2 If you've met me in the past decade, you probably know that I am
3 extremely passionate about computers. Let me first explain why.
5 On the most basic level computers are little (or big) machines that
6 can be programmed to do things, or
/compute/ if we're being
9 They host and provide access to the Internet, which is a pretty big
10 thing, but they do little things too like unlock your car door and
11 tell your microwave to beep at you. They solve problems. Big or small.
13 They're also
/everywhere/ - which can be scary to think about, but
14 ultimately helps propel us into the future.
16 There's something pretty cool about that - when you look at the
17 essence of computation. There are endless quantities of these machines
18 which follow the same basic rules and can be used to solve
/real/ 22 Now, let us consider the
/programmer/. They have power.
/real/ 23 power. They understand the language of computers, can whisper to them
24 in various dialects. It can be intimidating to witness until you
25 realize how often the programmer says the wrong thing - a bug.
27 In reality, the programmer has a symbiotic relationship with
28 computers. Good programmers understand this relationship well.
31 One day after I got my first job at a software company, I remember
32 being on an all-hands meeting due to a client service outage. We had
33 some management, our lead devs, product team, and one curious looking
34 man who happened to be our lead IT consultant who had just joined. He
35 was sitting up on a hotel bed, shirtless, vaping an e-cig, typing
36 away in what I can only imagine was a shell prompt.
38 After several minutes he took a swig from a bottle of Coke and said
39 "Node 6 is sick." then a few seconds later our services were
40 restored. For the next hour on the call he explained what happened and
41 why, but that particular phrase always stuck with me. He didn't say
42 Node 6 was down, or had an expired cert - his diagnosis was that /it/
46 The more you work closely with computers, the more you start to think
47 of them this way. You don't start screaming when the computer does the
48 wrong thing, you figure out what's wrong and learn from it. With
49 experience, you start to understand the different behaviors of the
50 machines you work with. I like to call this
/Machine Empathy/.
53 I already mentioned bugs - I write plenty of those, but usually I try
54 to write
/programs/. Programs to me are like poetry. I like to think
55 they are for the computer too.
57 Just like computers,
/computer programs/ come in different shapes and
58 sizes but in basic terms they are sets of instructions used to control
61 You can write programs to do anything - when I first started, my
62 programs made music. The program was a means to an end. Over time, I
63 started to see the program as something much more. I saw it as the
66 [fn:1] ... perform computations
70 Something that is missing from many organizations big or large, is an
71 effective way to store and access information, even about their own
74 It can be difficult problem to solve - usually there's the official
75 one, say Microsoft Sharepoint and then the list of unofficial sources
76 which becomes tribal corporate hacker knowledge. Maybe the unofficial
77 ones are more current, or are annotated nicely, but their very
78 existence breaks the system. There's no longer a single source of
81 My priority in this department is writing services which process and
82 store information from a variety of sources in a distributed knowledge
83 graph. The graph can later be queried to access information on-demand.
85 My idea of infrastructure is in fact to build my own Cloud. Needless
86 to say I don't have an O365 subscription, and wherever possible I'll
87 be relying on hardware I have physical access to. I'm not opposed to
88 cloud services at large but based on principle I like to think we
89 shouldn't be built on them.
