The Demoralized Coder

OK, another useless non-coding rant.  Here is the skinny of it.  I've got a core 2 project, a fairly larger web application, that I migrated to 2.1 and fixed a few problems.  Then core 3 came out and I was told to migrate to 3.  Well the 2.1 to 3, especially with the entity framework changes, is turning out to be a real pain.  Add in Telerik, which is a great control set, but I'm not sure the latest build is really core 3 ready for prime time.  So I'm getting all these issues and it is kind of a mission impossible.  At one point core 3.1 is coming out (December?) which will fix a bunch of things. But all my work arounds to get this app working in 3.0 will probably break then or be unnecessary by then too.

In essence I've got a working app, and just to keep the code base current while Microsoft finds itself is causing me a lot of grief.  I've got some health issues, and I don't expect to live till I'm 90.  I think I'll be lucky to him the mid 70ies point.  I've already been in IT for over 20 years.  I gotta admit I'm feeling a little burnt.  The money is good.  But it seems like I'm back on the coda obscura track rather than the creativity/problem solving track.  I want to solve the customers problems for getting an app that does what they need, not debug MS code each time they tweak something.  It is kinda getting old.  And the complexity of web development at this point, it is nothing I can't do but just the joy of doing it lately is a little lacking. 

So I ponder...there is the machismo factor of being on the bleeding edge...but I gotta say as of late I'm tired of bleeding all the time.  I'd like a lighter stack to work on, or maybe switch from web development to something else for awhile.  Not sure what or if that is practical.  I've got a great job with a great company, just the tools I've been given to do the job are starting to suck IMHO. 

I know waaaaa....I'll suck it up and make things happen like usual.  It just feels like ever iteration of doing this gets a little harder to pull off, and little longer to do, and more of a pain.  I like it when I'm not developing against moving targets so much and can get proficient without having to do a bunch of hacks to make things come together and focus on creating rather than hacking out esoteric problems. 

It doesn't help that this year has been really hard on the sick front.  I think I've been under the weather 4 out of 5 days on average this last 3 months.  Trying to think when you feel like a roasted turd isn't helping.

So, when this iteration is done, I will figure it out and make things come together, I hope to get a little bit of time to really think on what I want to do in life.  Do I want to reup for another 20 years doing the same thing I've been doing, do I just need a break, do I need to change focus?  Change tools?  All this I'm going to have to pray through.  Fear of taking a big money hit in changing careers is present, but my family unit if tightening the belt a little bit is possible we could get by with me making less money.  But, I don't want to screw them either.  All stuff to think about.

Microsoft is Losing Me

Firstly, Microsoft has been good to me.  My semi-mastery of Microsoft tools for web development has spawned nearly a 20 year career.  So I am by far not a Microsoft hater.  Yet some recent things that Microsoft is doing has me scratching my head.

• ASP.Net Core - The idea of having one framework that will run nearly anywhere is a noble one.  But is this really a problem that your average enterprise development team was asking to be solved?  Most (I'm guessing) that use Microsoft Visual Studio for development are solidly in the Microsoft ecosystem.  The idea of running MVC on non-Microsoft servers appeals to what...one percent of the Microsoft ecosystem users?  Plus if I can use free tools to develop open source MVC say, why would I be paying 1000's per year per developer seat for Visual Studio? So I can tweak JSON config files and run things from the command line out of penis envy for Linux users?  Dude I like GUI's.  Seems I'm one of the few.  Maybe that makes me a weak programmer but I grow tired of coda obscura for config files and other command line crap.  Give me a limited set of options in a GUI window that is well documented so I can pick what I need and move on to solving problems not pulling my hair out with being gifted with additional ones from Microsoft.
• Along similar lines, what is up with XAML?  I knew Silverlight would fail just like few are picking up XAML.  Again, why the GUI hatred all of a sudden?  Weird.
• Constantly changing things.  We have been jumping through hoops from Microsoft for years.  First ASP.  Then ASP.Net Webforms.  Then MVC.  Now MVC core with helper tags quasi bringing back webform like functionality  (but without the GUI support...sigh).  As we jump through the hoops we leave a scattering of legacy applications behind us.  The bleeding edge buzz word flinging developers build and move on leaving their head aches to others while they pursue fame and glory.  Us rank and file dudes have all these apps to support.  It is starting to get old.  If you wrote a PHP app 20 years ago it would (with minimal tweaking) work fine now.  LAMP stack is still widely used.  Can we say that for Classic ASP aps? Not really, though some decent sites are still powered by it.  What about .net 1 apps?  1.1, 2.0?  MVC 1?  .ASMX web services? Now core?  What happens when Microsoft jukes in a new direction?  Should we constantly be upgrading our apps to feed the beast?

