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Well, it’s a while since I wrote a blog post so why not kick off with a slight bit of professional heresy. I write software for a living; have done for over 30 years, starting with SCMP microprocessors in my teens (yes, I was THAT sort of teenager…) and working through everything in between until now when I spend my time split between .NET, JavaScript and PHP.
Now, why do I write code? Well, occasionally I do it for fun, but mostly I do it for profit – my clients pay me to do it. Actually, that’s not right. My clients pay me to solve their problems for them using software.
I’ve never been one of the great ‘geeks / hackers’ in life; I’m a radio amateur and electronics whizz, and the closest I ever came was in my teens and early twenties when I was fiddling with low level stuff like analogue to digital converters and the like; but pure software geekery has never been me. I used to say to people that I was a reasonable programmer but an excellent developer; now I’m more likely to say I’m an excellent problem solver.
Don’t get me wrong; I have an active interest in my profession, from the perspective of how I can deliver better service to my clients in delivering what they want from me. And I like to think that I write sound, efficient and effective code. I create data structures, create objects to model those structures and business processes, create code to implement these abstracts and put something on my client’s desktop or web server that allows them, bottom line, to make more money or save more money. I also write code that is easy to follow and maintain, that has sensible variable names, that I document and leave a pile of useful information with my client. And I’m there for them when needed. I love it when I get a call from a client who tells me ‘We needed to add a new feature, so we took a look at the code and documentation and we think we’ve done it right, but next time you’re in, could you give it a quick look?’ – the ultimate accolade for me – I’ve delivered code that others can pick up and run with.
I’m methodical, but don’t have what you could call a methodology; I was recently asked whether I was agile; I almost replied that I used to be but since I tore my knee cartilage a few years back I’m not as nimble as I once was. Do I practice Extreme programming; not really, I’m more Church of England, middle of the road, myself….
I’ve started to notice that there are two broad categories of software developers; those who work for software houses or in large development teams where words like Agile, Extreme, kanzen, dojos, user stories, sensei are the common parlance, and those who work very close with business and organisational problems, where the usual words that define a day at the coalface are fix, solution, feature, document, debug, budget, timescale.
I like to talk to my clients in their language; I’m afraid I still work in a world where businesses have processes, not user stories; where they don’t particularly care what technique I use behind the scenes as long as I deliver working, maintainable and efficient code, to budget and on time. I’m sure that the software house methodologies work effectively but do they provide yet another layer of obfuscation, bureaucracy and abstraction between what we do and what our clients and customers want us to do – solve their problems?
No matter how much we dress things up with Japanese words (and I speak with some knowledge and experience of Japanese culture and management) we must not lose track of what we do and why we do it; we solve problems by developing effective software systems delivered on time and to budget. That is all our clients care about; we’re not ninjas or ronin; we’re professional programmers and problem solvers.
I guess what I’m saying to developers is don’t fetishise what you do to the point where the process becomes more important than the product. It’s rare I have much good to say about Steve Jobs and the slavering behemnoth that is Apple, but he did once say ‘Great artists deliver’. And that’s what it’s all about.
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In the period since the General Election here in the UK I’ve seen a fair number of blog posts and Facebook notes entitled ‘Why I’m rejoining the Labour Party’ – typically by folks who were members of the Labour Party at some point in the past decade and who left when Blair and Brown didn’t live up to expectations. But now, given the Liberal-Conservative coalition Government, these folks are keen to get back in to the Labour Party fold and ‘fight the good fight’ against the ‘auld enemy’ – a Tory Government. (Those of us of a cynical bent and who’ve been around in left wing politics long enough to remember the 1980s can remember when the ‘auld enemy’ was actually people within the Labour Party with whom you didn’t agree…but that’s another story.)
I left the Labour Party around the time that ‘Clause 4’ disappeared from the membership cards – the start of the great re-invention of the Labour Party as New Labour. I’d served time as a Ward Chair, Constituency Vice Chair and been a delegate to the District Labour Party here in Sheffield. I even considered running for election as a City Councillor, and very briefly toyed with the idea of trying for a Parliamentary seat, but eventually stayed as a local party activist and school governor. I was a member of the Party when it was distinctly un-trendy to be so; a time when the Labour Party was in opposition, stood as much chance of getting in to power as England did winning the World Cup.
Despite the fact that I was self-employed, running my own business, the old Labour Party held much appeal for me. Even with Clause 4 – detailed here with the ‘revisions’ – I always felt I had more to gain from a Labour Government than from the Tories. The Labour Party was good on issues that mattered heavily to me – civil liberties, for example – and whilst some of the economic policies would be personally bad for me, I could understand the underlying philosophy. And I always regarded it highly unlikely that Labour would drag us in to wars….
