Wayback machine has me in 1999! Pretty much same services, but focusing more on applied engineering and product development. I wish it had the images. I have them on an old HD somewhere, I’m sure 🙂
If you want to book some time with the one man show:
As an older gentle-person, I’ve seen the marketing change over time for describing what computer programmers do. When I was child it was Rapid Application Development or RAD. I think this is best term. I like the “extreme” sports nature of it and it fits with the title of this post.
Agile is a modern software development methodology emphasizing adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement. It promotes flexible responses to change and collaboration among self-organizing cross-functional teams.
Agile is perhaps the single biggest contributor to shit code-bases and jaded work-forces. 2-week sprints are hilariously impotent. Especially when you have 6 meetings between sprints and your management-chain infects the process daily. They just yap and you gotta drink it.
Short-term gains become long-term losses as you churn on things that matter to no one but the guy managing the jira/kanban board. But, by all means, keep doing it. It will give me time to catch up.
Because everything is planned and binned in ~2 week sprints, and everyone is RUNNING, nobody stops to smell the flowers. Stopping to think and say, “hey maybe this is architecturally wrong.” There is no time to fix systemic issues in an agile environment. You do look like you are working really hard though and getting it done!
You keep marching towards a false goal and you can’t stop!
Agile is a management technique, not an engineering technique.
Waterfall
Agile was sold as the solution to waterfall. Waterfall is the traditional approach of planning everything out and then after a Critical Design Review (CDR) you then begin to “cut metal” or type code. I believe this approach is still superior because it forces people to think about the entire journey. Not just where they will fill up for gas next.
Agile is a hedge for management that won’t/can’t specify up front what they want/need, because often they don’t know. Only develop what you need as you need it. It would probably work if everything in software wasn’t connected.
While remodeling a house, there is no way that hanging a picture or painting a wall can cause the light-switch to now not only turn on the light, but now it flushes the toilet as well
Scrum
When a word comes from a sport like Rugby. What do you expect this process to look like? It is a giant clusterfuck. All these yappers talking about coding and project management. They are distracting you!
There is no clean code, there is no silver bullet. Work hard, pay attention, ITERATE!
MVP
The Minimum Viable Product is the only thing that Agile may be good for. Thrash, Thrash, Thrash and get something going. But a stable mature “Product” should never probably never use agile. I may die on this hill. Fail as fast as you can and build MVP in a sprint. But don’t ever call it Agile, it isn’t!
Companies / Software Ruined by Agile:
Excel
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please help me fix this article into a coherent rant instead of an old man yelling at the clouds 🙂
Freestyle development is when you just have a blank text file and an idea, and you go make something out of nothing. This is the way to get started to make dreams into reality.
Programmers love their tools. It can be a fetish. How many tools is too many tools between your software and your customer?
Sometimes having more tools in your toolbox is a hinderance not an asset. Organizational breakdowns. Lost tools. Normally there are a few key tools you always have close by if needed.
As engineers or programmers it is often our bench software: Matlab, python, various editors and programming environments. Everyone loves good tools.
Editors and IDEs
Typing is so important. The speed of thought into your editor, the interface between man and machine. Keyboard shortcuts, specialized editors, beyond qwerty… they all tie you to a configuration. It is not a deal-breaker, but its important to reduce the friction between you and your data entry point. But the more you configure the harder it is to work on another’s system.
Do I have to mention emacs and vim? Yes. These ancient editors require months of training to use effectively and perhaps years to master.
1970s computing was defined by big iron machines or mainframes. Big servers, dumb clients. PDP-10’s main storage was tape machines and TECO was the editor of choice. A single page editor. This was great for editing LISP programs and eventually an Editor of Macros (Emacs) was developed mid-70s. Somehow it is still the preferred editor of many programmers.
On the other end of the editor spectrum was “line editors” which were more attuned to working on teletypes. Teletypes are typewriters with serial links. Could it be over a phone line? Vi is a visual line editor created shortly after Emacs. Its modern version was rebooted in the 1980s as Vim. Again, the editor is still used at large (in 2024) and there is a large key-binding extension/plugin for most Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).
Is it worth it to learn emacs or vim? Yes, but that is my opinion and I wouldn’t suggest learning to ship a product and learn vim at same time. It is a lifestyle change that seems less and less important these days. It’s a fun distraction from real work.
Programming outside of a UNIX environment is largely done in a IDE. Visual Studio being the de-facto standard for C++ development. As opposed to makefiles and shell scripts, the idea of an IDE is everything is in one spot. Editor, Compiler, Debugger. Very convenient, you can setup IDE like features in emacs and vim, you could say emacs is a IDE for LISP. Borland IDEs have a special place in my heart as this is where it all started for me, outside of QBasic of course.
The point I’m trying to make is, you can approximate one with the other. Your customer doesn’t care which IDE or text editor you use. The language, framework, etc is a builder’s artifact. A tool mark.
Custom Keybindings & Hardware
If you listen intently you can hear the crackle of mechanical keyboards chording and creating arpeggiations of clicks echoing. Mechanical Keyboards are nice, but I think if you wanted to become inept on the other peoples machines. Just learn DVORAK or COLMAN instead of QWERTY. Still awaiting learning how to use my ErgoDox.
