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Back to newsletter 036 contents | All Javva's articles
You've probably seen this link about "Real Programmers" before, but it was new to me. Pretty funny. I actually laughed out loud several times. My best quote was definitely
"the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language."
Which probably needs to be followed by this amusing snippet from Heinz Kabutz's excellent newsletter showing how to write BASIC in Java. Why would you want to? Hey, there's some geek in all of us. And he's got a lot of explaining to do.
September 3. Well, I must say, I am surprised at how effective these team building thingies are. With Boris and Brainshrii and myself enjoying the prospect of a tip-top dinner, a day out cruise with our significant others, and several state of the art electronic trinkets on the basis of our hugely successful performance at the departmental outing, our camaraderie has never been stronger. The "performance team" are hot-to-trot. Of course, Weevil is out to prove we cheated. He's spending so much time trying to gather some evidence of nefarious activities that he's looking positively dishevilled. Poor chap. And after all, we didn't cheat. We were just very effective at intelligence gathering before the event. Hardly my fault if the event plans were accessed so easily.
September 10. With our enthisiasm in full flow, we've agreed to take a penetrative look through a partner company's Java application. Apparently HasntGotAClue was talking to the manager on the other side, and he was boasting about his Java performance group, and the other guy was having performance problems, yadda yadda yadda. Means we get to stay at some plush hotel, have a nice daily expense allowance, sounds almost like a holiday. And all we have to do is find a bottleneck or two over the course of a week. Should be a breeze.
September 25. I'm writing this on my laptop in the plush surroundings of the Ritz-Carlton, while I'm waiting for a top quality three-course meal of something or other, I can't quite pronounce it. This really is one of the most relaxing weeks I've had. Turned out our partner company really had no idea about performance monitoring tools. They were doing code reviews to try and figure out where the performance problems were in their application. Like Duh! Can I say piece of cake, or should I just wait for the third course and eat it. When we went along to the lead architect with a printout of the JDBC calls that they were actually making, rather than what they thought they were making, his eyes almost bulged out. I let Brainshrii do the talking. That way they were straining to understand what he was saying, which should have made it seem more difficult than it was. I mean, how much effort does it take to record, sort and print? These guys were state of the art when it came to J2EE, but cavemen when it came to J2EE performance. Ooh, I'm an expert! I just realized it. What fun. I guess that means it's time to start a new skill. After all this is I.T. If you do something long enough to become an expert, you can be sure that your skillset is going down the tubes. Next year I'll probably be listed along with PDP macro programmers and thinking machine technicians, in the group suitable only for work in computing museums. Hmm let's see what's hot? Broadband, security, web services, mobile computing, ... Okay, so I need to start learning about high-security web services running on mobile phones connecting over big fat data links. See that? One minute ago I was an expert and a dinosaur, the next I'm a visionary.
BCNU
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