I’m declaring my storage problems to be resolved. Though I’m sure this will come up again. I have to believe at this point I will not encounter the issue for several more years. I now have about 5 TB of free storage across several systems, with another 1.5 TB drive ready to act as either a backup or additional space. About three years ago I had about 1 TB of free space and no idea how I’d ever fill it. Now I know.
The introduction of catalogs of patterns has been a great advancement to software engineering. These collections of common solutions to common design problems are an excellent way to pass knowledge of the software engineering craft from one practitioner to another. I am happy to have several great texts from this category taking up valuable shelf space. Design Patterns, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, Release It!, and Enterprise Integration Patterns are some of my favorite references that continue to be a source of inspiration whenever I encounter difficult design decisions. However, they are not the last word in software engineering that some engineers present them as. Acting as though pointing out that a pattern exists is a valid appeal to authority for using that pattern is like saying that serving seafood to those that are allergic is acceptable because the seafood was prepared using the recipe of a master chef.
Here are a few of my favorite software engineering related books I’ve read in the last year. To make this list the book had to be something I read in 2009, and it had to be interesting, useful, or just plain insanely great at totally changing my perspective on something.
Since 2009 is almost officially over here is a list of my favorite software engineering related tools I’ve been using this year. Most of these tools have been around for a while, and I didn’t necessarily just start using them this year. These are all things I just found to be very useful throughout the year doing my job.
Seth Godin wrote this ingenious analysis of market changes titled “It’s not the rats you need to worry about“. It got me to thinking about how I prefer CDs over downloaded music. Primarily I have this preference based on the quality of the content. I’d prefer not to have more physical media taking up space in my house, but until someone offers CD quality lossless downloads I feel like I’m stuck. However, I’m not the ideal customer. The last time I bought a CD was 6 months ago, the time before that was a year and a half. One CD a year is not going to sustain your industry.
I had an interesting exchange with my manager yesterday. We had our very first team meeting under the guise of the new “Great Place to Work” initiative. We were informed that there is no budget for conferences this year so SOL on the professional development plans. There was also an open question about if we understood our performance goals. The exchange went something like this:
Management: Does everyone understand their performance goals?
Me: I’m a little confused. I’m told I need to make 4 contributions that fix an issue in production. What if there are not four issues in production in my product? (I’m thinking do I really need to break something in order to have done a good job this review cycle.)
About a week after release I ran the 10.6.1 update only to find that it had failed to install. I’m not sure exactly what happened since my typical method of carrying out updates is to click whatever needs clicked then move back to working on whatever other system is available. I do know that I was left with a dialog proclaiming that the update had failed and I should restart. Fine. I restart. Upon restarting the machine – my MacBook Pro circa 2007 – sat at the boot screen (grey screen with the little spinner) for at least 30 minutes. Not good. I restarted again but this time with the verbose boot sequence – Command-V at startup. Turns out the machine could not find a needed kernel extension for SCSI. Not sure why it needs SCSI but apparently the file was lost in the attempted update. It was clear that whatever happened the system was not going to fix itself, and Google wasn’t sure what was happening either as most the posts I could find related to the specific error talked of hardware failures.
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