The command interface or how you move around the file are what I would say splits emacs and vim editors. Modal (vim) vs normal. Let’s leave that for another post. This is all to say the mouse is not the most important tool of a programmer when writing code. Your hands re on your keyboard.
Some people (ahem) have even added a foot pedal for shift or other keyboard strokes.
Vendor Software
On a unix you are almost guaranteed to have a C compiler. I think that is POSIX standard. Your distribution will provide it. Microsoft provides the Visual Studio. One you thing you can do is make these IDEs emulate emacs or vim. I do this for vim in both Visual Studio (Proper) and VS Code. Its pretty close and I get some breakpoints for free. On Linux I’ve heard good things about Qt Creator as an IDE.
You may have other vendors outside of your main development tool kit provided by vendor 1. Every piece of software you add beyond this point is normally business related. Libraries are the most important consideration when writing software in a reasonable amount of time. I would vet your libraries thoroughly and “vendor them in” to your main source control.
Then there is the subscription as a service (SaaS). This means you normally don’t host it yourself. Github is a perfect example of a legit reason to include a SaaS product into your development pipeline. But the real thing here is with a remote service, you run risk to disruptions you have no control over. Sometimes the website goes bankrupt. I would avoid these in your flows if possible.
Of course there is our own customization of your tools on top of this. Configurations, Plugins, Extensions, our own shell scripts. Often it’s the “dotfiles”. These build up over the years.
3 Levels
It is important for you to customize your development environment so that you can build and ship your product to customer. Often these setups can be cumbersome and fragile, but that is ok, the product doesn’t suffer from this directly. Now developer tool fatigue is a real thing. Developer ergonomics are important, but taken to the extreme, turns into a naval gazing exercise.
Rolling Stock – Minimum settings changed, As it was intended
Custom Setup – Tinkering deeper, voiding warranty
Fired or Getting Paid – How many apps/scripts are between you and your product or customer?
I like to roll stock when I can. Just because you CAN customize and extend, doesn’t mean you should. Is it worth it to add this new complication to my codebase?
Fired or Getting Paid? — I think this is an important question, will you create an unmaintainable mess while getting paid and then get fired because the business cannot support the liability you have created, or will you keep it running as best you can and improve the system reliability slowly over time?
endcap
I may or may have not written a kernel extension for windows that maps caps lock to escape. The autohotkey hack wasn’t fast enough. I love the idea of “jig’s” I love making tools, but sometimes it gets me into deep trouble…
In a previous post, I teased that I would explain exactly what is happening in what I believe was the most copied function of the AOL Proggie era. Adding the list of people in a chatroom to a list in your program. This is that post. Fire up your BASIC editor and open up your Win32 API manual and follow along.
Let us start with the include from the Win32 API. Visual Basic (VB) is somewhat of an interpreted language, but it has the ability to include function calls to Dynamically Linked Libraries (DLLs) written in C or another system language.
Key Win32 APIs that are imported and used in dos32.bas from various .DLLs
VB “compiles” to P-CODE and then is interpreted by the runtime or virtual machine of sorts. Similar to Java’s JVM and its bytecode. In VB5 there was a native compiler for x86 machine code, but before VB5, and maybe after, you could “decompile” the P-CODE and get actual source of any program. People got upset at this and there was an entire obfuscation scene dedicated to preventing decompiling of VB programs…
A good programming team
Interacting with AOL by reading dialogs, clicking buttons and other automations was fairly straight forward. The general flow would be: identify the window, studying its hierarchy, find the control, and send it messages.
To do this, even today in 2021, I like to use Patorjk’s Tool for Window Spying, but you could always use spy++.exe included in the tools from Microsoft. Automation of this style is similar to scraping websites now. You are reverse engineering and poking into stuff you normally shouldn’t. With most scriptable apps you have an official API. For progs, you needed to invent your own API or SDK… by essentially inspecting the window “DOM”..
Most controls could be read and written too. But there was one control that alluded us. The list of people in the chat room was some type of special control. There was some formatting that would happen and other things that prevented a standard LB_GETTEXT from working.
In the earlier Sk8er.bas there was a call to a “311.dll” which took care of the AOL16 bit. But when 3.0 came out, which was 32bit we had to reinvent the wheel. Not sure who wrote the 311.dll, maybe we could decompile it. It probably was reverse engineered… But I know it held something that is similar to the code in question. Food for thought: Why was it in a .dll?
Don’t make globals, always use Option Explicit 🙂
Ok onto the 32 bit version of this code. There are 2 main variants, but they all do the same thing. Tap into the process, read some memory and do some magic.
dos32.bas’s AddRoom Implementation
This dos32.bas was claimed to be completely written from scratch, it was… except for the above bit. Still searching for the original author. There is actually another variant that I saw in alpha32.bas, it is shorter and simpler, but I will focus on the tear down of dos’s copy pasta.
Code Review
1122-1132
Turn off error handling with On Error Resume Next (think of it as a blind try/catch on all exceptions and keep on trucking… not great, but hey)
Find Chat Room Window, Get Thread and follow to Process ID (seems roundabout way, was there multiple threads in Aol32.exe?)
