Never again.

This is an IRC conversation from this morning reproduced in full with minor edits to formatting, spelling and removal of system messages.

09:49 < n0ob> so then it would seem that the summary is that the article is wrong, but postfix notation is inherently superior except that it requires learning
09:49 < lumy> did the post fix thing come from the article?
09:50 < lumy> (the being superiour part)
09:50 < n0ob> no
09:50 < lumy> ok. then we agree about the article.
09:50 < yangman> I wouldn't say the article is wrong, but starts on a good path then misses the point
09:51 < yangman> ... and mostly starts on that path from the wrong point, but, really, only linguists would pick up on that
09:51 < yangman> the actual neat part is how language has changed to better suit the hardware model
09:52 < n0ob> how so?
09:52 < yangman> FORTH is reverse polish because arguments and return values go on the stack, and you need to be very explicitly aware of what's on the stack
09:52 < yangman> (hardware model is perhaps wrong. I'll corret that later)
09:52 < n0ob> well, hardware model may not be incorrect, but there are more than one model to choose from
09:53 < yangman> with a lot of languages that followed after, the stack is basically abstracted away
09:53 < yangman> with FORTH, "what's on the stack?" is very key
09:53 < yangman> with stuff like lisp, "what's my result?" is what's important
09:53 < yangman> NOW
09:53 < yangman> what I initially wanted, but didn't have time nor energy for, is to point this out and make the connection back to Japanese
09:54 < yangman> there's a phenomenon in Japanese, and actually mandarin as well, where the verb is promoted to earlier positions in an utterance
09:54 < yangman> English has this also, but to a lesser extent
09:54 < yangman> so, instead of "(I) fruit(obj) ate"
09:55 < yangman> it's instead "(I) ate, fruit(obj)"
09:55 < yangman> making the connection back to "what's important", you can say that while the fact that a fruit was eaten is important in the first, in the second it was the action
09:56 < yangman> making the connection back to FORTH vs Lisp, you have "what object did I manipulate" vs "what manipulation did I perform"
09:57 < yangman> anyways, that's my outline for a blog post
09:57 < yangman> I got 10 minutes into trying to find linguistic papers on the phenomenon I was describing, but gave up
09:57 < n0ob> that is an interesting point
09:57 < lumy> heh.
09:58 < yangman> but, since I just typed all of that out, it's going on my blog

(I graduated from university with a joint degree in Computing Science and Linguistics. While no longer fluent in Japanese, I lived and went to school in the Tokyo area for 4 continuous years, leaving the country for Canada at age 12.)

11:14 < krichter|work> yup, perforce
11:14 < yangman> p4 is like a sleigh dog with some weird mental condition
11:15 < yangman> everything is fine and peachy most of the time, but occasionally, for no reason, it’ll tear up all your socks or run your sleigh into that tree
11:15 < yangman> that specific tree, around the corner, by the shed
11:15 < yangman> you don’t know why
11:15 < yangman> but, at the end of the day, you’re just glad it’s there at all, because those 400kg crates don’t haul themselves
11:16 < n0ob> also, branches seems to require brain surgery
11:16 < cdemwell> lol
11:16 < yangman> yeah, it’s a trick you’ve heard that the dog can do, but you’re always afraid to try because you notice people that say they do them are often missing limbs

Joy of joys.

Now, if I actually had time to actually play games…

So, that’s one more off the list.

Unfortunately, I’ve confirmed that the front motor mounts have gone bad, so said list is not actually any shorter.

While the filler bolt is M14 with fine thread (14mm x 1.5mm), the drain bolt is a M10 (10mm x 1.5mm). There was a lot of half-information about the exact sizing of these bolts, and it is not specified in the service manual. (At least not in the one I managed to find.)

The filler bolt is placed in such a place that it is not possible to get most (all?) clutch-type torque wrenches into where it needs to be, while a standard wrench or even a smaller ratchet would fit without issue. With the right lengths of extensions, you can get the head of the ratchet inside the suspension assembly where this is not a problem. A breaker bar is usable without extensions.

