Afterwood

It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth

It started with a conversation in the pub. With me, it often starts that way. However, there is some debate between me, and the editor of this journal, about which pub it was. I maintain it was The Chandos in Charing Cross after an ACCU Christmas pizza, whereas she reckons it was The Last Pub Standing in Norwich during the Norfolk Developers Conference. At this point, my wife would typically step in and point out that I’m the least reliable witness ever as I can never remember dates, places, faces, etc. And she’d be right; my memory feels more akin to a level 1 CPU cache than an NVMe solid state drive.

No matter, the place is a mere detail, it’s more the topic of conversation that’s relevant here. Whilst chewing the proverbial fat over a pint, I lamented the death of the printed programming journal and, in particular, the loss of the irreverent column that typically concluded each issue. Ever on the lookout for new content, our illustrious editor suggested I take up this mantle for Overload and, clearly on a roll, also proposed the puntastic title ‘Afterwood’ as a wonderful play on my surname. Even without a King’s Shilling dropped into my pint, I still cautiously accepted the challenge.

That all happened a decade ago, and so this is my tenth anniversary article. A milestone such as this felt ripe for some deeper reflection on whether I had achieved what I originally set out to do. And then I read my opening entry again and remembered the only objective I really had was not to write about anything deeply technical and additionally try and write pieces of a more whimsical nature, but with at least a tangential relationship to the world of software development. (The journal might well be titled ‘overload’ but there must be some limits.)

During my tenure, I’ve managed to write a fictional story about the Leftpad debacle, invent a game show based on classic programming gotchas, riffed on the terms ‘tab’, ‘thread’ and ‘get’ in popular culture, penned a poem about risks to delivery, and wrote a letter to Santa. Hopefully each piece has been thoughtful or entertaining enough to provide a gentle close to a journal which has a tendency to send your head into a spin with some magical template meta-programming!

Ten years feels like a long time, and it is, but as I write I’m watching Sir David Attenborough celebrate his 100th birthday. Now that is a seriously impressive milestone, even in modern times. For someone who has achieved so much and is such an icon of conservation, a shindig at the Royal Albert Hall is the least we can do to celebrate his amazing life so far.

Curiously that’s twice now that I’ve written about milestones in a positive light, and yet it feels weird saying that. Software Development has this nasty habit of taking positive terms from The Real World™ and putting a negative spin on them – consider ‘legacy’ and ‘inheritance’ as two classic examples where you’d normally welcome them with open arms, but not in your codebase.

When I started my professional programming career, I worked for a small software house that produced shrink-wrapped applications. Each release was a big event, with the occasion typically signified with a single digit increase in the ‘major’ part of the product’s version number. The inevitable ‘crunch’, which preceded this milestone, only served to heighten the relief we felt on the flipside. This was an era where the physical media of floppy disks and manuals had a significant impact on the schedule and approach to quality assurance.

For many of us programmers these days, where delivery comes in the form of bits and bytes passed back-and-forth across the wire, and updates trickle out to consumers, there are less opportunities for any kind of fanfare. The rise of the Internet and Agile movement has allowed us to smooth out those peaks and troughs, and replaced them with a delivery style that focuses on a steady stream of change – continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, etc. If you’re not doing everything, all at the same time, are you even doing it right? (All the major web browsers are currently floating around the v150 mark, which must be having a detrimental effect on the price of Champagne and canapés in Silicon Valley.)

I think the last truly hard deadline I ever faced was the turning of the Millennium as I, like so many others in our field at the time, worked on remediating systems – either by patching, or in my case, largely rewriting – so they would accommodate the new era. Since then, no deadline I’ve faced has been that hard, at least in the same immovable sense, despite what The Management might have tried to suggest, because we all know ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’. Even teams supposedly following the rules of Scrum don’t actually abort sprints when it’s clear they aren’t going to meet their ‘commitments’. Instead, we complete the current timebox the best we can, and regroup for the next one – eat, sleep, plan, repeat.

I think it was James Coplien who I initially heard remark: “after the first compile it’s all just maintenance”. It was at a time when the industry was getting its head around the idea of incremental change, and statements like these were a reaction to the project-oriented mindset of the time. It feels like this overly reductive approach to feature development has had the side-effect of also diminishing our achievements to the point that celebrating them can seem a little churlish. It’s nice to work in teams that have a habit of rejoicing in small victories, I just miss the days when we used to celebrate the big ones too, even if they were only big and memorable because of our inability to manage the accidental complexity.

Next year sees Overload reach another milestone and I look forward to celebrating its continued existence. We might have missed the boat on booking the Royal Albert Hall but I’m sure we can raise either a physical or metaphorical glass to the achievement.

Chris Oldwood is a freelance programmer who started out as a bedroom coder in the 80s writing assembler on 8-bit micros. These days it’s enterprise grade technology from plush corporate offices the comfort of his breakfast bar. He has resumed commentating on the Godmanchester duck race but continues to be easily distracted by emails and DMs.