The Dark side of being a Software Developer

IBM launched a campaign almost five years ago : „Where teams are heroes“. On conferences they distributed light blue t-shirts on whose back a team of software developers was pictured as super-hero cartoon heroes. We all want to be such heroes don ‘t we? Be famous like Kent Beck, Martin Fowler or Uncle Bob Martin , Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman and others, don’t we?

And we all kinda live and work in that dream. The long hours and efforts spent on last ditch deadlines, the lengthy and emotional discussions about a problem and our effort to be just the man who saves the team and the project. We all like to be the person people go to fix hard problems.

I lived the dream also. I worked day and night, fifteen hours a day weekends and holidays on tough projects which needed to be finished by a certain deadline or the client and our company will be in grave peril threatening their very existence. Does it sound familiar? I even worked several times from dusk till down, twenty four or even thirty hours consecutive too meet a deadline and afterwards I felt like a god. I’ve leaded a team to hell and beck and completed those damned screens just in time for the client presentation in the morning. And I’ve been doing such shenanigans for some time now.

What is the cost of such a way of life? What is the price we as people pay for doing such a service for our company and our clients?

What is the dark side of being a software developer?

SAS Special Forces WWII (Africa)

Let me tell you my story. Something that happened to me at the turn of the millennium.
  Let me tell you what price I paid for my way of life.

My wife threatened to divorce me a dozen of times, threw me out of my bedroom (temporarily thank God) , yelled at me continuously and generally made my life a living hell. Often I was made to choose between my family or my work. And both seemed critical at that moment. And I really wanted her to understand that what I was doing was important and critical and serious consequences will happened for multiple people if I don’t deliver. And she would yell at me and tell me that I’m not a soldier, or a doctor or a policeman that I do not work 24h a day and I’m not on back and call every day of my life. The situation was more drastic when my son or her were sick and I had to work.

Ultimately I tried to work from 5 a.m to 17 p.m , but the stress and the long hours and the lack of sleep just put me into bed for a couple of weeks. What a bummer.

Not my health, not my wife were the most horrible, most darkest and vilest price I had to pay. It was my four year old son.

One day he just wouldn’t budge from me after lunch. He cried and clinged to my leg and didn’t want me to leave. And I didn’t, but started to play with him. During the play he said to me that he had a dream : “Daddy, I dreamed that next time you will go to your work I will not see you for a long, long time”.

My work gave my son nightmares that he is going to lose me.

When my mother put him to bed one night he asked to her if I’m going to come to bed next him when I stop working for the night and why is daddy working during the night after working the morning and the day and the last five days like that.

My soul froze and my eyes started crying and my scream stopped in my mouth and I cursed my self for being such a monster to my family.

Is it really all that important?

The client set a deadline but made thirty percent change on its original request all which was accepted by us and the deadline slipped day by day into oblivion and often we would rewrite the same feature or screen several times. The work would just pile on with an even increasing defect rate due to long hours and stress and the dead line would remain the same and my colleagues and friend and I would soldier on trying to fix that which was already broken.

During that time I told my self that in the end it will all be worth, everything will pay out and my family will live better and all the people around me told me that I’m being stupid and an idiot.

But I stopped for a minute and made a mental calculation. It just didn’t pay out. The amount of personal loss compared to the business gain I expected and received where just not comparable.

Yeah sure the business is important. It puts food on our table and we must live by our word to deliver something to certain day. I believe it still and live it still. But you know, being a software engineer is just part of my life the other is my family. I still work in the evenings, but not all evenings . I work because I like it, and enjoy it and I get to learn something , not because someone made me. But my place and my obligations are to my family also and that is an area I really, really messed out. 