I really like MVC and Sqlite.  For me it is a sweet spot for development.  But I think I'm going to become a real programmer and start branching out to Ubuntu running Node.js.  I bet I can build and app and not touch it for 10 years and it will run fine on the latest version of Node and Ubuntu just fine (though would be ugly as HTML / JS / CSS evolves, but it would still work!).  

Microsoft, you are losing me.

An Old Programmers Tale of Caution and Encouragement.

This was originally posted [HERE].  The post is so old I worry it will vanish, and I think it is an important read, not just for gaming, but for any project.  So I re-post it here.  God bless rogerborg.
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Why I can't write games anymore - a novella
Postby rogerborg » Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:07 pm

Pull up a chair and I'll tell ye a tale. A tale of back in the olden days, when men were real men, women were real women, and small fluffy compilers from Alpha Delorie were real small fluffy compilers from Alpha Delorie.

Back in the Day - about 1994 or so - I found myself with some free time on my hands. So I 'downloadorzed' (hey, it was a novel concept back then) Allegro and djgpp for my supa-phat new 486DX2-66 DOS/Win3.1 PC and decided that I'd write me a game.

Because I'm a sad Trekkie (please, nobody ever tell my daughter why she's named Miranda) I figured that I'd write a computronic version of Star Fleet Battles, easily the most complex board game ever devised by Man or Nerd God. I mean, that thing ships with Errata, Addenda, and Errata in the Addenda.

Bear in mind that at this point, I really had no idea what I was doing. Sure, I had a degree in Computer Science, but being from the Old Skoolz it hadn't taught anything as tawdry as how to actually, you know... write software. I'd hacked the bejeesus out of Netrek, but only to the extent of pwoning it with a 'borg client.

So I went in with an abundance of overconfidence, and no real knowledge of what I was doing, or how to achieve it.

And in about 8 weeks of finger-bleeding coding, I had a playable 2D game written in pure structastic C and debugged with printfs(), much as the Pilgrims must have done. It had no config to speak of: you created ship descriptions in human readable text files, using a 'unit X is based on unit Y' hierarchy, and likewise with scenarios. When you started it up, it presented a simple list of available scenarios. You selected one, and away it went.

But you know what? That primitive pile of junk implemented a significant subset of Star Fleet Battles. Cloaks, shields, damage control, phasers, photons, disruptors, plasma torps, drones, anti-drones, hellbores, fusion beams, expanding sphere generators, tractors, transporters, boarding parties, shuttles/fighters, tugs, pods, star bases, planets and ground bases, all 'modelled' in Windows 3.1 Paint then rendered in glorious spinny 2d-o-rama, replete with asplosions and Star Trek sound effects ripped from the bleeding belly of the burgeoning intartubes. It had AI that provided a moderate if predictable challenge, it had fleets and fleet commands, and it implemented all of my original requirements and a few more besides.

That was in 1994, when I knew nothing and had tools little better than sticks and rocks. In 2008, when I know vastly more about how to design, write and test software, and have tools that would make the 1994 me mess my pants... I honestly believe that I couldn't write that game again.

Want to know why not?

I know too much, and have too much.

