Ted Dziuba: Why Engineers Hop Jobs

May 022010

Came across this while browsing Google Reader…

via Ted Dziuba: Why Engineers Hop Jobs

People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.

Ummm OK?

Apr 072010

Okay, I get the idea but come on… Talk about verbose errors. I guess it’s better than “Argument out of range.”

Custom tool warning: There was a validation error on a schema generated during export: Validation Error: Wildcard ‘##any’ allows element ‘Account’, and causes the content model to become ambiguous. A content model must be formed such that during validation of an element information item sequence, the particle contained directly, indirectly or implicitly therein with which to attempt to validate each item in the sequence in turn can be uniquely determined without examining the content or attributes of that item, and without any information about the items in the remainder of the sequence.

Unit tests are no substitute for manual tests by end users

Feb 152010

I like unit testing. I’m not a hard liner so I don’t take it too seriously. I don’t necessarily fully subscribe to the test-first approach in all cases and I think aiming for 100% code coverage is rarely practical. But I do like unit tests. They give my a certain peace of mind and set a minimum standard for functionality.

But I just ran into a bug in my code that I didn’t catch in my unit tests but the end user caught pretty early on. Typing a decimal value into a field that was bound to an Int64 property on the viewmodel didn’t produce any error but simply reverted the field to zero. As the developer, it never occurred to me that someone would want to put a non-integer value in the field. I even guarded against negative integers.

Anyhow, the fix for now is “don’t type fractional minutes in the minutes field.” The bug is not particularly disruptive, just confusing. The nature of the field is such that a fractional minute is meaningless, but the end user is entering numbers directly off a bill which happens to have way more precision than is needed. It’s super low priority so I’ll queue it up for when other bugs need to be fixed. But I thought it was a great example of how developers can know the code inside and out, yet the end user will always find a bug you never even considered.

How would you like to lose your job to a 9 year old?

Jan 232010

9-Year-Old is World's Youngest Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer This is pretty impressive. When I was 9 I was still trying to figure out how I could get Guns N’ Roses to come to my birthday party. Of course the cynics will probably claim it is a reflection of the MCSE certification, but how can you not be impressed?

9-Year-Old is World’s Youngest Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer

via Doug Finke

AT&T fixes bug that logged users into random Facebook accounts

Jan 192010

Note sure how Facebook gets off the hook on this one. This is entirely a *Facebook* problem, not AT&T. If Facebook wasn’t developed by morons with no regard for privacy and security, this bug wouldn’t be possible.

AT&T fixes bug that logged users into random Facebook accounts

Okay, so we were under the impression that Facebook login credentials were a locally-managed affair, but it looks like almost anything can break when AT&T’s involved — according to CNET, the carrier just fixed "several problems" that had users logging into the wrong Facebook account from their phones.

I’m getting there…

Nov 012009

Just trying to set up WordPress here. It’s pretty impressive so far.

Socialism Parables

Apr 062009

I got one of those emails today that had more Fwd: headers than actual content, but I read it and I really liked the analogy so I decided to post it.

When I was teaching economics, I would simply draw a wagon on the chalk board with people riding in the wagon and people pulling the wagon and I would ask the students what happens when there is more riding than pulling?  The answer is obvious, the wagon stops.  It is the same with an economic system.  Someone has to pull the wagon.

And this one…

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked; and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich – a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little. The second test average was a D!  No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed.

No Shit!

Mar 252009

This is funny. I installed Netscape Navigator in a virtual machine for that “blast from the past” feeling and I got this familiar message. Why was common sense so uncommon in software back then?

Nutscrape

Dick Morris says “You can’t push a string” but Andre proves him wrong

Mar 222009

Dick Morris says:

In an effort to promote liquidity and boost the economy, the Federal Reserve yesterday announced plans to grow the money supply by another 50 percent to 60 percent. This ignores the profound observation of Gen. George Patton: “You can’t push a string.”

But my friend Andre de Cavaignac proves that you can… Smile

var stack = new Stack<string>();
stack.Push(new string());

Fundamentals of the economy are strong after all. Our apologies to Senator McCain.

Mar 152009

This makes me sick. We watched for months as the Obama smear campaign replayed the famous sound bite from John McCain saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.” Despite what the news would have you believe, the fundamentals of our economy ARE strong and they’ve been strong all along. There are a few weak sectors that are spilling over into the rest of our economy, but in the majority of industries, it’s business as usual despite some prudent (and probably long overdue) cutbacks on spending.

So now President Obama is saying nearly the EXACT SAME THING as Senator McCain and even his own economic advisor, Christina Romer, sounds like a complete shill trying to explain how President Obama’s version is correct while Senator McCain’s made him “out of touch.” On Meet the Press this morning, it took her almost 10 seconds before the word “inherited” came out of her mouth and despite David Gregory’s repeated attempts to get clarification on the “fundamentals”, all she could say is that we’re just misinterpreting the President’s comments. What else is new.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA:  If we are keeping focused on all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy, then we’re going to get through this.  And I’m very confident about that.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ):  You know that there’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street, and it is–it’s–people are frightened by these events.  Our economy, I think–still, the fundamentals our–of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult time.

Anyway, just listening to her talk, with that big smile and word for word script recitation makes me worry. Are all of President Obama’s closest advisors such “yes men” (or in this case “yes women”)?

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