To Suffer The Slings and Arrows of Vendor Products…

Being a software architect is a difficult task. Part of the skill is rote software design based upon the technology of choice. Part of it is the very soft "science" of knowing how much to design to make the software somewhat extensible without going so far as to design/build something that is overkill. An extreme version of this would be the inner platform effect.

Way back when I was a somewhat new developer, I was tasked with adding a fairly large feature that required the addition of a database to our otherwise database-less application. I went to our in-team architect, described the problem, and asked him to request a modest database for us. At the time, Sybase was the in-house tool. He decreed that "Sybase sucks", and that he could build a better database solution himself. He would even make it more functional than Sybase.

At the time, I didn't have a lot of experience, especially with databases, but intuition told me that Sybase had employed countless people for more than a decade to build and tweak Sybase. When I pointed this out, and the fact the it was unlikely that he was going to build a better database than all that effort - by himself - in only a few days, I received a full-on dressing down because I didn't know what was possible, and that a good architect could design and build anything. While I agreed that given enough time it might be possible, it was highly unlikely that it would happen in the next three days (because I needed time to do my coding against the database to meet the delivery schedule). I was instructed to wait and he would get it to me in time.

My Spidy-Sense™ told me not to trust him, so I went to the DBAs that day and told them what I needed. Since I had little relevant experience with setting up a database, I told them of my inexperience with such things and asked them to optimize it with indices, etc. They created it for me that day. Since it was their implementation of my (DB) requirements, I knew that it would at least pass their review. I then coded the required feature and delivered on time. Was it perfect? No. Could it have been designed better? In retrospect, sure. But I was new to databases and it was fast enough for the need at the time.

At every meeting for the next three months, our manager asked the architect how his Sybase-replacement was coming along. He sheepishly admitted that while it was coming along well, coming up with a design that would support all of the features provided by Sybase was proving to be a bit more involved than he had imagined, and that it would take a while longer.

Several months after that, he was still making schematics and flow diagrams to try and build a new and improved Sybase.

Our manager never did do anything to stop him from wasting time.

As for me, I learned an important lesson about knowing when to write code, and when not to write code.

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Announcements: Make Your Apps Faster With Raygun APM

Your software is terrible, but that doesn’t make it special. All software is terrible, and yes, you know this is true. No matter how good you think it is, bugs and performance problems are inevitable.

But it’s not just the ugly internals and mysterious hacks and the code equivalent of duct-tape and chewing gum which make your software terrible. Your software exists to fill some need for your users, and how do you know that’s happening? And worse, when your application fails, how do you understand what happened?

In the past, we’ve brought your attention to Raygun, which allows you to add a real-time feedback loop that gives you a picture of exactly what’s happening on their device or their browser. And now, Raygun is making it even better, with Raygun APM.

Raygun Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tackles the absolute worst part of releasing/supporting applications: dealing with performance issues. With Raygun APM, you can get real-time execution stats on your server-side code, and find out quickly which specific function, line, or database call is slowing down your application.

You won’t have to wait for someone to notice the issue, either- Raygun APM proactively identifies performance issues and builds a workflow for solving them. Raygun APM sorts through the mountains of data for you, surfacing the most important issues so they can be prioritized, triaged and acted on, cutting your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and keeping your users happy.

In addition to all this, Raygun is adding tight integration with source control, starting with GitHub.

Request access to the beta here. Or if you’re already tired of searching logs for clues in an effort to replicate an issue, try out Raygun’s current offerings and resolve errors, crashes and performance issues with greater speed and accuracy.

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Revolutionary App For Blocking People

This revolutionary app idea sounds like it actually might work. Only one person can use it at a time though, but I’m sure they’ll think of something. John Cena does a great job!

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A Comment on the Military Industrial Complex

Simon T tugged at his collar when the video played. It wasn’t much, just a video of their software being tested. It wasn’t the first time they’d tested Simon’s most recent patch, but it was going to be the last time. There were a lot of eyes in the conference room, and they were all turned on him.

Simon worked for the kind of company which made missiles. The test in the video was one of the highly expensive tests of a real missile under real-world conditions. Several of these had already been done with this software package, so Simon hadn’t expected any problems to crop up. In this case, though, the missile left its launcher and sailed in a perfect parabolic arc into the ground 5 meters away from the launch site.

Missiles diving headfirst into the ground mere meters from their launch site was officially considered a bad thing. There were all sorts of checkpoints and automated tests and simulations that were supposed to keep this thing from happening. It didn’t take long to find the problem.

if roll < 0 then
{
  {we're adjusting the roll here cos it's too high so we are going to take just half
  roll = roll / 2;
  zcdem = zdem; { add gravity }
}
else
{
  {roll is clockwise}
  …
}

This code happens to be Turbo Pascal 4, a version of the language released in 1987. Simon’s job had been to create this Turbo Pascal code by porting the logic from Fortran 68, running on a mainframe. Due to hardware constraints, the Fortran version took 8 hours to simulate and calculate a missile’s trajectory. Simon’s Turbo Pascal version could do the same job in near real time.

There’s just one problem. Curly brackets in Turbo Pascal can be used to mean radically different things. On a line by themselves, they can substitute for begin or end statements, but they can also serve as comment indicators.

And you can see where this is going. Simon left off his closing } on the {we're adjusting… line. You might expect an error like that to be caught by the compiler, and it might have… had he not also had the { add gravity } comment, which handily provided a closing curly brace, essentially commenting out the entire body of the if statement.

In their testing, they’d somehow never hit this condition. Even in the real-world tests, the wind had previously been blowing from the west, which meant the missile had a positive value for roll. Only on a day with an easterly wind did they catch this bug.

For want of a } the missile was lost…

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Testing An Insane Giant Lighter

To ask is to answer–is bigger better? Well, yes, when you can build a giant lighter and it actually works… Of course it’s better! Imagine how easy it is to light candles in your house […]

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