The race to the bottom. I started in the early 1980s. Employers championed tight code that worked well. During the late 1980s till today there has been a constant dumbing down of software development. Hacking on the fly was always shunned. Now it is called AGILE and expecting people to pay for a hand polished turd is standard business practice. Software quality has fallen through the floor and it is gaining speed as it heads … What surprised you the most in your career as a software engineer?Read more
Information Technology
Posts relating to the IT industry
Posted inExperience / Information Technology
The Upside of Coronavirus
Like most of you, I get a lot of spam. It sucks. Just cleaning out the junk mail folder can be time consuming because the auto-detection sometimes auto-detects the wrong thing. Here is a piece of spam which made me smile. This is something I didn’t really know. The length of the grace period between being canned and being sent home. I did know after going home one could have to wait up to a … The Upside of CoronavirusRead more
Posted inExperience / Information Technology
Most Text Editors Get Tabs Wrong
Why do PC based text editors get tabs wrong? I’ve been getting back into COBOL and writing a book on GnuCOBOL. This lead me to writing a book on Emacs. For no more people than they have, they’ve done an amazing job. This lead me to poking around for the correct editor, preferably one that could be close to a full blown IDE. I know. During my VAX/VMS days I happily used EDT, dropped to … Most Text Editors Get Tabs WrongRead more
Posted inExperience / Information Technology
The Best Part of Low End
As I get closer and closer to the cranky old man stage of life I get pickier and picker about my monitors and office lighting. I also find supposed high end products intolerable. Anyone who reads this blog knows I write a lot of books. “The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE” is off for final editing. I have two more books that are somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the … The Best Part of Low EndRead more
Posted inExperience / Information Technology
Making Sublime Text 3 Do COBOL
It’s a long way from an IDE like the script kiddie generation is used to. It’s also a long way from EDT on VMS, less of a distance from LSE though. LSE (Language Sensitive Editor) didn’t have color but it did have built in language HELP. Don’t worry if you don’t like the color, I just happen to like the Solarized color scheme. You can choose your own. The package control installation is broken. Lots … Making Sublime Text 3 Do COBOLRead more