6th Module: Uncle Bob's Cabin


I think this has been one of the most dense and varied source content for one of the blog entries for this course. I guessed at first that the podcast would concentrate on topics mainly revolving around techniques and tools that make a programmer a craftsman and how one can benefit from said practices. Bob Martin seems like a very passionate person who understands, or at least tries to, what are the causes and situations that result in the current state on the industry. He also loves to code and believes that everything that we produce must be a reflection of said code. In general, I have been convinced by him and I really liked all his anecdotes and general knowledge of computer and programming history. He really does come off as an eccentric uncle.

His point about architects and how young people tend to aspire or have management roles as a goal, rather than just aspiring to be really good programmers is kind of a mixed bag, at least for me. Normally, when one person is in charge of managing something, they get so completely lost in it that they can no longer contribute the way they used to. Of course, this does not have to be the norm, but it can be common if it is a big project. One example that I can personally think of is with the school project of Semestre I. I was assigned as “manager” and had to oversee the general production process. While I was dying to write some code and leave my mark on the software we were producing, most of the time I was solving (or trying to solve) logistics, human and scheduling issues. Maybe I was just inexperienced, but I think that you can only be a great programmer or craftsman if you are able within your workplace to commit yourself to the goal of 100% coding.

The final conversation Bob and Markus have about the future of programming languages is very interesting to me. Something that caught my attention is to how it dismisses most functional programming languages for the industry or as particularly useful, while at the same time prophesizing the advent of a language that will have features from those languages in a way more people can use them.  I think many programmers that play around with functional programming would wish that it was used a lot more in the industry. At least that is my case.

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas más populares de este blog

7th Design: WarGames

It has been a long time since I have seen a movie from the 80’s. I had forgotten how corny they can be, not that it is a bad thing, and it is just that they are not as common as they used to be. I really liked the film; it made me laugh with all the ridiculous situations and all the liberties it takes when David hacks into stuff and gets out of situations at the nick of time. For the most part, it showcases what was a very serious topic (the Cold War) as a parody of itself, with chubby militarymen, threats about launching nukes at the slightest provocation and a paranoid government that would even suspect a 16 year old of Soviet espionage just because he has low grades but he is smart. There are, however, some plot points that I just could not get out of my head while watching the movie. First of all, I do not think that Joshua’s nature when David plays a game with him is justified or fully explained. At the beginning, one of the main WOPR engineers tells the spokesperson from ...
Leer más

4th module: Architecture as a placeholder for something hard

Architecture can be a hard word to define, especially for a student who has had close to zero experience working with industrial or real life projects. While the article works hard to try and describe it based on the experience of several people. Each one has his/her own opinion and “guesses” the answer based on they think is important (or not) about this mysterious part of software creation. In this post, I will try to do the same from a unique and rather ignorant point of view. Up until the last semester, I had never really been concerned with decisions concerning the grand scheme of projects, whether because all of the work that I had been working on has been relatively simple (less than 3,000 lines of total code) or because said projects never needed to be seen by the perspective of someone like an architect or devops engineer. I just needed to make sure the program met the requirements of the class I was in and that was it. Going by that kind of experience, all I knew abou...
Leer más

5th Design: Virtue is balance between XP and Vista

The article written by Martin Fowler proposes a number of interesting techniques that seem to be the result of working and suffering a little with several kinds of design patterns (or lack thereof).   He shows that he has a lot of experience working with several teams and different types of projects, enough that he has been able to experiment and create his own way or method for designing. This method tries to takes the best practices from both evolutionary and up-front design, claiming that they both have advantages as well as pitfalls. However, his writing may suggest that he likes XP (good evolutionary) a little bit better, since he only mentions a couple of problems with the agile practices, most of them related to the people who practice them badly or take them too seriously. I completely agree with the part about people and how their disposition or will can make a project be successful or a complete mess. Last semester, I was in a special project for the school that r...
Leer más