It's sometimes hard to keep the modern stream of consciousness flowing when stuff as truly unimportant as work gets in the way. This however has been my limiter for a while now.
In 2005 I was asked by an old acquaintance to go look at the problems plaguing a C++ application that he was responsible for. This thing does electronic trading of credit derivatives for one of Europe's biggest banks. My contract was for a week.. I am still at the company with more and more work to do each week.
I recently moved from credit derivatives to commodity trading where I am now on a small team of architects dedicated to dragging the company kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I've always considered myself more as an educator than anything else and this job is no different to many of my others because I am mentoring a whole team of VB6 developers in how to survive in the real world. I recently gave a presentation on patterns in which I started by asking "Has anyone heard of patterns?" All the hands went up. I then asked "Who knows any patterns or has used one in their work?" I was rewarded with a room full of blank-staring faces and no hands.
So, the mandate of the moment is to assist inexperienced developers to "migrate" a truly vast and monolithic VB6 application set to .Net and make it work. Can you say "Refactoring"?
In one sense I think this is a really shocking revelation that even in today's blog-following, webcast-viewing world of geeks that people who program for a living still don't know about the gang of four and have never even understood the simplicity of Singleton or the joy of Dependency Injection. In another sense however, I allow myself a little chuckle of schardenfreuder-ish glee when I realised that there is still a place in the world for old blokes who know the difference between their arse and their elbow.
A job that was originally a weeks work, that became six-months, that mutated in to two-and-a-half-years of living in a hotel three nights a week has now become a full-time job educating "cub" developers in the joys of how to program in the real world and so 60% of my family (that's six of us) are moving to the metrolopis in the hope of being able to spend more time together. (I don't get to sleep with my wife enough at the moment....)
We've just signed for a lease on a house in a tres chic part of the country, outside of town but 30 minutes from the bank where I work and we intend to move in early August.
So, the mandate of the moment is to assist inexperienced developers to "migrate" a truly vast and monolithic VB6 application set to .Net and make it work. Can you say "Refactoring"?
In one sense I think this is a really shocking revelation that even in today's blog-following, webcast-viewing world of geeks that people who program for a living still don't know about the gang of four and have never even understood the simplicity of Singleton or the joy of Dependency Injection. In another sense however, I allow myself a little chuckle of schardenfreuder-ish glee when I realised that there is still a place in the world for old blokes who know the difference between their arse and their elbow.
A job that was originally a weeks work, that became six-months, that mutated in to two-and-a-half-years of living in a hotel three nights a week has now become a full-time job educating "cub" developers in the joys of how to program in the real world and so 60% of my family (that's six of us) are moving to the metrolopis in the hope of being able to spend more time together. (I don't get to sleep with my wife enough at the moment....)
We've just signed for a lease on a house in a tres chic part of the country, outside of town but 30 minutes from the bank where I work and we intend to move in early August.
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