rant

I’m spending a lot more time in Central London at the moment due to current work commitments. A few weeks ago I was having a quiet stroll through the streets and had what I can only describe as an odd moment:

I looked around and found I was being converged upon by 5 or 6 people walking slowly and aimlessly towards me – all from different angles, all only vaguely aware of their surroundings, all looking like they were making straight for me. I instantly thought of one of the scenes from “Shaun of the Dead” {A cracking film, go hire it tonight}.

I’m very much enjoying the current Olympics, the achievements and drama by so many competitors from all over the world in different events,  and the coverage provided by the BBC  - when they can keep narrative and vision together and they are not asking tired competitors who have just done their all daft questions like “how do you feel now” {I’d love some of them to reply ”Knackered, just sod off OK!”}

However, a concern I have had for weeks seems to be panning out. For athletics I think we will see running. And more running. With running thrown in. Running, running, running. with a light scattering of everything else if there is UK interest. What vexes me is that most of this “running” is not even actual running!

For the sake of current clients, this posting has been time-shifted.

I’m looking at the paperwork for a possible new job in front of me. Document seven out of 13 is the Working Time Directive Waiver. It’s the one where you sign on then dotted line saying your proposed new client can demand more than 48 hours of work a week out of you. {This may be UK or European Union specific but, frankly, I don’t care}.

I’m not signing it. For one thing, I doubt the legality of the document under EU law – especially in light of the issues the UK government had with this and junior doctors {who often, and still do, end up making life-deciding decisions on patients when they are too tired to play Noughts and Crosses, having worked 80 hours that week}. For another, well, I don’t give a damn. I ain’t signing it.

I’m not a die-hard “Queen’s English”, “thou shalt not split infinitives” type but I am sick of people miss-using the word Unique.

The word unique means being one of a kind, the only example, the singular occurrence, the absolute only one. One. Singular. Get it? Still don’t get it? Well it means….unique! As a word that has only one unequivocal meaning, “unique” pretty much bloody well is it, by it’s absolute definition. It’s a yes/no situation. If you are unique in some respect, it means you are the only one example.

You probably all recognise this situation:

Dave needs something doing that he can’t do himself – let’s say it is creating an API for the file management package. It isn’t your job to do but it is something you can do. Dave is blocked until the API is created.

So, being a nice person, you tell Dave you will see what you can do for him over the next couple of days.

So why is it that what Dave hears is “Dave, I love you more than life itself, I am dedicated to this task and I WILL complete it before the end of tomorrow. My other tasks, emergency production issues and the untimely demise of my cat are all secondary to this endeavour.”.

You see, 24 hours later, Dave is at your desk “When will this be done?! I’m blocked until I get this!!!”. If he’s the guy I had recently his next step is to slap his fist into his palm as he utters, almost shouts “I NEED this!”.

I’m kind of expecting to get a bit of a comment-kicking over this one…

I never much liked mobile phones – Yes they are incredibly useful, yes they allow countries that lack a ground-based telephony network to create a nationwide system, yes they allow communication all the time from almost anywhere. That last point is partly why I dislike them. {Actually, I don’t like normal phones much, or how some people {like my wife} will interrupt a conversation to dash across the room to answer it. It’s just a person on the phone, it will take a message if someone wants to say something significant. If someone calls your name out in a crowd, do you abandon the people you are talking to, dash across the room and listen to them exclusively? No, so what act that way over a phone?}.

Sometimes I can become slightly annoyed by the silly way the media puts out total tosh and twaddle(*) that over-states the impact or drawbacks about technology (and science ( and especially medicine (and pretty much anything the media decides to talk about)))). Occasionally I get very vexed indeed.

My attention was drawn to some such thing about SSDs (solid State Discs) via a tweet by Gwen Shapira yesterday {I make no statement about her opinion in this in any way, I’m just thanking her for the tweet}. According to Computerworld

SSDs have a ‘bleak’ future, researchers say

For many, today is the last working day before Christmas and the festive season – So I sincerely wish upon everyone a Merry Christmas.. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, well the intent of my wishes still holds – I hope everyone; whether working or not; religious leanings for, against or indifferent; has an enjoyable few days during whatever end-of-year festives you have.

