3 AM systems

The company I work for relies heavily on a homegrown software system they use to manage thier business. Sounds normal, right? Of course. And ("naturally"), the system has evolved over time from it's inception as a simple, 1,000 line kludge into a multi-million line enterprise infrastructure. Also reasonably normal, right? Of course.

Now the thing that blows my mind is that not only is this normal for the sort of work that goes on behind closed doors (e.g. being a in-house software developer, such as yours truly), but this type of "guided mutation" is also the primary source of revenue for several high-profile, high-dollar software publishers.

What, you want examples? Good grief, how many?!? PeopleSoft, SAP, Great Plains. Even Microscoff and Beezelbill's most successful products were, at one point, disgusting, sloppy, sickly-smelling "leftover surprise" sorts of products, where several bad products are sort of sm00shed together, with a handful of unripe "new" features (usually already present in 99.99% of the competition's offerings) baked into the most unintuitive places, & even a sprinkling of eyecandy (or what they think passes as eyecandy... that stupid paperclip still gives me nightmares), effectively producing, in a nutshell, a half-baked , slightly warm pile of steaming dog shit. And a really really long run-on sentence having also bad grammer to boot, eh. uNF uNF, goddammit.

Show what 12 hours nonstop chasing bugs down a source code alleyway with no flashlight, no map, and no idea what might to jump out and try to scare/suffocate/sodomize you. How would you like to take a patchwork workflow (I oughtn't even mention the fact that it was cobbled togther from many bastardized bits of code), two similar yet logically unrelated (well, conceptually, anyway - the implementation is so fragmented you have to wonder if you're really looking at the right fucking parts) business entities.

Or how about websites written in Classic ASP, that have been reworked and overhauled innumerable times over the course of about five years, and only in the last year and half has the code actually migrated into the bowels of a source control system? Do you have any idea what it's like wading through 500 files trying to figure out which 5% are actually being used, which 5% are defunct or redundant implementations of the same feature, and which one are pure garbage? Uh.. okay, okay, so I'm exaggerating - the garbage is obvious. Files in the production source tree with name like default_1012004_john_broken_test_dammit_wtf_oops.asp. Give me a fucking break!

Or how about the slightly modified copies of scripts lying around (but not under source control!! oh no, can't have that!) that nobody even knows about until after you delete in in error?

Oops.. I just realized..... heh. Okay, I'm tired. And done.



(....Wait a minute... Microsoft still puts products like that on the market......)

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here...

"...for drivel shall spew forth and cauterize thy eyes..."

So I've done it; I've finally set aside my preconcieved notions of how the predominant characteristics of "bloggers" were ultimately a lack of intelligence, perspective, and better things to do with one's own time, and just went ahead and set up a stupid-ass blog for myself.Not that I don't enjoy reading blogs; on the contrary, sometimes there is no better resource than the published opinion of a fellow human being who happens to exist outside the realm of that certain form of manipulation of the public's opinion known as "corporate sponsorship".

I happen to see sifting through all the fucking cruft that is the web as an enormous waste of time - there's just no good way to find what you're looking for, and if you do happen to find something relavent, it's usually so saturated with bullshit (either produced by the consumer or the consume-ee), that it makes me want to break shit for wasting as much time as I did looking for it.

Anyway, why did I bother? I'll tell you why; a very old and very dear friend of mine turned me on to blogging through his blog - Black Rabbit. It didn't seem like much to me, until I read through the entry titled "You start on Monday" - man, that really hit home. At that point, it finally struck me: I don't communicate enough with any of my friends or family - I'm a self-certified workaholic, which is 50% worse than my dad (he's not self-certified).

So I figured (even though underneath, it probably has a lot to do with to my own lack of intelligence, perspective, better things to do, and [most likely] good judgement) that it couldn't be all that bad for me to set up another semi-anonymous text-based fountain of frustration and anguish in the "blogosphere", and maybe someone I know will stumble upon it one day.

So now I have my own platform from which I may spew forth my thoughts, however meaningful or meaningless. Can't hurt, right?

After all, who's really gonna read this drivel, anyway?