YANJ (Yet Another New Job)

 So, Startup, Inc. had what I can only guess in an investor clench and they laid off 10 people, including me.

Meh.  I got a new job in less than 5 weeks.

New Job

 So I up and changed jobs - no more working for Giant Souless Corporation; in stead, I'm working for Souless Startup Company.

It will be interesting to see if SSC has managed to actually implement agile.

Agile will fail

Because none of the business-side people bother to learn, and all the commercial tools allow them to avoid learning.

User stories that are written solely from the person at the keyboard, with no thought to the different parts of the architecture - so all the estimates require input from UI, middleware, and server-side staff, and can't be subdivided by the tool into group-specific work

Business-types who cannot define a feature with any precision - "customer will get a message with the offer", neglecting all the many ways the system needs to not repeat the message.

Non-leaders

So I've been having a bad day.  Wake up to a bunch of work bureaucracy bullshit - web forms that do not have working links, Satanically bad UI design, a ton of 'jobsworth' types telling me I have to do X, but not providing anything other than links to 47GB of text and no pointers.

Now the project that the team is supposed to be working on together is cobbled together by a guy who does not provide a working build script, has both JSON and XML format config files, and so on.

I/m fucking furious

Bad API behavior

Ok, so we were running test code yesterday evening to get some data for a presentation, and there was a typo in a text string that a downstream system didn't like.  So this morning I get angry emails about the "bad data" and have to roll back the changes.

But what really pisses me off is that the downstream system was coded to expect exactly certain strings in that field, and if the contents did not match, IT FUCKING CRASHED.

This is not good software design.  It can complain, log errors, ignore the messages, all sorts of annoying things, but it should not, EVER crash when it can easily avoid doing so.

The Perfect Office

Screw open plan offices.

They suck in all ways.

The ideal office plan has individual real offices for each developer -walls all the way to the ceiling, real closing door, etc.

Each cluster of 3-7 offices opens onto a common space with a few tables and whiteboards for group work, etc.

Several clusters all share a common kitchen space, where at least once a week there is a company-paid lunch.  Access to the cluster space is only through this common space, so you can get the (limited) benefit of people mingling for "collaboration", and the common free lunch means people will see other groups from time to time, and trigger any serendipitous synergies.

Adjustable sit/stand desks in each office, at least 2 large whiteboards in each office (Minimum 10x10 ft space).  Two or more monitors, wireless mouse and kayboard.

Logging advice

Ok, an actual post about doing things right, instead of me venting my spleen.

So, let's talk about logging messages.

When writing logging messages for technical use - monitoring, statistics, etc, pick a separating character that is not part of the various fields you have interest in.

For example, most log messages will include a timestamp, so use of ':' is out.  Likewise, if the timestamps include the date, the '/' or '-' is right out.

A good choice for the field divider is the '|', and then the use of spaces as separation of the subfields.