Heroic Software

Corporate America has spent the last 15 years trying to make the case that another class of skilled worker, developers, are commodity resources. As long as you have good requirements, the theory goes, any developer should be able to code your application for you. That does not work in practice, in my experience, because developers are not interchangeable parts.

Most people don’t like to write. They aren’t motivated. Now give them a task that requires excellent writing. Bad work generally results.

It’s hard to pinpoint the source of this breakdown, but in my experience software implementation problems are usually key.

If you release shit, you look like shit. It’s much better to release nothing at all.

Why is the Transparent property offered for static controls when it doesn’t actually work? Shouldn’t it be disabled for static controls?

The reason why it is offered is that it is a general window style that can be set on any control. Visual Studio doesn’t know which controls can render transparently and which ones don’t, or what extra steps are necessary to get the ones who can render transparently to actually do so. It just exposes the WS_EX_TRANSPARENT style and hopes that you know what you’re doing.

In retrospect, it was a poor chose of name for the style. And the incorrect online help doesn’t make things any better.

What resolution do you need? Particle accelerators probably need jillionths of femtoseconds, for instance. Computer-scale times are probably on the order of hundreds of nanoseconds. Human-perceptible and most real-time processing can be done in milliseconds. Geologists don’t give a shit about a stretch of time less than a hundred thousand years.

My fear is that the company, by being spineless, is now subject to manipulation from their client. “What, you’re not going to let big old Microsoft tell you what you can and cannot do, are you? Be a man! Implement the feature!” And then the company will buckle under the pressure and implement the feature anyway.

It was nice to know HP, when it was a company that mattered.

The company prefers to announce new products simply when they’re ready, not when some arbitrary date on the calendar arrives. That’s why they stopped doing Macworld Expo keynotes. They showed this year that they’re not afraid to do a software-only WWDC keynote. But they can’t move Christmas.

The morale boost you’ll get will be incredible. After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get as a software programmer in your professional life. These are the great moments that make it all worthwhile. We *made* something. People used it. It matters.

It’s like sex, with clothes on.