You can see there are old-school postfix variable identifiers, I think this kept code smaller w/ Option Explicit.
VB4 straddled both 16bit and 32bit so I am guessing that is why the integers are defined as “long” here at 32 bit. Long to me is 64bit, but 1995…
Some Copy Pasta’d Knowledge. Thanks David!
1133-1137
Biggest mistake I think in this entire snippet, Iterating over a list of items while the list can change.
It cannot be atomic I guess, we cannot lock it, but it seems very strange to call LB_GETCOUNT every loop iteration.
Send message and get the LB_GETITEMDATA, then pad by 24… No idea perhaps that was formatting data? This listbox had embolden and italic modes for enter/leaving.
ReadMemory from ScreenName string which is only 4 characters, must be an address/pointer
psnHold now holds the value stored at the address stored in ScreenName
Source is Pointer to Address in ScreenName String of 4 Chars so 32bit Addy
1138-1142
psnHold now holds an address. Pad Address by 6… again no idea why.
Resize ScreenName to 16 characters (largest screen name possible on AOL)
Read Memory into ScreenName
Last Step: Trim to null character, remember we use c-strings in VB!
Epilog
Wow, we got through it. Still a lot of unanswered questions, but I think we solved most of the important bits. When I originally read this code in the 90s, it blew my mind. I just chalked it up to magic and copy and pasta’d it. It always stuck in the back of my mind though, and after I learned about memory and pointers in college it seemed to make more sense.
I promised myself I would eventually write this post to shed some light on one of the most important years of my life. What lessons are learned while you are having fun and sharing your code with friends. Thank you for reading and remember… If you don’t understand it, you don’t always need to! Copy Pasta!
Breathing life into an old unknown codebase is one of the most exhilarating and most often a frustrating endeavor a software engineer can partake in. Duct-tape programmers as someone once said, are a necessity. The question I always ask myself:
Is it easier or faster just to rewrite all this shit?
Depends on where you are in your journey. Knowing when to add another layer of lasagna vs replacing 5k lines of code with 3 python functions and no dependencies is the real key.
Baggage or Luggage? Baggage you wish you could leave behind. Only bring the luggage.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it must be a duck.
Recently I started a project with Pure “Vanilla” Javascript, and it was quick going. With the React as the starter pack, I had a basic prototype with proof of concept multi-user editing: https://twitter.com/robmurrer/status/1169118440122015744
That was a month ago and I ported it to Typescript which is a superset of Javascript (JS) that “compiles” to JS. It plays well with React’s JSX becoming TSX. Tip to cast in Typescript:
blockchain = await this.state.store.getItem(id) as BlockProps;
To me, having to do the work of a compiler, is maddening and that is why I actually really love Typescript (TS). Coming from any traditional language it is a nice safety cushion under you.
TS has excellent tooling to enable confident refactors, which is the number one issue with my JS codebase. Refactoring “blind” in pure JS is nightmare. Refactoring is by far the most important task, so I’ve gone full TS. But I can see if you are just learning JS you should absolutely not start with TS.
Start pure Vanilla JS and build something. Then when you get stuck trying to refactor. Revert and start fresh with TS. I like the quick rewrite and throwaway approach for rapid prototyping. JS is the best rapid prototyping environment I’ve ever seen.
Ok on to code… The most important part of an editor is the data the user enters. You cannot lose it. We are using the Local Forage package from the folks at Mozilla for the data storage layer. Under the hood it will use IndexedDB on modern browsers.
Ok so what are we looking at here? The genesis for the post. What the heck is Hydrate and Dehydrate? It’s just the cool term for serialize and deserialize. I like it. The whole point of these names is to communicate what it is they do.
Update: Um it writes the data in a format it can send over wire or store in database.
But there is something about naming it what it has been called in the past. Hence this post.
The tour de force of programming design patterns:
Finite State Machine (FSM)
React’s fundamental concept
Start here!
Command Pattern
Ahem…
Classes
Only to hold state!!!
Of course React uses inheritance 😀
Composite
Just a tree, or
Now with more Blockchain
I’ll write/link up some more about the above at some point.
Creating software is easy, creating software that is sustainable to maintain and extend is hard. There are not many mediums in which the consequences of a simple change or design decision can render the complete system useless. The way in which the software is built is just as critical as to who is building it.
Honey why is the toilet flushing now when I flip the light switch?
Whoa! Cool! I didn’t realize changing the light bulb would do that.
Poorly designed systems are interconnected in ways that are not necessary. It is often easier to write the prototype in this manner, but products often need to be refactored to use time tested design patterns.
If you ever find yourself scared to change something or can’t figure out how to add the next killer feature. It is certainly time you reevaluate what you have and don’t be afraid to delete your code. You may be surprised how much of it is no longer needed.
So you think you are almost there. You think one or two more hacking sessions could “do it” and you start the weekend thrash.
What is the difference between a clever hack and an unmaintainable pit of tar?
If you are in the Zone, then you of course nothing can stop you. But I say stop and rethink your life. You probably are building the wrong thing anyway.
CommandPattern.org 