Why Monoculture

At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I told my family that since I didn’t use Windows in a professional capacity and I didn’t use it personally, there was no way I was going to go to the effort of becoming and staying smart about Windows, and if they wanted me to do tech support, well, that was just too bad. I may even have been that much of a jerk in saying it, too. To my surprise, that was pretty well received. As a result, we mostly have Macintosh computers in the house.

Next Project

When we bought our house in the woods, it came with outbuildings. There’s the Rat Shack, which looked like maybe someone was going to build a granny unit and then gave up and just parked a camping trailer there instead. And then there’s the Toxic Waste Shed, which looks like a shipping container made of plywood and is full of shelves stocked with rusty electronics (!) and half empty cans of paint, tar, and solvents. But our favorite is the Pantry, an 8×8 room with a concrete floor, stud and drywall walls, and electrical wiring but the wires terminate about a foot outside the building. Maybe it was built to house the water pressure pump, which ultimately got located elsewhere, or maybe it was gonna be a weed drying room, or…we dunno. We thought of making it a chapel, but instead we insulated the heck out of it and installed baker’s racks and use it to store bulk and canned goods.

Sounds Like a Job for Perl

In which I write a continuous build system for bagpipe music using Perl and a Makefile.

The problem: the band has sheet music that everyone is supposed to memorize, the membership is geographically dispersed and not everyone can make it to every practice, and during practices and workshops and after competitions the music can get edited to reflect feedback and (one hopes) improve the performance. How do we distribute the music to everyone?

Programming for the Ages

So this feels like the most Silicon Valley thing I’ve said in a few years, but the thing I’m working on right now is basically the same parts and programming language I was working on as a hobby back in 1997. Yes, the machine is in someone else’s data center, yes, the services it’s interacting with are running in still other data centers; even so, I am writing Perl CGI scripts and cron jobs to respond to automated messages and run intermittent build and release processes. What a blast from the past.

Greatness Abides

Okay, so when I looked at Google news this morning, this story was in the “For you…based on your interests” section: Gremlin Brings Chaos Monkey Testing to Spinnaker CD Platform. Now, I’m a respecter of Dev Ops, but I’m not really a practitioner of Dev Ops. So I think this is cool, but the coolest thing about it is that my amazing wife invented Chaos Monkey. And now Dev Ops people all over the place are using it and excited about it and it’s really quite valuable. This, right here, is another reason that tech needs women.

It Could Be Better

A long time ago, my housemate (who is one of the only people who reads this – Hi, Kurt!) had this great explanation for why his homework wouldn’t compile: “It was perfect, so I fixed it.” Man, that so describes every programmer I’ve ever worked with. (Incidentally and orthogonal to the point of this post, I suspect that this attribute of programmers coupled with the increase in the global number of active programmers accounts for so much of the frustration I experience with software nowadays.)

Things I Wish

I wish that Google provided an offline/dev version of Firebase so that I could work on my mobile app when I’m not actually online. Sort of like they offer a dev version of Datastore for App Engine development.

I wish that Google made their Flutter documentation available as a downloadable package so that I could refer to it while I’m not actually online.

I wish that I could test the capability of Flutter+Firebase to deal gracefully with network unavailability.

I wish that software development didn’t suck.

In 1984, I was able to write a FORTRAN IV program to do a bunch of math and then output bitmapped Mandelbrot graphs to a dot matrix printer because the language was stable, the hardware was stable, and the manuals were printed out and stuck in binders on the shelf over the computer desk. Today, I can write programs anywhere but the languages aren’t stable and the hardware isn’t stable and the manuals are online. If I write code in a stable language for stable hardware, nobody I know will be able to run it.

Progress.