A full-stack software engineer is someone who is comfortable working at any layer, from code and systems through team members to customers.
APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
FSF
FOSDEM
My current record of FOSDEM attendance sees me there once per decade: my first visit was in 2007 and I’m having breakfast in my hotel at the end of my second trip. I should probably get here more often.
Unlike a lot of the corporate conferences I’ve been to in other fields, FOSDEM is completely free and completely organised by its community. An interesting effect of this is that whole there’s no explicit corporate presence, you’ll see companies represented if they actually support free and open source software as much as they claim. Red Hat doesn’t have a stand, but pick up business cards from the folks at CentOS, Fedora, GNOME, ManageIQ…
When it comes to free software, I’m a jack of many trades and a master of none. I have drive-by commits in a few different projects including FreeBSD and clang, and recently launched the GNUstep developer guide to add some necessary documentation, but am an expert nowhere.
That makes FOSDEM an exciting selection box of new things to learn, many of which I know nothing or little about. That’s a great situation to be in; it’s also unsurprising that I know so little as I’ve only been working with free software (indeed, any software) for a little over a decade.
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Coercion over configuration.
The package management paradox
There was no need to build a package management system since CPAN, and yet npm is the best.
Wait, what?
Every time a new programming language or framework is released, people seem to decide that:
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It needs its own package manager.
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Simple algorithms need to be rewritten from scratch in “pure” $language/framework and distributed as packages in this package manager.
This is not actually true. Many programming languages – particularly many of the trendy ones – have a way to call C functions, and a way to expose their own routines as C functions. Even C++ has this feature. This means that you don’t need any new packaging system, if you can deploy packages that expose C functions (whatever the implementation language) then you can use existing code, and you don’t need to rewrite everything.
So there hasn’t been a need for a packaging system since at least CPAN, maybe earlier.
On the other hand, npm is the best packaging system ever because people actually consume existing code with it. It’s huge, there are tons of libraries, and so people actually think about whether this thing they’re doing needs new code or the adoption of existing code. It’s the realisation of the OO dream, in which folks like Brad Cox said we’d have data sheets of available components and we’d pull the components we need and bind them together in our applications.
Developers who use npm are just gluing components together into applications, and that’s great for software.
In which the quantity 1/"booleans per module" is proposed as a software quality metric, and readers are left hanging.
New project: the GNUstep developer guide
I discovered by searching the interwebs that a significant number of people who try out GNUstep get stuck at the “I wanted to do Objective-C on my Linux so I installed GNUstep…now what?” stage. There are some tutorials for GNUstep around, but they’re not necessarily easy to find, and not necessarily pitched at beginners. Otherwise, you’re told to look at the Cocoa documentation, and as Xcode’s user interface turned into a combine harvester, Apple moved to Swift, and other changes happened, the relevance of Apple’s documentation to GNUstep has been on the wane for years.
Therefore today I’m launching the GNUstep Developer Guide. It’s not yet pretty, it’s not yet complete, but it is a place to look for GNUstep documentation written for GNUstep programmers. The first guide is up: the introduction to ProjectCenter and GORM.
Let me know if you find it useful!
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This post on semantic versioning reminded me that we’re making a future in which Ubuntu 01.04 will be newer than Ubuntu 99.10.
This is fine.
The reality is not the abstraction
Remember that the abstractions you built to help you think about problems are there to help. They are not reality, and when you think of them as such they stop helping you, and they hold you back.
You see this problem in the context of software. A programmer creates a software model of a problem, implements a solution in that model, then releases the solution to the modeled problem as a solution to the original problem. Pretty soon, an aspect of the original problem is uncovered that isn’t in the model. Rather than remodeling the problem to encapsulate the new information, though, us programmers will call that an “edge case” that needs special treatment. The solution is now a solution to the model problem, with a little nub expressed as a conditional statement for handling this other case. You do not have to have been working on a project for long before it’s all nubs and no model.
You also see this problem in the context of the development process. Consider the story point, an abstraction that allows comparison of the relative sizes of problems and size of a team in terms of its problem-solving capacity. If you’re like me, you’ve met people who want you deliver more points. You’ve met people who set objectives featuring the number of points delivered. You’ve met people who want to see the earned points accrue on a burn-down. They have allowed the story point to become their reality. It’s not, it’s an abstraction. Stop delivering points, and start solving problems.
