L-P Huberdeau

Technology move fast. Every week there are new frameworks and libraries. In the past years, it seems like data stores have been appearing at an even faster rate. Each of them claims to be a revolution. Those that have been around for a while know that revolutions don’t happen that often. Those claims set expectations very high.

Working on larger projects come with the annoyances of project management. Every stakeholder sends in someone to check on the project status and make sure it is on track. It’s not really possible to blame them to keep an eye on where their money is going, but it can be very counter productive. Software projects are not like every other project. It’s not a production line and it is very hard to measure. Complexity is hidden, and so can progress be. A well run project will tackle the bigger risks first to avoid uncertainty near the end.

Developing new features in the open source world is a long process. Not because coding takes time, but because the maturation cycle is much longer. In a normal business development cycle, the specifications are usually quite clear and they will be validated before a release by QA. In most cases I encounter, the initial need is driven by a specific case, but due to the open nature, the implementation must eventually cover broader cases, driven by feature requests or stories from other users.

Originally written in 2009, but never published. Conclusion was reworked.

I spent the last week in Boston to tackle the refactoring of Tiki trackers with other developers. The code was getting old and had evolved in ways no one would recommend. The original author himself had qualified them as a hack. Yet, hundreds of people use them extensively and the interface had been polished over the years. The main issue is that the cruft to value ratio was reaching a tipping point. The collapse had been predicted for a long time but did not happen. Modifications only took longer to perform, leaving more cruft to remove each time.

There are multiple definitions to what software architecture is, notwithstanding that in some areas, the term cannot legally be used. Definitions vary from high level code design to organizational issues. James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bjørnvig came up with a good summary in Lean Architecture.

I have not written much C++ in my life. Most of it goes back to college and university, and that short period of time I was at Autodesk. However, I always considered the STL to be very influential. A few years back, I read Bjarne Stroustrup’s book and something hit me. For those not familiar with the STL, it’s a very template-intensive library that does not use much of the traditional interfaces you typically see in object oriented libraries. Instead, everything is based on duck typing.

Some problems are just too obvious. Blatantly unacceptable. Yet, we live with them because we grow accustomed to them. Dozens of people work on a project and solve small issues in the code by patching things up. That’s just the way it’s done. We all do it not thinking there is an other way. The code piles up, duplication creeps and inconsistency spreads. It happens so gradually that no one notices. The only solution to it is gaining perspective. Recently, I got away from a project I had been with for years. The official time away was really only 3 months.

In the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to get my hands in an SOA system involving multiple components. I had prior experience, but not with that many evolving services at the same time. When I initially read the architecture’s documentation, I had serious doubts any of it was going to work. There were way too many components and each of them had to do a whole lot of work to get the simplest task accomplished. My role was to sit from the outside and call those services, so I did not really have to worry about the internals.

For some reason I never quite understood, I always tend to be extremely busy in the summer when I would much rather enjoy the fresh air and take it slow, and be less busy during the winter when heading out is less attractive. This summer was no exception. After the traveling, I started a new mandate with a new client, and that brought my busyness to a whole new level.