The OldWood Thing

One of the most laborious things about starting work at a new client / employer, can be getting your machine and user account configured so that you are able to work on their codebase.

[Despite being almost 30 years ago, and the finer details being lost in the mists of time, the punchline has always stayed with me – it’s scar tissue I guess :o).]

This is quite a long post (15 mins) and if you’re only interested in my final musings, and not the day itself, just skip to the last two sections.

Note: This blog post follows the modern recipe style – a load of unimportant background history before presenting the real content.

I’ve no idea where I first came across the following premise for when starting a new code change: “First ask yourself, how do I test this?”

An interesting question came up at a meet-up I recently attended, where they were discussing approaches to coaching and mentoring.

Ever since the rise of LLM based tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot there have been quips made about how great it makes as a pairing partner.

Last time I wrote about the monthly Cambridge Software Crafters Meetup which I started attending almost a year ago.

Despite living pretty close to Cambridge I’ve never actually worked there.

Most of the time these days when I get into a conversation about naming it tends to be about tweaking the language, perhaps because I think there is a much better term available, or the author is a non-native speaker and they’ve transliterated the name and

Just over 14 years ago I posted the eulogy I wrote for my father on this blog (So Long and Thanks For All the Onions) mostly because I had just started writing and this blog gave me the confidence to write.

This post was prompted by a document I read which was presented as a development guide.

As one of the few devs that both likes and is reasonably well-versed in PowerShell I became the point of contact for a colleague that was bemused by a performance oddity when querying the number of cores on a host.

An interesting bug cropped up the other day in a dub configuration file which made me realise I wasn’t consciously aware of the precedence of && when used in an IF statement with cmd.exe.

[I’m sure there is something else going on here but on the off-chance someone else is also observing this and also lost at least they’ll know they’re not alone.]

We were writing a new service to distribute financial pricing data around the trading floor as a companion to our new desktop pricing tool.

I had taken a new contract at an investment bank and started working on a very mature codebase which was stored in ClearCase.

Like most programmers I’ve generally tried to steer well clear of getting involved in management duties.

Let’s be honest, hiring people is hard and there are no perfect approaches.

Way back at the beginning of my professional programming career I worked for a small software house that wrote graphics software.

My current role is more of a DevOps role and I’m spending more time than usual monitoring and administrating various services, such as the GitLab instance we use for source control, build pipelines, issue management, etc.

I was working on a new system – a grid based calculation engine for an investment bank – and I was beginning to read about some crazy ideas by Netflix around how they would kill off actual production servers to test their resilience to failure.

I signed off My 200th Blog Post in November 2014 with the following words: See you again in a few years.

A few years back I got to spend a couple of weeks consulting at a small company involved in the production of smart cards.

My recent tirade against unnecessary branching – “Git is Not the Problem” – might have given the impression that I don’t appreciate the power that git provides.