Skip to main content

You are not here not reading this post...


Some days it's hard to really appreciate what a software developer is or does. And I have "been one" for over a quarter of a century and I still don't know what I do.

I can translate management speak into meaningful English and then understand what "they need" as opposed to "what they think they need."

I can translate "business requirements" into an internal mental model composed of data stores and processes and subsequently translate that model into "working code" in any language you care to mention to produce a "deliverable".

But...

I still don't truly understand what happened along the way. I think it is more to do with the underlying nature of the universe rather than the mechanical processes. Codds rules and normalisation for instance, one can learn, understand and apply these rules to great effect but what does "de-normalisation to 2NF" mean to a bunch of atoms and molecules which don't actually exist because they themselves are composed of mere collapsing wave-functions and statistical probababilities.

Yes, I am having an other "reality challenging" day brought about by the mind-numbing futility of my current development task. As I sit here and stare at my lovely HD flat-panel monitor I see not words and Erlang terms but tens of thousands of coloured pixels, some of which appear as I strike the plastic rectangular input device attached to the quantum reality manipulation device.

 To quote a rather famous publication, "In the beginning was the word.". A word is a sound. A sound is a vibration. Current interpretations of what's "out there" are telling us that vibration is truly all that there might be, albeit in nine or ten dimensions and composed of "strings".

Wow.

No wonder I can't figure out any of this stuff... it's all made from string and it's all tangled up... maybe it's all composed of "knot" gates. ROFLCOPTER etc.

Ah well, back to work... whatever that is.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Communicating between controllers in AngularJS

I have seen many solutions to how to make controllers talk to each other whilst at the same time remaining within "da rulez" of writing Angular applications. I have been using Angular for about a month now and at times it has been swearier than a good Haskell session, it is most definitely worth it all in the end. I have written a really nice looking web application for my employer and they seem to like it. I think Angular. One thing I really aced (to my own satisfaction at least) was wrapping a REST (of any type) API using a resource. I will make a separate post about that. Do the simplest thing... Here is my own solution to the problem of how you can make different controllers communicate cleanly using the "event" system that Angular provides. All you have to do is ensure that the following event listener is added to your application root-scope: App.run( function( $rootScope )) { $rootScope.$on('broadcast', function( e, data ) { if (undef...
3 comments
Read more

Cross platform development with Scheme

Just a quick note about something I recently found whilst trying not to buy MOCL… http://www.lambdanative.org/ LambdaNative is developed and maintained by the Pediatric Anethesia Research Team (PART) and the Electical and Computer Engineering in Medicine (ECEM) group at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I have spent a week or two evaluating it and accidentally contributed a pull request that got merged and one that didn’t and I have to say that, for what it offers, it is awesomely good. Having personally spent many hours with it now, I do not yet think it is ready for mainstream development for a few reasons. I don’t mean that it a bad way either. What I mean is that the language, Scheme, is not really that widely known and as such it probably won’t break out into the public arena any time yet. That’s a real shame because I think that they have achieved an amazing thing; total abstraction of the underlying platform with a really powerful, underestimated language. ...
1 comment
Read more

Handling multipart/form-data with NanoHTTPD

I am in the process of reviving an old project from 2014 that I never finished because of other work commitments. In that time, bitrot has set in, the Android API has moved on and all in all, the home-brewed HTTP server I wrote using SocketServer and the org.apache libraries had to go! I looked around, found a couple of contenders and after much time decided to go with NanoHTTPD because it is lean, small and fits in exactly two files. The main server is in one file `NanoHTTPD.java`and there is another file called `ServerRunner.java` which manages instances of running servers. The others The other project I looked at is this one:  https://github.com/koush/AndroidAsync which led me a merry dance and I just couldn't figure out how get the POST data I had uploaded. I spent a few days really digging at it with Wire Shark too to make sure the data was going up. It was. Whatever... I had used it via a gradle dependency entry but I dropped it and went back to NanoHTTPD. For m...
Post a Comment
Read more