Stuff I learned working as a scrum master

 

Working as a scrum master I learned a couple of hard truths :

• People have a lot of misconceptions about what a scrum master should be doing
• Sometimes they are true (which makes things worse)

Now If you take a look at the Scrum guide the scrum master has a lots on his plate:

Now the things I most often hear is that the scrum master should:

• make sure there are burndown charts (as the single most important thing a scrum master does)
• organize and run the scrum events (although the guide says that the scrum master should be doing that as needed or as requested)
• remove impediments

I’ll be honest, in relation to burndown charts I never drew one (there are tools for that). I find that tiring and I think there are better uses of my time. But surprisingly this is what I most commonly hear from developers – “My previous scrum master was spending most of his time drawing charts and organizing meetings …..” – what?

Scrum events are important but the thing is that the value of a scrum event is not provided by a scrum master but by the people joining the event. I think that helping people to prepare for the scrum event is much more important then actually running the event it self. I rather focus my self on facilitation then on meeting organization.

Removing impediments its a very important thing. The team has bring business value by working on the sprint backlog as agreed with the product owner. Anything that is preventing the team to do that must be ruthlessly removed.

Now here lies the catch. That could be a wide variety of things. And is really contextual – what is the current situation within the team and the company dictates what is an impediment and what is a possibility to grow.

In situation A the team needs to build a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) to put on the market as quickly as possible. Anything preventing the team to the most important tasks to achieve that is an impediment ( I try to simplify things as much as I can). Now in that situation building a continuous integration server , something the team has no experience with , or making sure all resources on Azure are created as they should or taking care of 3rd line support calls coming to the team or helping write all the unit tests or doing some research or … the list could grow. And all those things could also be things the team could be doing and taking them as learning and growing opportunities.

Its highly contextual.

Now for me the rule of the thumb is as follows:

• Is it part of the teams core skill set – yes (let them do it)
• If not is it needed to achieve sprint goal – yes (ok deal wit it somehow)
• Is this the right time to grow the team on this skill – yes (let them do it, and help them)
• If not take care of it your self or find somebody who will

DotNet Core : The good, the ugly and the just started

I just started out playing with .NET Core on my own time. Getting the feeling for the technology, trying to learn the basic concepts and getting some basic programming tasks done.

Wow.

Working in .NET for the last eight or so years I really find this one much more different then the usual flavor provided by Microsoft.

Lets be honest, on most .NET projects I worked the MacDonalds style of programming, where 80% of the problems are solved easily by spending 20% of your project time while you spend the remaining 80% dealing with the remaining 20% of the problems which incidentally are what the the project is about. Go figure.

With this first dotnet core project I spend my time dealing with something completely different. It actually reminds me of the time I was learning to code in PHP and Python (it was years back during my Linux times).

The first thing that struck me was complicated level of setting up a project (project.json configuration) and linking all projects in a solution together and then managing all the different execution and deployment environments. Whaat?

But hell, its fun to deal with these type of issues.

Most of the help I got didn’t come from the actual documentation. It was mostly useless, so I just relied on googling for solutions or going directly to the dotnet core repository and looking trough the source code.

The second biggest problem was that there was not a solution wide way to build all projects and run all tests. Well, that was easily solved by using the custom Task functionality of VSCode.

Something like this:

.vscode/tasks.json

And then in the root of the solution writing this small batch script:
build.cmd

And then with a simple, and familiar CTRL+SHIFT+B , voila:

it builds everything and it even runs all the tests.

The command line interface is simple and easy to understand, and once you get past the project.json madness you will have a literally very powerful platform to work on.

The coolest thing it is that the project is completely open source so well if you find a problem or have a need, the solution is several hours and a pull request away.

Of course I don't see .NET teams jumping all over it right now. I haven't yet tried developing in .NET Core with Visual Studio but I guess as with every version 1.0 of a Microsoft Technology the tooling will suck long time (usually we have to wait till version 3.x till we get the maturity level high enough to develop normally). But hell, I could be very wrong.

Still its a cool thing to play with. If you are curious what I did so far please look at my GitHub profile:

Being a software developer without a University degree

I'm a software developer without a university degree. My family couldn't afford to keep me at the university past the second year and to my misfortune I was not ready to strike out at my own.

I returned to my home town and started working in my fathers small company. It was a three person team. I was working there since I was thirteen, on and off during every school break. Now it was permanent. Or so I thought.