I left the Labour Party after the death of John Smith – nowadays I think there are lots of people who’ve never heard of this man, which is a great shame. I’m pretty sure that Labour would have won the 1997 election with him as leader – without the massive changes from the new Labour experiment being carried out. Whether the party would have had such a big majority – I have no idea – but they would still have been the Labour Party I grew up with and joined. I think reform was inevitable, but New Labour is no longer a party of the people – more a party of the chattering classes. I’ve often considered that left to it’s own devices the New Labour experiment would eventually move the party to either a dilute form of Gramscian Marxism or the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School – neither of which I have much time for.
After leaving the Party I was broadly sympathetic to the activities of the New Labour government in most areas – but there was a certain ‘control freak’ attitude – the ‘Big Nanny’ state – obvious in policy form the very beginning, and that made me concerned for civil liberties from very early on. After 9/11 then it became more obvious; again, I was supportive of certain policies, but not others. Economically, I was concerned that we were seeing a subtle form of old style ‘tax and spend’ taking place, with a bloated and increasingly ineffective public sector being paid for by various ‘one off’ financial wind falls, such as selling off gold (ultimately a £7 billion LOSS) or the 3G Phone licenses (23 billions). Jolly japes like this earned Brown the sobriquet of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ – but it’s pretty easy to balance the books in the short term when you get nice one off payments. Just wait until you have to keep the books balanced when things get tight….
I was also concerned by the increasing levels of surveillance and law changes that worked against our civil liberties. We’re now the most filmed population in the world; this technology exploded under New Labour. Anti-terror laws bought in by New Labour were used to keep people under surveillance to see whether they were using their dustbins correctly, for crying out loud. And let’s not get started on ID cards, vetting to work with children, the Digital Economy Bill, etc. And then there’s the whole business of illegal wars….
I honestly believe that the 2010 election, had New Labour been re-elected, would have been a further blow to civil liberties – combined with the economic crisis I could easily see these Stasi-like powers being expanded to cover all aspects of our lives.
New Labour are no longer in power but the people within the New Labour machine, the officers, the MPs, the leadership candidates, the local members – they’re still there and they are still, in most cases, the same people who have implicitly agreed to all of these assaults on our liberties. I’m not saying that the new Coalition Government have got it right – but I’m happy to give them a try rather than vote in authoritarianism. To the thousands of new members of the Labour Party I say this; do you support reduction of civil liberties and economic mis-management – because by joining the Party today, unless you are joining to get some change of people and policy at the top, you are supporting the people who were in power during one of the most authoritarian decades in the UK’s history.
Think before you join or re-join. I have; and I’m not for joining.
Early on in my consulting career – late 1980s, early 1990s – I did a lot of work for a public sector organisation. I worked on a number of projects – this was in the days when IT consultants could still be generalists, applying their skills to whatever was needed – and tended to specialise on development of a few database applications that were centrally based and accessed over a (pre-Internet) wide area network, held together by leased lines, private cabling, etc.
All in all, a fantastic environment in which to hone your skills. Actually, in many respects I was rather spoilt by this client – and by my first job out of university – they both gave me a rather distorted view of working life! For a while we experienced some rather ‘odd’ problems on some of the applications running over the wide area network. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t actually ground the problems – we checked software, hardware, cabling, the works. Eventually, and half jokingly, a colleague and I (both of us radio amateurs) decided that the problems were being some how caused by sun spots….
Unsurprisingly, this caused gales of laughter in the office, but as far as we were concerned there was an element of logic in our proposal. We knew that sun spots and solar activity in general had an effect on the earth’s ionosphere, and that in the past bad solar storms had knocked out telephone and communication systems. Indeed, in the pre-Internet, pre-computer days of 1859 a major solar storm had caused incredible effects, even causing telegraph wires to carry electrical currents when all the batteries were disconnected!
This information did little to convince people around the office, so we simply did what any other self respecting techie would do; turn things off and on, replace a few network cards and bridges, tighten connections and tweak software. And the odd errors stopped, and we stopped worrying about it.
But over teh years I’ve thought about those gremlins on numerous occasions, and it now appears that we may have been right after all. According to this article, solar storms can cause mystery glitches in communication and computer systems.
It may be that the next time we get a big solar storm or Coronal Mass Ejection – when a massive plume of plasma and charged particles is thrown from teh sun out in to space – the impact will be much more than a few gremlins in the works. Some have suggested that a storm similar to that of 1859 might cause massive damage to the electrical and communications systems of the world; indeed, some real pessimists have suggested that a BIG solar event might put us back in to the pre-electronics age for decades.
Let’s hope we don’t get it…