Finally, the filler hole is only a few cetimeters below the sidewall of the wheel well, making filling from the side rather difficult and slow. It is perhaps quicker and easier to use a funnel with a very long hose attachment and filling from above the engine compartment.

Now, please direct your attention to Exhibit B: RFC 3875, section 4.1.7. Specifically, the below quoted paragraph:

   The server MUST set this variable; if the Script-URI does not include
   a query component, the QUERY_STRING MUST be defined as an empty
   string ("").

A potential  poit user recently encountered this problem.   While I would like to update the lighttpd bug entry alerting them to this crucial violation of specification, I’m also unwilling to sign up to yet another bug tracker just to fire off a single comment; avoiding such overhead is precisely the reason why I support OpenID.

Update: Mere minutes later, said user has pinged the bug.  Hopefully this leads to a resolution more correct than the first.

21:06 < calyth> \o/

21:08 < jeikobu> \o_

21:20 < calyth> _o/

21:20 < calyth> _o_

21:20 < calyth> |o|

21:21 < calyth> .o.

21:21 < ffff> (o(

[...]

22:50 < yangman> that is a fairly accurate depiction of climbing, yes

So, lets try and pin point why.  It may be that the current software business culture is fundamentally incompatible with my personal goals and philosophies, or that a string of bad luck has seriously jaded my subconscious feelings about the profession.  You may sympathize with the following, or dismiss me as a huge pussy that needs to suck it up.  Whatever the case, it’s time for a rant.

But first, watch this: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.  If you’ve already seen it, watch it again.

Financially, being a software developer has netted, essentially, zero.  Despite emerging from university a dozen moons ago with almost a year and a half of professional experience and free of debt, I have been unable to provide for my own living expenses since sometime in 2008.  Being laid off twice in less than as many years has certainly not helped matters.  Forget trying to make an impact on a team: being accepted in to team in the first place has never been anything short of near-impossible.  Even before the market collapse, my first co-op position did not involve working with software development at all, and my second attempt yielded only a couple interviews, despite having extensive programming experience outside of school.  Worse still, I’m paralyzed by a—perhaps irrational—fear that if I spend significant time in a field away from development I may never gain entrance again, especially having not yet made it past the “junior” phase of my career.  Does it not, after all,  signal that one is uninterested in pursuing programming as a career, and worse, that they might not be good enough?  Of course, it’s also time spent not getting more experience; with professional experience apparently favoured above most else, people with luck like mine appear to be perpetually “inexperienced” enough to gain more of it.

That, however, is not the cause of my shift in attitude.  Hang on to your tower of hats, because here come more words.

I became a programmer because I was intrigued with the idea of making computers do neat things.  Not computing, as through toolkits, libraries, and frameworks, but computers in the literal, physical sense.  I don’t mind having to know things like strides, fences, and word alignment; I enjoyed assembly programming on an 8-bit, single-accumulator microprocessor; I even once applied to be a firmware developer in Saskatoon.  Saskatoon, for crying out loud.  Alas, the modern software market has very little room for people with my kind of disposition, but that’s OK, because I kept myself occupied with mastering novel, shiny new things.

But, to what purpose?  Am I a better person for knowing how to work six different web frameworks instead of just two?  Can I derive happiness from knowing one more obscure, undocumented bug in PHP?  Is that mouldy block of cheese still in the fridge, or did I already toss that out?  I’ll just come right out and say it: I don’t care about the web development.  I find no joy in mastering more JavaScript, CSS, RoR, Twisted, or whatever database that’s currently the rage.  No, I won’t build you a website.

Furthermore, it frustrates me when job postings list “self-motivated” as a requirement, as if to deny any notion that programmers can—and do—derive motivation from the work itself.  On the whole, the divide between what developers need to thrive and what management are willing to provide is still as wide as ever.  For every story I hear about awesome work places and interesting work, I hear two more about micromanaging bosses, design-by-marketing, unreasonable workloads, or leadership by incompetence.

Finally, I have passions outside of hacking, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that none of them involve computing.  There are things I can do to improve my chances of employment (spend all my time at a computer working on open source projects, move to Ontario, give up computing and go back to school, etc) but most of them, I feel, must come not as mere compromises, but by giving up some fundamental part of my identity.  It’s a cost I’m not yet willing to pay.