I'd second guess myself on design, and design patterns. I'd agonise for weeks over the exact hierarchy of objects, interfaces and responsibility for implementing features, and then I'd change my mind and start over. I'd spend an age carefully abstracting away the presentation from the data so that I could change engines, then I'd spend another age using that flexibility to dither over whether to use engine X for its bells, or engine Y for its whistles. I'd agonise over whether a networked version should be architected as a multiplayer game with AIs, or a single player game with a coop/competitive mode. I'd type a line of code, then Google for an hour to convince myself that it was optimal.

I'd make posts like this rather than actually knuckling down and just writing code that implements the clear goals that I've set myself, because it's more rewarding to talk about it than to worry that I've picked the wrong way of doing it.

In 1994, I was Aquaman. Sure, all I could do was talk to fish, but dammit, when there was a problem to be solved that smelled even remotely piscine, I talked their little fishy fins off. Now I'm El Dorado. I have loads of powers, and can make up new ones as I go, but that just makes it harder to choose one and go with it. A marauding octopus! Should I read its mind? Shoot it with my eye lasers? Create an illusion of a sexy lady octopus? Should I grab it and teleport it to a sashimi restaurant? What to do... what do... oh, never mind, it's eaten Kairo.

So, as we grind and bump towards the conclusion of this senile shaggy dog story, do I have a point to make? A nugget of wisdom to impart?

I do.

First, don't listen to the 2008 Rogerborg. Now I only know what can't be done. I've forgotten what can be achieved though ignorance and determination.

Second, listen to the 2008 Rogerborg when he says to do as he says, and not as he does. If you have a game that you want to write, then write it. Just knuckle down and write it. Don't worry about how optimal your data encapsulation is, just bung everything into a structure and call functions on it. Write naive code, and don't give a stuff about optimisation or resource management. Get stuff on screen, and make it spin.

When you are happy, then you're done.

And here endeth the lesson.

The Laws of Programming.

This link is pretty funny and full of Wisdom-

The Laws of Programming

Old Man Grumblings

I guess I'm getting old, as far as programming goes. I see a lot of fads blowing through programming (apparently many geeks are actually more prone to fads then aren't, and this is interesting as you would thinks geeks with their alleged superior intellects would be immune), some of the fads are good, some of them OK, some of them not, but apparently ALL demand to be followed with absolute faith else your code is yukky and you suck (even though many programmers who didn't use all this stuff put men on the moon, designed planes like the SR-71, managed complex nuclear physics codes, yadda yadda yadda, just fine without all these extra layers of abstraction.

I digress.

I guess my point is summed up here.

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=25748

I might have blogged about this before, but I keep coming back to this, as it never gets old to me.

Distributed Open Source SVN: Git

Web Designer Depot has a nice into to a version control system called GIT that looks like it might be worth checking out.


http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/intro-to-git-for-web-designers/

Note From an Old Dog

I found this post on a game forum, but I feel it applies across the whole programming spectrum.

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=25748

Decent Windows Service Tutorial

This page covers the basics for creating a Windows Service.

http://www.beansoftware.com/NET-Tutorials/Create-Windows-Services.aspx

Visual Studio 2008: First Impression

Well, I downloaded the Visual Studio 2008 Express version and played around with it very briefly yesterday. So far I haven't played with too many of the new features yet, but hopefully I'll get a chance to over the weekend. Here are some initial comments of mine.

The Good: The install was a breeze compared to Visual Studio 2005 Pro.

The Bad: I still have to support classic ASP applications, and it looks like the intellisense for classic ASP has pretty much been removed. Bummer.

The OK: I like that the .Net framework 3.5 integrates the AJAX framework out of the box. It looks like most of the interface is pretty much the same as Visual Studio 2005, so I won't be hunting for things all the time, which is nice.

Overall I like how Microsoft is giving away Visual Studio and SQL Server Express versions away for free.

Download copies for yourself -

http://www.microsoft.com/express