batou

Thank you for raising this one noisily; very grateful.

I've put a full stop on upgrading our test kit to this while we analyse everything.

You're right. But this was in an area where there were no staff. One reason I quit was we couldn't even get someone to repair PCs in so I ended up having to do it.

We still use email like we did 15 years ago...

Did anyone know they issued a CLR already that worked on ARM, PPC, OSX and FreeBSD and is open source?

It even requires perl to build!

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4917

(they yanked official support for half of the bits bit its still in the tree)

Yes I worked for a guy in 1998 who basically invented both salesforce and AWS and wanted me to join him as the technical lead. I thought he was nuts and told him no. Due to the geographical location of the company he couldn't find anyone else to do it and went back to fixing PCs.

Now I look back with regret.

It will be an asset. The most successful team in my company is built out of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and mathematicians.

Very good question.

That's kind of scary as it's exactly what I did. Same course, same country, same time :)

I'd agree with the embedded side though. The business side is a shit sandwich I really wish I hadn't got into.

I big chunk of us operate on those side channels already.

Well we can but you end up with a dead limb and a dead animal.

This happens with the plants occasionally too.

I did this, on a smaller scale. The house I live in was built on an old orchard and we were graced with one of the very few remaining apple trees in the garden. It produces relatively sour apples useful for cider and cooking etc. We think they are Bramleys but not 100% sure. I grafted a few branches off a Blenheim Orange stock a friend had that had fruited for a couple of years first. 2 didn't work but 4 did and we have two varieties now on one tree. They're in the same pollination group as well and we planted meadow flower mix around it to attract the pollinators so you actually end up with more apples on both parts of the tree. Last year one of the branches snapped off entirely because there were so many apples on it.

Edit: photo from a couple of years back after we nearly emptied it on a cider run :) - http://i.imgur.com/aYacpT4.jpg

It's quite easy, perfectly routine and has been done for a very long time indeed. Hundreds of years if not more.

You can take this to extremes if you really want (sorry for the Daily Mail link): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2437247/250-varietie...

This sounds similar to a reporting system I wrote in about 1999 using Word automation API. It sat on a windows NT box and watched for changes on a netware share. That would load up a text file, read it, parse it and pick documents and fill in bookmarks in the documents then print it to a printer or PDF file.

Worked wonderfully apart from the memory leaks :)

Yep. I decided to take the piss as much as possible.

I wanted the income and less hours and demanded it. They said no, so I automated most of my responsibilities and do a 25-30 hour week anyway. I work from home and most of my job is thinking and that's non-deterministic.

You only live once (I shudder saying that but it's true).

Not joking but these are all fads, mostly recycled ideas and nowhere near the leading edge of thought. The moment you hit your mid 30s or ~15 years experience, motivation is driven by two aspects:

1. what hurt you badly in the last 15 years

2. which things have already been done but have been reinvented an repackaged differently.

I've seen all these before in other incarnations.

I do this on a small scale. Couldn't agree more. It really does bring a lot to your mental health.

I'm sitting in the kitchen writing this staring out the window at a nice juicy tomato with my name on it. I'm having it for lunch in my sandwich.

You do have to get used to failure. For example, it's July an my butternut plants are only 2 inches tall an have no chance of fruiting ever.

No, CQS. CQRS is slightly more complicated and decouples everything via a service bus model along with a massive software ghetto lead by Udi Dahan who I personally despise. An excellent marketer but a poor engineer. I've cleaned up two companies who bought into that idea (event sourcing, service bus etc).

Simply a command is something mutative. A query is something not mutative that returns information. There is no further specification other than that.

It doesn't mandate a bus or event queue or publishing model nor whether or not the commands are synchronous or asynchronous.

I'm there. I decided one day that it's just a job and found what I really wanted to do.

So I'm reading maths and physics now. The joy in my life is actually from taking things to pieces and seeing how they work and there is plenty of that there.

For more of being with you, my company drank the microservices kool aid. Rather than concentrate on building a quality product we've got buzzword soaked boiled shit that doesn't work properly. There's nothing wrong with microservices in principle but they lack the talent and experience to pull it off. So there I am, a doomsayer, a figurehead on a ship of fools.

Edit: Just to add, I work for liars and a personality cult and that is the root cause. Why don't I leave? Money is amazing and that gives me the freedom I need.

I agree with this to a point.

I just built an API over HTTP, ignored all the REST rules and separated everything into commands and queries. Commands are POST and do something. Queries are GET and get something. I need to write this up.

Schema is hell with JSON etc. I don't get how you can enforce something like this cleanly in a language like JavaScript under node.js or something without piles of assertions or some weird meta-format. I'm barely managing with an informal

Also JSON is a crapfest for transferring data. Need something better than that over HTTP that is strongly typed with strong schema and has flexible binary formats other than whacking a base64 encoded string in an object or using multi-part mime.

And then you're back at RPC and protobufs or something similar. Perhaps that's the answer.

I'll try that. Thanks for the tip.

Sorry to hear this. Thanks for the warning - I'll get my eyes tested next week!

I'll pass on both of them. Thanks for the info!

That sounds like it's dangerous so I'd avoid that :-)

Thanks for the confidence builder; much appreciated!

I drink (water) like a fish. Have tried that one for over a year unfortunately :(

Off topic; does anyone know if there are any services that get rid of floaters? I've got a nasty one right in the middle of my best eye and it is very annoying. Has been there for two years and I haven't got used to it yet.

It slowly fell behind. I made the mistake of using it for a product pre-MVC. When MVC came along they jumped the shark and we ended up ripping it out and replacing bits with Autofac and some light weight abstractions we put together ourselves.

This is right and wrong.

Right because yes there could be a ton more open source solutions out there. Also right because most of them are either shit, commercial or abandonware. This is a big problem. We imported a lot of stuff and found it was mostly crap (Nservicebus, justsaying come to mind)

Also wrong because a massive portion of what we do is a solved problem on .net. There's not a whole load of stuff to reinvent.

What I'd like to point out though is name me one platform I can build stuff for desktop, mobile, web, embedded, plugged into office applications, deployed by a single click from the web, deployed to single machines, deployed to thousands of workstations, will talk to just about anything under the sun from REST, SOAP, WS-*, databases, spreadsheets, document models, message queues, serial ports, pipes, TCP channels, has a request broker and distributed object model and has several data access methods from ORM, SQL, table gateway abstraction and has very decent tooling, provisioning, integrated deployment, testing, profiling and backwards compatibility going back 20 years all out of the box with no glue required?

On top of that there's support which is actually very good for everything above.

Nope there's only one and Java doesn't come close.

Some organisations won't allow use of a product unless there's a support option. I can understand this after a complete system failure a few years back on an open source unsupported product. I was hired to fix it! :) Mostly though in comes EnterpriseDB and support costs then. Problem is always staff availability here in the UK though so we always end up with SQL Server and Orscle bodies.

Ugh this brings back memories. After spending 1988-92 on ARM stuff (Acorn) I ended up doing something on DOS with assembly, well MASM. x86 was horrible in the 16-bit segmented mode. I finished the job off in Turbo Pascal in the end. To this day it scares me and I hadn't delved lower than C since.

Edit: I've still got a copy of MS DOS encyclopaedia sitting on my bookshelf actually. Signed by Gates. Ebay time!

It shouldn't be. They're POSIX focused.

I'm actually arguing that my RDBMS is no place for a compiler. I want to compile everything externally, test it and then deploy it. Not deploy it, compile it, cross fingers.