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* On Computers |
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If you've met me in the past decade, you probably know that I am |
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extremely passionate about computers. Let me first explain why. |
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On the most basic level computers are little (or big) machines that |
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can be programmed to do things, or /compute/ if we're being |
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technical.[fn:1] |
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They host and provide access to the Internet, which is a pretty big |
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thing, but they do little things too like unlock your car door and |
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tell your microwave to beep at you. They solve problems. Big or small. |
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They're also /everywhere/ - which can be scary to think about, but |
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ultimately helps propel us into the future. |
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There's something pretty cool about that - when you look at the |
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essence of computation. There are endless quantities of these machines |
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which follow the same basic rules and can be used to solve /real/ |
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problems. |
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** The Programmer |
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Now, let us consider the /programmer/. They have power. /real/ |
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power. They understand the language of computers, can whisper to them |
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in various dialects. It can be intimidating to witness until you |
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realize how often the programmer says the wrong thing - a bug. |
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In reality, the programmer has a symbiotic relationship with |
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computers. Good programmers understand this relationship well. |
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#+begin_annecdote |
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One day after I got my first job at a software company, I remember |
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being on an all-hands meeting due to a client service outage. We had |
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some management, our lead devs, product team, and one curious looking |
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man who happened to be our lead IT consultant who had just joined. He |
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was sitting up on a hotel bed, shirtless, vaping an e-cig, typing |
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away in what I can only imagine was a shell prompt. |
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After several minutes he took a swig from a bottle of Coke and said |
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"Node 6 is sick." then a few seconds later our services were |
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restored. For the next hour on the call he explained what happened and |
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why, but that particular phrase always stuck with me. He didn't say |
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Node 6 was down, or had an expired cert - his diagnosis was that /it/ |
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was /sick/. |
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#+end_annecdote |
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The more you work closely with computers, the more you start to think |
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of them this way. You don't start screaming when the computer does the |
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wrong thing, you figure out what's wrong and learn from it. With |
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experience, you start to understand the different behaviors of the |
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machines you work with. I like to call this /Machine Empathy/. |
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** Programs |
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I already mentioned bugs - I write plenty of those, but usually I try |
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to write /programs/. Programs to me are like poetry. I like to think |
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they are for the computer too. |
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Just like computers, /computer programs/ come in different shapes and |
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sizes but in basic terms they are sets of instructions used to control |
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a computer. |
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You can write programs to do anything - when I first started, my |
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programs made music. The program was a means to an end. Over time, I |
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started to see the program as something much more. I saw it as the |
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music itself. |
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[fn:1] ... perform computations |
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* On Infra |
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Something that is missing from many organizations big or large, is an |
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effective way to store and access information, even about their own |
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org. |
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It can be difficult problem to solve - usually there's the official |
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one, say Microsoft Sharepoint and then the list of unofficial sources |
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which becomes tribal corporate hacker knowledge. Maybe the unofficial |
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ones are more current, or are annotated nicely, but their very |
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existence breaks the system. There's no longer a single source of |
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truth. |
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My priority in this department is writing services which process and |
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store information from a variety of sources in a distributed knowledge |
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graph. The graph can later be queried to access information on-demand. |
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My idea of infrastructure is in fact to build my own Cloud. Needless |
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to say I don't have an O365 subscription, and wherever possible I'll |
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be relying on hardware I have physical access to. I'm not opposed to |
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cloud services at large but based on principle I like to think we |
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shouldn't be built on them. |