I haven’t given up, though.  Not yet.

Despite the unbearable tools and brain-dead designs, all the terrible stories, and all the depressing weeks not knowing how much longer I may have to make my savings last, I’m still trying my chances in the hopes that, this time, it’s going to be great; that this time, there’ll be interesting projects for years to come; that this time, I can find purpose in what I do that aligns with my own.

Will I succeed?  Who knows.  What I do know, though, is that I am no longer afraid to complain out loud.

My earliest memory of using a computer is way back in the late 80′s, playing Pacman on a who-knows-what in a computer lab at my father’s university.  I wasn’t very good at it, but I was also five. There is a photo from even earlier of baby-me, wearing pants with a butt flap (hanging open; no diapers), back-side to the camera, again in a lab of one of my parents’. I’m standing on a chair in the photo because it would be impossible to reach the keys otherwise.

The whereabouts of the photo is unknown, but I have seen it, and I am damn proud of its existence.

I inherited most of my technical-mindedness from my father, who is a very capable hacker of his own right.  The story goes that although we couldn’t afford a TV of our own in China, we would almost always have one to watch because he was constantly fixing them for other people. To this day, if any sort of electronics break in our household, it will often be disassembled, then repaired or scavenged for parts.  It’s getting harder and harder, of course, but I can’t remember the last time we actually disposed of an appliance because it was deemed mechanically unrepairable.

There’s no being humble about it: I have The Knack.

Sprouting

“I got my start early” would probably be the expected opening to this paragraph. But, I didn’t. Owning a personal computer in China in those days was unthinkable.  It was less so years later in Japan, but still something very much unattainable on my parents modest income.  Less than a year before leaving Japan for Canada, my family received a used computer as a gift. I managed to find a few programming books from my elementary school’s library that teaches game programming, but only to copy the final code samples so I could play a few games. Although the interest was there, I was simply unwilling to put in the effort to learn programming.

My first serious dive into software development happened in the late 90s, towards the beginning of high school, when I got my hands on a copy of Macromedia Flash.  Not unlike most other youth with similar dispositions, the want to become a video game developer was a significant driving factor.  With my previous attempts at Java Applets and C++ failing to yield results, having a built-in vector graphics engine was an instant win.  My Flash development, programming wise, peaked when I produced a discrete 2-body gravity simulator for my Physics 11 final project. I was, no doubt, the biggest nerd in my class.

From there, I expanded to Delphi Pascal (to build a MUD client plug-in), took a brief detour in x86 assembly (Delphi’s substring replace function was too slow), picked up Java when I became a developer for the above mentioned MUD, finally learned enough C++ to hash out a few simple CLI applications, then dropped way down on the abstraction scale to PIC assembly for a self-directed project in electronics for my final year in high school.

A couple months later, I started formal studies in computing science at Simon Fraser University.  This would also be the first time since elementary school that I am taught programming in a classroom.

Growing Tall

The rest, as they say, is history. Theories were learnt, jargon was absorbed, and line after line of code were written.  I got involved in open source development, worked a handful of semesters at an actual software company, and, eventually, got a piece of paper declaring me a Bachelor of Computing Science.  There are even people using the code I’ve released to the world.

As a hacker, life was good.

A Drought Approaches?

Life, though, wasn’t good.

I’m not enjoying this.

Somewhere along the way, the side of me that hungered for intellectual knowledge and challenge had decided that it’s had enough.  What was once a hobby of novelty and intrigue has, over time, turned into the repetitive and mundane. While I still enjoy the act of problem solving, hacking for its own sake began to feel unfulfilling, banal, and, worst of all, pointless.

So, where to go from here? My long-term plans, as of the last few years anyway, have always been to make a graceful exist from the software industry after earning what I feel has been enough from it.  My hope is that once I am no longer programming for a living, I may be able to enjoy it again.  On the other hand, I am becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of no longer doing this at all. The knack and geekiness will always be there, of course, but, at least for the moment, my future as a hacker isn’t looking too bright.

Then again, who knows. I never planned to become a computing scientist, either.