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The book “NeXTstep Programming Step One: Object-Oriented Applications” by Garfinkel and Mahoney said this about Controllers in 1993:
A good rule of thumb is to place as little code in your controller as necessary. If it is possible to create a second controller that is only used for a particular function, do so – the less complicated you make your application’s objects, the easier they are to debug.
Later, on the same page (p131):
Before you start coding, it’s a good idea to sit down and think about your problem.
Both of these pieces of advice still apply. Neither has been universally internalised 24 years later.
2017: the year of configuring Linux (or Windows, or OS X, or…) on the desktop
I’m going to FOSDEM next month, maybe I’ll see some of you there. This gives me motivation to solve one of the outstanding problems on my laptop: I currently, as has been mentioned here multiple times, use Windows 10 as a bootloader for my GNU/Linux installation. I would rather boot straight into Linux. So I can set myself a milestone: I would prefer, by the time I get to St. Pancras International train station on Friday 3rd Feb, not to have Windows on this laptop any more.
The laptop is a Alienware 15 R3, although weirdly the processor my laptop contains (Core i7-6820HK) is not one of the CPU options listed on the Dell website, so maybe they changed the configuration without updating the model, or had a spare old CPU knocking around when they built my laptop and decided to use that. Anyway, this is computering, so this is fine. You’re not expected to know or care that you don’t have the correct bits in the computer, just that it’s “Late 2016” (even though they still sold the R2 in late 2016, too).
The problems I have seem to fit into one of two categories: either the wi-fi (a Qualcomm Atheros chipset) doesn’t work, or the CPU/motherboard chipset (see above) isn’t supported and all hell breaks loose.
The wireless situation is that the wireless should be fully supported: Qualcomm Atheros integrated the driver into the Linux kernel back in version 3.11-rc1, in July 2013, and supply the firmware binaries. And so it doesn’t work in modern Linux kernels (or doesn’t reliably work, or fails for different reasons).
The chipset situation is that Intel integrated the driver into the Linux kernel back in version 4.3, in November 2015. So it doesn’t reliably work in modern Linux kernels.
I could go into the specific problems I’ve seen and the specific things I’ve tried to work around them, but I won’t. I won’t because well-meaning but unengaged people will ask me infuriatingly basic and irrelevant questions (yes, I have already turned Secure Boot off; no, it doesn’t change the fact that the ath10k module hasn’t loaded), or suggest unjustifiable solutions. The most common is the Distro Pimp: you should try [Debian/Debian testing/Arch/Ubuntu/openSuSE/Fedora/Mint/wait, which one did you say you’d already tried?]. Well that’s nice, but the distribution I tried (that didn’t work) is made of GNU and Linux 4.8, and the distribution you’re suggesting is made of GNU and Linux 4.8, so what specifically is it about your distribution that makes you think it works where this other one doesn’t? Oh, they focus on [stability/cutting edge/purple desktops/compiz effects/bible-reading software] do they? And how does that solve my problem where the kernel doesn’t work, despite being newer than all of the bits I need to have a working kernel?
This is the reality of Linux on the Desktop, the one that computerists say the world is ready for. Of course, it’s also the reality of everything else on the desktop. Something that occasionally happens in my Windows 10 bootloader is that it reboots while I’m using it to install some updates, because I stopped moving the mouse for a couple of minutes between 6pm and 9am (you know, the time when I’m at home, using my home computer). Some colleagues at work use Windows as an actual operating environment, and have things like Skype (made by Microsoft) popping up a notification when they’re presenting in PowerPoint (made by Microsoft). Something that apparently happens to people that have Macs is that the built-in PDF software doesn’t work well and they have to buy somebody else’s PDF software, except that they have to check whether that other PDF software is based on the built-in stuff or is something written by somebody else only they can’t because without the Four Freedoms they don’t have the freedom to study how the program works, and even if they could fix the problem they’re not allowed because they lack the freedom to redistribute and make copies to help their neighbours, or to improve the program so the whole community benefits.
This is fine.
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