class, I highly recommend you try lisp as the environment as it provides really nice semantic features and 
the best manipulation of symbols that I've seen from any language.) I feel really lucky to be where I am and I look forward to hearing about
everyone else.

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