Punished by Rewards

So today is Good Friday and apparently enough Christians live in India that they managed to get a holiday put into the calendar.  So i’m not working today.  That is, I didn’t have to take the 15 minute walk to the Nous office.  I’m just putting in some time today in my A/C room refactoring away and debugging the CallerMD website.

A project i’m working on requires a bit of a re-design to the website to allow for basically an extension to the system.  Unforetunately, a good part of the UI layer was rather hard coded to the existing structure so i’ve been doing more test writing than actual code writing for the fear of god that I totally fuck it up.   It helps me sleep at night.  That and the mosquito net.  Can’t forget the net.

Was reading Stevey’s blog which is always fun.  He’s got a good article on complexity.  Should be mandatory reading for most executives that have even the slightest involvement with software.  And apparently passing laws.  Good reminder that ‘Shirt ain’t easy’.  Read it.

More interesting though was his comment about ‘davesecretary’ – blogger extraordinaire.  He’s Canadian, white and drinks beer like he means it.  Reminds me of someone.  Anyway, he’s got a bunch of stories about his trip in China that Stevey was pretty damn impressed with.  So I figured I’d read some.  Stevey’s got a pretty decent sense of humour and is one sharp kid so if he’s impressed, it’s probably worth a read.

He’s got an authentic voice for sure and seems more than willing for an adventure.  He keeps letting ‘fate take the wheel’ and stuff like that.  Almost Catcher in the Rye kinda stuff.

Anyway, his stories sound real familiar.  White man travelling in a foreign country, doesn’t matter where, kinda has the same stories.  Cab drivers that take you everywhere you don’t want to go and nowhere you do.  Locals that may not entirely look favourably on you.  Being American by the colour of your skin.  The value of your money basically making spending it more of a past time than for any real reason.   I haven’t had too much of that but I can see the same stuff here.

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I was a bit bored of all that code I’ve been writing lately – too many mandatory brackets and less than elegant syntax.  A far prettier sight than that c++ stuff but still too noisy lots of the time.  So i went back to writing out the domain model for the game of Monopoly in ruby.  Downloaded MacRuby but don’t really have much reason to use if since I don’t really want to use Cocoa.  Just for kicks I guess.

Ruby does make you feel happy.  It’s like my laptop – sexy stuff.  It really is.  Try it.  Go write some ruby code – play around with all it’s ‘method_missing’ glory and then come back to java.  You understand what John Lam means about syntax noise.  You can write ugly code for sure but it’s harder if you’ve played with the language much.

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Yesterday had a talk with the guys here about their database design.  They had done a pretty litteral translation between the DB and the UI.  Basically obvious persistence kinda stuff where you take the checkboxes and put them directly into a column.  Need more checkboxes? Just add another column.  I tried to show them a bit of a better approach where you can add more values without changing the schema.  Didn’t think too much about it so there were some gaps for sure but I think it’s a lot better than the original stuff.  More Open-Closed kinda stuff.

Going out drinking with Harish and Sada tonight.  Gotta get running before he shows up.