Back to getting things done at work
Mar. 9th, 2019 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcA few weeks ago I mentioned a slow, tricky period at work battling popular enterprise software libraries and, later, that things had started going better again. Last week I caused some amusement at a meeting in responding to a comment about writing parsers in PL/pgSQL that such would be one of the better tasks I have been given. Sure, my favorite parser writing so far was over a decade ago in Haskell, using Frisby and Parsec, but, while PL/pgSQL is as limited and basic as, say, PostScript (if we ignore the font stuff), that it is basic really helps. It is well-documented and the abstraction that it does present simply works.
In contrast, the frustrating technologies are those where they purport to offer a simple helpful view but the illusion is repeatedly shattered as unexplained dragons keep breaking out from inside. The best software for building things, of which I also offer Basser Lout as an example, is that where you ask even more than it seemed was promised and it still works seamlessly: one cannot help but suspect that some good, clean design underpins them rather than an unholy nest of worms that are not all entirely friends with each other.
Perhaps in contrast to that tricky period, recent weeks at work have felt rather productive. Admittedly, some of the to-do's that I checked off the list were trivial: a few are but minor changes to our codebase, even to comments, but still worth doing in my opinion. Others do involve more code, largely bugfixes, but again they were clearly bugs in our code, rather than unclearly arising from interactions with third-party code, so they were far more amenable to inquiry and correction than my challenges this time last month.
In contrast, the frustrating technologies are those where they purport to offer a simple helpful view but the illusion is repeatedly shattered as unexplained dragons keep breaking out from inside. The best software for building things, of which I also offer Basser Lout as an example, is that where you ask even more than it seemed was promised and it still works seamlessly: one cannot help but suspect that some good, clean design underpins them rather than an unholy nest of worms that are not all entirely friends with each other.
Perhaps in contrast to that tricky period, recent weeks at work have felt rather productive. Admittedly, some of the to-do's that I checked off the list were trivial: a few are but minor changes to our codebase, even to comments, but still worth doing in my opinion. Others do involve more code, largely bugfixes, but again they were clearly bugs in our code, rather than unclearly arising from interactions with third-party code, so they were far more amenable to inquiry and correction than my challenges this time last month.