I’m going to be miserably now. You might want to stop reading here and maybe go to the shops for that last spell of retail hell or some other Christmas tradition. It’s probably best if you do…

A while back I was asked by a friend to blog about being a contractor. In the pub last week my friend reminded me of this and that I had not obliged him. I will – think of this as instalment one Jason…

I’ve been a contractor on and off for 18 years. For anyone not familiar with the concept, it is where you are self-employed and you simply hire yourself out to a company for a period of time or to do a specific job. You generally have less job security than an employee and less rights and benefits – No holiday pay, no paid sick leave, no annual pay increase {OK, so that one is rare for employees too these days}, no training and generally the first out the door when the money gets tight. In return you get more money when working and a lot, lot less to do with office politics, HR, annual reviews and the like.

It is not for everyone but I like being a contractor. It gives me a broader degree of experience.

I like it apart from one main thing.

How many people under the age of {Martin checks his age and takes a decade or so off} ohh, mid 30′s does any database design these days? You know, asks the business community what they want the system to do, how the information flows through their business, what information they need to report on. And then construct a logical model of that information? Judging by some of the comments I’ve had on my blog in the last couple of years and also the meandering diatribes of bitter, vitriolic complaints uttered by fellow old(er) hacks in the pub in the evening, it seems to be coming a very uncommon practice – and thus a rare and possibly dying skill.

{update – this topic has obviously been eating at my soul for many years. Andrew Clark and I had a discussion about it in 2008 and he posted a really good article on it and many, many good comments followed}

Everything seems to have turned into “Ready, Fire, Aim”. Ie, you get the guys doing the work in a room, develop some rough idea of what you want to develop (like, look at the system you are replacing), start knocking together the application and then {on more enlightened projects} ask the users what they think. The key points are the that development kicks off before you really know what you need to produce, there is no clear idea of how the stored data will be structured and you steer the ongoing development towards the final, undefined, target. I keep coming across applications where the screen layouts for the end users seem to almost be the design document and then someone comes up with the database – as the database is just this bucket to chuck the data into and scrape it out of again.

The functionality is the important thing, “we can get ‘someone’ to make the database run faster if and when we have a problem”.

Maybe I should not complain as sometimes I am that ‘someone’ making the database run faster. But I am complaining – I’m mad as hell and I ain’t gonna take it anymore! Oh, OK, in reality I’m mildly peeved and I’m going to let off steam about it. But it’s just wrong, it’s wasting people’s time and it results in poorer systems.

Now, if you have to develop a simple system with a couple of screens and a handful of reports, it might be a waste of time doing formal design. You and Dave can whack it together in a week or two, Chi will make the screens nice, it will be used by a handful of happy people and the job is done. It’s like building a wall around a flower bed. Go to the local builders merchants, get a pallet of bricks, some cement and sand (Ready), dig a bit of a trench where you want to start(Aim) and put the wall up, extending it as you see fit (Fire). This approach won’t work when you decide to build an office block and only a fool from the school of stupid would attempt it that way.

You see, as far as I am concerned, most IT systems are all about managing data. Think about it. You want to get your initial information (like the products you sell), present it to the users (those customers), get the new (orders) data, pass it to the next business process (warehouse team) and then mine the data for extra knowledge (sales patterns). It’s a hospital system? You want information about the patients, the staff, the beds and departments, tests that need doing, results, diagnoses, 15,000 reports for the regulators… It’s all moving data. Yes, a well design front end is important (sometimes very important) but the data is everything. If the database can’t represent the data you need, you are going to have to patch an alteration in. If you can’t get the data in quick enough or out quick enough, your screens and reports are not going to be any use. If you can’t link the data together as needed you may well not be able to DO your reports and screens. If the data is wrong (loses integrity) you will make mistakes. Faster CPUS are not going to help either, data at some point has to flow onto and off disks. Those slow spinning chunks of rust. CPUS have got faster and faster, rust-busting has not. So data flow is even more important than it was.

Also, once you have built your application on top of an inadequate database design, you not only have to redesign it, you have to:

• do some quick, hacky  fixes to get by for now
• migrate the existing data
• transform some of it (do some data duplication or splitting maybe)
• alter the application to cope
• schedule all of the above to be done together
• tie it in with the ongoing development of the system as hey, if you are not going to take time to design you are not going to take time to assess things before promising phase 2.

I’m utterly convinced, and experience backs this up, that when you take X weeks up front doing the database design, you save 5*X weeks later on in trying to rework the system, applying emergency hacks and having meetings about what went wrong. I know this is an idea out of the 80′s guys, but database design worked.

*sigh* I’m off to the pub for a pint and to reminisce about the good-old-days.