I always wanted to become a software engineer. Since I was a little kid and my father smuggled a Commodore 64 from the Netherlands into Yugoslavia. My mother, who spoke a little German, helped me to learn BASIC programming at the age of nine from a Dutch manual. By the age of eleven I was writing a combination of assembly and BASIC and writing my own, albeit simple arcade games.

If I could not get a proper education I decided to get one by myself. Luckily for me I was working in an industry that is fully internet driven, and all the resources I needed to educate myself were available online.

I bought a book and taught myself PHP. I wrote a couple of in house projects for my family and after a year I got my first programming job. Well the rest is history. I ended up having a good career so far. It had its ups and downs but so far I managed to keep myself employed and my family provided for.

Not having a university degree in an IT related field is one of my biggest regrets in life.

When searching for new work some of the positions I applied to would not include me in the phone screen part of the interview process, some would never respond to my application.

Regardless of not having a university degree I managed to build a career in software engineering.

I'm proud of my achievements. I self educated myself. It was hard and I still work on it.

How did I do it?

• Find out what are the core skills a software engineer needs to have and train your self in them
• Spend time daily (ideally one hour or more) focusing your self on the core skills
• Read, listen to IT related media.
• Rinse and repeat

I think for the core elements of software engineering there is no better alternative then to buy and read books about the topic. Something which is considered core doesn't change that often and if it does skills learned can be easily be transferred to the new version. Alternatively reading documentation (for example PHP always had excellent online documentation), watching presentations and tutorials (InfoQ is my favorite source about anything software engineering). 

I think if you want to be an excellent software engineer you cannot get away from spending one or more hours a day improving your skills, be it programming, reading or listening. You have to do it. Your job will provide some but not all the skills you need to advance. 

Yes, you will be tired. So I am, in the evening, but not in the morning. So I getup earlier and spend time learning while I eat my breakfast. I listen to podcasts on my way to work, read books in the tram or when I'm waiting for something. 

Chances are you will always find gaps of time you can fill with some learning aspects.

Sitting in front of a computer and coding is critical. There is no alternative, the only advice I can give is sit down and do it regular. Plan for it and do it. Nothing worthwhile doesn't come easy. Being a good software engineer is sometimes a hard life, even if you love doing it as I do. 

I love listening to podcasts, .NET rocks and Software Engineering Radio are my favorite. Years ago when I was working in Croatia I was burning CDs with downloaded podcasts and listening to them on my way to and back to work. It was the best of times. 

Nowadays I use my Safari Online subscription and read books while I trudge in a tram. 

The most important thing

Be positive and keep striving. Life and the world will keep building walls around you, there is no need to build them yourself. You will hit obstacles and dead roads. But I firmly believe if you keep working and doing the hard things you will achieve what you need to achieve. 

The only constant is change

Software development is not an exact science.

Let me repeat that.

Software development is not an exact science.

During my career I've never had the same team, the same project and the same business context twice. Although I learned from all those experiences, and I've extracted principles and rules of thumb each new company, team and project is a completely new experience.

In the heart of all modern software development processes lies the feedback loop.

Try something. See how it goes. Change based on the feedback.  The hear of software engineering lies in the continuous usage of the feedback loop on all level and dimensions of a software project, from the individual coder, from the dynamics in the team, from the project management standpoint and from the interaction with the client.

When an engineer understands this simple fact all the rules, all the processes pale to the simple fact that their are all just tools used in the service of maximizing the gains from the simplest principle of the feedback loop.

Governing a software project there are multiple forces. The team that builds it, the business that sells it and the customers that buy/use it. The huge mental strain that goes into building a software product and its plasticity render it completely impossible to fathom at the begging, to set it hard and simple to build as a hause that can be designed by a single person then rebuild across multiple locations by less skilled people. But on the other side its plasticity render it hugely flexible, and prone to changes and adaptation.

