Low Country Software Ramblings

One of the thing I really enjoy doing is speaking in public. Back in the day before the internet bubble burst, I was a Field Application Engineer. The best part of my job was giving presentations, tutorials and demos. There is nothing quite like standing in front of a room with 50, 100 or 200 engineers and not only giving a presentation, but interacting with them and answering questions. It might just be nostalgia, but I miss that feeling of connectedness.

Unfortunately, embedded programming is not a public activity and there is limited opportunity to speak to an audience. Doing the conference circuit is a way to go, but competition for slots is fierce and it can become expensive. Making presentations at a user group meeting is a more viable alternative, but living in the technological sticks puts a crimp in that idea. That last fall back is doing Lunch & Learn type sessions. This works great at larger companies, but as I’m part of a 1.5 developer team, the audience is limited.

This state of affair has unfortunately resulted in me becoming rather disconnected form the happenings in the tech community at large. I get plenty of news from the internet, but there is nothing that comes close to interacting with designers at various companies. Those hallway conversations and water cooler chats give you a sense of what is really going on out there…

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There comes a time when one has to assess what they are doing and why. As part of this process, I’m taking a hard look at my blogging habits. This blog started as my ramblings on embedded and .NET topics. Along the way, it has morphed into this (mostly) daily aggregation post about all things .NET

I’m an avid reader, and part of the motivation for the daily post was to share whatever interesting tidbits I came across. I also wanted to post fairly frequently. A daily news aggregation post was an easy answer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well.

All of the interest shown by readers, as manifested by comments and pings, was with (for lack of a better term) “original content”. Witness my almost off the cuff post on Ageism. It was by far the most widely viewed post, thanks to Larry O’Brien agreeing with me and sparking curiosity. I guess being the catalyst for a post by someone in the top 50,000 Technorati blogs will do that to you.

As such, my daily posts are no more. Instead, we are going back to posting whenever our muse calls. Embed This! on the other hand will stick around in its weekly form. My small way of countering a lack of embedded content on the net.

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A toast, my friends, raise your glasses to “Absent Companions!”

Once a Blue Angel Always a Blue Angel

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I have a tendency to fall in love with specific technologies. Past recipients of my affection included C, C++ and Python. Eiffel’s software by contract did catch my eye. I had to share a room with REXX, but that went nowhere. And Perl and Tcl, well…that was more of a one night stand. I never had the opportunity to know Java, but maybe we can meet for lunch someday?
My latest tryst is with .NET. I am just taken with the ease of development, the powerful tools and approach one can easily use: VS 2005, N/MbUnit, NPerf, NCover, FxCop, JetBrain’s Resharper. The list goes on and on. There is a freedom found in .NET that sadly, I am not experiencing at work. Sure, I write the occasional small program in C#, but most of the work is in C or C++. I have to deal with header files and function declarations, no built-in support for refactoring. Like a jilted lover, I’m starting to feel resentment towards my old flame.
I long to be free of the shackles of my past, and embrace a future with .NET.

Of course, one of the issues associated with my passion for new technologies is that a pernicious mindset can take hold: every problem can be solved with the judicious application of duct tape. Or as the old adage goes: when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Does the world really need a .NET ModBus Protocol library?

Maybe I should look into language counseling…

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Back in ‘96, I had the opportunity to attend my first (and only) development conference (The C++ Developer’s conference). This was an amazing experience, where I got to attend workshops by Robert Martin, John Lakos and others. I even met Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup.

I mentioned to one of my fellow attendee that it would be amazing to work with Dr. Stroustrup. He told me that one of his friend actually worked at Bell Labs. It was great to work such luminaries as Stroustrup, Kernigan and Richie. However, his friend could not help but feel that he couldn’t measure up. Being around such greatness, he simply felt inadequate. Back then, in my mid-twenties, I didn’t get it. I simply thought it would be fantastic to work with such pioneers. Now, with a few more years under my belt, I think I get it.
I wonder how I would feel if I were to work with Larry O’Brien (Magazine editor at 25, someone who did a $100M/year transaction engine in SmallTalk, and uses genetic algorithms to tune C++ compiler settings).

How about Robert Martin and the crew at Object Mentor? The man is a prolific author and everyone at OM seems to be a deep thinker: Tim Ottinger, Michael Feathers and the rest of the gang.

Let’s not forget Scott Hanselman, who can whip out a program to embed images in an MP3 file over lunch (he used a library, but still!), wrote a Tiny OS in C# and puts out a weekly podcast.

I could go on: Roy Osherove, Mark Miller (good lord, he’s got a blog!), Guido van Rossum, etc…
I suspect working with any of them could bring out insecurities. But interestingly, the reason why I sometimes experience self-doubt doesn’t have to do with colleagues, but with the fact that most of our company product portfolio rests on my shoulders. As we’re in the middle of a large product introduction, with multiple deliverable devices, a delay in delivery has a direct and very measurable impact. I don’t own the company, yet the self-imposed pressure to produce is there. That is not a fun place to be. Sometimes I long for the anonymity of a large organization. Luckily, we’re getting a new engineer to take on some of the load.

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