Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Tidbit: Lines of Code

315116528_480edcad4d.jpg

According to a claim in the Non Relational Data Stores Panel, the query parser in MySQL alone spans 100'000 lines of code in C and the whole Cassandra Database is 30'000 lines of Java.

I don't know what to deduce from that, but it is certainly interesting.

Some directions of thought:

  • Java is a more powerful language than C
  • MySQL is much more sophisticated than Cassandra
  • NoSQL databases are much less complex than relational databases
  • ...


Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Pimping my MacBook

I am attempting probably one of the most stupid things: pimping a MacBook ...

The patient is ready. Let's get started.
The patient is ready. Let's get started.

Patient is opened. Pulse is steady.
Patient is opened. Pulse is steady.

The offending organ has been removed.
The offending organ has been removed.

The replacement organs fit well ...
The replacement organs fit well ...

Surgery finished, patient hopefully ready to wake up ...
Surgery finished, patient hopefully ready to wake up ...

... however the doctor is not completely pleased with the result. Another operation is due next week...

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Enterprise IT: immature and simple?

Once you've admitted to yourself that you're a bad programmer, you can stop all the silly posturing and pretending that you're great, and you can look around and find the best possible tools to help you look smarter than you are.

People pile layers on top of layers, abstractions on top of abstractions, complications on top of complications, crap on top of patches, and patches on top of crap until everything collapses onto itself and the singularity appears.

Recently I was confronted with the following problem:
Screen shot 2011 09 22 at 2 26 51 PM
  • Which x maximizes u?

I remember that I had solved similar problems in analysis lectures about a decade ago, but I had no clue how to approach the task today.
I also have the impression that it would take weeks if not month for me to get back into the subject. Ok, I can read the wikipedia article about the quartic functions but I don't think I will get it without investing some major timespan. I am even doubtful if I could suck the knowledge I need from the internet, or if I finally would have to go to the bookstore and buy an analysis book ...
Business card law student
This made me think about my everyday work as a "coder for hire"/consultant working in the trenches of enterprise IT projects.
I am confronted with problems I have never dealt with almost on a daily basis. However this makes me not nervous at all ...
For instance in a recent project it turned out that I had to write reports with SSRS and integrate them in some custom SharePoint controls. I have never done that before. I never came near to SSRS before and I delibarately had kept a long distance between me an SharePoint. Still I was not afraid of those tasks. I was quite confident that I could solve the tasks within the expectations of the customer (however I am sure there are many developers that would have provided better value for the customer). When I look at the quartic function above I am much less confident and would be get quite nervous if I had to solve that task ...
I started wondering about that fact and came up with some theories:
  • I am just a natural talent in everything related to enterprise IT ... nah, I don't think so :-)
  • Enterprise IT is a simple domain. We don't really deal with substantially complex or challenging problems, at least not in the technical realization. We mostly deal with trying to understand technology that has been created by other people. Trying to find out what the assumptions and intentions of those other people were and how to match that as good as possible to our context. If we are good, we try not to apply the technologies in a wrong way. (note that I differenciate enterprise IT from other areas in IT like i.e. scaling a cloud infrastructure like facebook or developing new algorithms for video compression, there I think we still have real innovation and technical challenges).
  • In the IT industry, especially in enterprise technologies, knowledge is extremely easy to come by. Probably the only real skill you need, is to effectively search the internet. Then you can almost solve any problem. Just ask Goolge and spend some time on Stackoverflow ... you don't need a CS degree for that. Of course that was deliberately provocative: The small challenge remaining is how you combine and apply the knowledge you sucked from the internet. And of course the ability to know when not to apply a technology and look for another solution.
  • The IT industry is very immature, at least in the enterprise environments I usually find myself. For each project I get hired, I usually have to go through an interview process. These interview processes have quite different flavors of sophistication but the people conducting the interviews think they check that I am suitable for the job. They usually get the requirements for the job through some obscure windings in the organization, but in most cases it has nothing to do with what I end up doing once I really get in touch with the project. It seems the enterprise IT industry has a hard time defining its specialists. The result is that a bunch of generalists like me are stumbling along doing a mediocre job ...
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