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

Wed Jan 30 16:15:26 CST 2008

Well, it's not as grim as all that everywhere..

I think unmaintainable code is the result of small IT staff (like one real
hack/guru when the software/prototype was first written) and business needs
pushing forward with production without respecting the need to perfect the
original release.  Business does not recognize software elegance-- they're
all front end.  And further, business is driven by productivity, not
aesthetically written software back ends.

A balance is needed between business objectives and IT requirements.  Maybe
business continuity (disaster recovery, major turnover of staff..) would be
a good angle to approach business leaders to respect IT requirements?

With the common, bad habits of developers who only spend time coding and
none documenting, self-documenting languages like ruby probably help.
Personally, regardless of development environment, I throw everything into a
wiki and let it rot there..  I make it a practice of being completely
unnecessary to a company at any given time ;)

-bronius

On Jan 30, 2008 2:46 PM, PILLING, ANDREW ALEXANDER <AAP006 at shsu.edu> wrote:

>  Get together with friends to form a start-up company that does things
> right from the get go and blow the competition out of the water. Sure people
> may lose jobs when businesses fail but if they find jobs with companies that
> are doing things with a proper engineering perspective in mind then they'll
> probably find a great deal more job satisfaction from their new jobs
> anyways.
>
>
>
> I spend a little time every couple of weeks with some friends of mind
> implementing just such a plan. I feel sorry for the competition once we've
> honed our products and make them available for purchase; all their
> [customer] base will belong to us.
>
>
>
> -Drew
>
>
>
> *From:* shacs-bounces at shsu.edu [mailto:shacs-bounces at shsu.edu] *On Behalf
> Of *Jared Lobberecht
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 30, 2008 1:48 PM
> *To:* shacs at shsu.edu
> *Subject:* [Shacs] Old friends (inventory of former CS students/SHACS
> members)
>
>
>
> 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
>  ------------------------------
>
> *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 <http://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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Shacs mailing list
> Shacs at shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/shacs
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Shacs mailing list
> Shacs at shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/shacs
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51438/*http:/www.yahoo.com/r/hs>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Shacs mailing list
> Shacs at shsu.edu
> http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/shacs
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.shsu.edu/pipermail/shacs/attachments/20080130/69bafee7/attachment.html