A software product is never fixed. The people who build it are never constant. The people who want it are never constant and the constant the product operates in is never constant. Accepting that the only state a software team exists is a state of fluctuating chaos a consolamce of sort can be found that are never right answers and that the only truth is a process of continuous improvement and adaptability.

Change is the only constant in life.

Change is pain.

Change is growth.

To survive one must accept constant change.

Are integrated collaboration solutions the future of the internet?

I hate signing up for services on-line. Just going trough the process of typing my username, email address, password, personal data over and over for all the services I would like to use makes me crazy.
Luckiliy with the the advent of oauth and other federation services nowadays I can signup form most services using my Google or Facebook account (the two I generally use mostly). One-click signup made my life easier.
A nice feature of using web services is the ability to reuse data, content and features from one service (e.g. Google Drive) within Another Service provider (Draw.io) and have changes to my work published to a group of people using a collaboration tool (Slack).
Most online service providers expose REST endpoints for almost every feature they provide. Some are notification features (reading statuses of artifacts) while other expose behaviors of the service (e.g. posting a facebook status or saving to my google drive folder or publishing a note on evernote).
Are we living now in the world of the programmable web where REST apis replace the old days of bash shell scripting in the unix command line for hackers, where a basic level of programming skills enables us to automate and integrate our online work life?
Tools like IFTTT  or Zapier provide simple to use integration commandlets between various services which is a nice start for that entire space. But looking at their API's they are really simple. Comparing them to all the various possible REST apis published by almost everyone the amount integration and collaboration possibilities are enormous.
Leveraging various cloud based solutions its trivially simple to set up a continuously running background service in the cloud which executes various types of checks and integration tasks on a regular basis. I would recon that for lean starups and small organizations one of the first automation priorities they need to execute is to automate all their online services and collaboration tools.
New organizations are not just bound by one service provider but utilize a wide array of services offered on the internet, all of which can either be used for free or very cheap. Adding users and connecting all those services in one go is where most organizations will leverage the ROI of utilizing all those solutions.

Applying the Bosnian Model to the European Union

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a broken country. No questions about it. It was broken by the fall of Yugoslavia, but bearing the brunt of the Yugoslav wars and now by the separation into national entities. Its a place where latent conflict still lurks and which hangs together by a thin thread of heavy bureaucracy and legislature which is so prevalent in many lives of BIH citizens.

But there a silver lining. Bosnia is a micro representation of the European Union as a whole, a real life testing bed for European ideas and models. The EU has long and bloody history of conflicts,ethnic cleansing and old grudges popping up after five minutes of talking to a national of another EU country.

With so many languages and cultures living in the same place going about and handling business across the EU its not that easy. Especially the language issue. Lets face it , English is the lingua franca of the world and if you want to hop about the EU the only language you really need is English. It helps to know the local language but how can you expect a single person to be fluid in all the twenty something national languages of the union?

In Bosnia there are three main languages :

• Croatian
• Serbian
• Bosnian

with a small caveat that those three languages are virtually identical. If you are a speaker of any of those three languages you can go and communicate with speakers of the other two languages without much issues. The grammar is mostly the same and the vocabulary is virtually 80% identical. But if I was required to write and speak perfect Serbian or Bosnian I wouldn't be able to. 

The solution is multilingualism. All three languages are equally official.In practice you can get official papers and fill official forms using any script (Cyrillic or Latin) and language of choice. The only caveat being that you need to stick to your chosen form.

On the EU level its a nightmare to work with the local government of the country who's language you don't know. In general you have to provide translations for everything. Its costs money, and its time consuming.

The solution for the Union would be to supplement the local language with English as the official one. You can seamlessly fill forms, sign documents and communicate with either the official local languages or using English.

As Europeans we all still to national oriented, we keep our cultures close and take it to personally anything that could endanger our perceived cultural values. But in order for the union to work we need to transcend our cultural boundaries, egos and national values and be programmatic about how the union works. Our system needs to enable the seamless protocol of ideas, people and business without introducing to much administrative, legislative and procedural overhead. Its bloody difficult just by it self to work on such a scale. We really don't need to make it more difficult.