Notes from $work

[mdlbear]

My performance review yesterday seemed to go pretty well. No numbers until $boss goes to $grandboss and things grind through the mill, but... On average, my income has not kept up with inflation; I don't expect that to change. $boss had some good suggestions about my next project; it's starting to come together into something coherent. And useful, which is always good.

There was a group in the lunchroom this afternoon (or maybe it was yesterday; everything runs together these days) discussing code readability. Somebody remarked that my Perl code always looks like I expected it to be read by somebody else. I responded that I know damned well that when it comes back to me in a year or so, I'll be somebody else.

... but that doesn't always help. Our form-handling system was written nearly a decade ago, by $boss.previous, on top of an old version of the world's third-ugliest programming language. Which, to my lasting embarassment, I designed. (Aside: PIA is basically a stripped-down Lisp with XML syntax. HTML, in the beta version. Just for comparison, the fourth ugliest language is INTERCAL. Trust me, you don't want to meet ATLAS or the Advantest IC tester language (the name of which I have mercifully forgotten) which are in second and first place respectively. Syntax by H.P.Lovecraft; architecture by Sarah Winchester. There are things you're better off not knowing.)

Anyway, our intrepid system administrator was trying to get it running on a modern Linux box so he could pull out the historical records. M. is fscking brilliant (fluent in five or six languages, degree in CS, ...) but let's face it: mouldering code, dead language, written by people who should have known better... Took us about an hour to find both places where an absolute pathname was hard-coded in. Just because it was my own stupid design didn't mean I remembered it: thank goodness for find, grep, and man.

Could probably have done it in half the time if it'd been me at the keyboard. Nice to know that, even with my brain mostly turned to mush from old age and chronic caffeine addiction, I can still out-debug a bright young whippersnapper half my age.

Comments

[gorgeousgary]

Syntax by H.P.Lovecraft; architecture by Sarah Winchester

And some of the most ferocious assembly language subroutines to be found outside the jungles of Borneo? ;-)

[mdlbear]

Pretty much. And you *really* don't want to know how they ported the tester language from Nova assembly language to Pascal on the VAX; it should be sufficient to note that it involved global variables called R1, R2, R3, and R4.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

My perl code is that way too, for the same reason. With me, if I haven't looked at it in two weeks, I've forgotten it. Not only that, but I'm training the younger guys in the "mack truck" principle - "write your code so that it can be maintained even if you get run over by a mack truck". It helps.

[mdlbear]

Yup. I also figure that my code is my portfolio.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

People who I've worked with have often noted my ability at debugging. I figure it's a good memory combined with having already made all the mistakes that they're just getting around to making now.

[mdlbear]

It's also an eye for oddities, I think. Even when I was first starting out I was better than most at finding other people's recalcitrant bugs.

But having made all the mistakes is certainly part of it.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I made quite a few of them myself, and then improved upon it by having my first paying computer job be solving others' mistakes while I was still young and tractable.... so that I still remember how to understand other peoples' weird code even though it's anathema to me to write said... :)

I don't know if I can keep up with *you* but I can keep up with a lot of'em...