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I was talking to my father a few months ago when I posed this question. Are we watching the death of boxing as a popular sport and if so, why? I suggested that boxing started to decline when public broadcast turned to pay-per-view and private broadcasting, such as closed-circuit television. Back when I was a kid, all of the major fights were on national television. I can still remember Howard Cosell calling the Ali, Frazier, Norton, and Foreman fights. Back then, everyone knew who the heavyweight champion of the world was – and there was only one at the time, not five. But, money gets the best of everyone sooner or later. Promoters decided that they could use boxing’s popularity to leverage revenues by charging people to watch it. In the short term, this worked great. Over the years, however, I think people slowly lost interest because of this. The promoters started setting a bar that you had to hurdle to see the fight. Eventually, you have to decide whether you’re willing to shell out $50 to watch a fight on TV. If you know the fighters, you might decide to invite some friends over and split the cost and it turns into a small party, like Sunday afternoon football.

However, these things can spiral. Some people won’t go over the hurdle. They start to lose touch with the fighters. Popularity declines a bit. Coverage in the newspaper gets smaller. Coverage on TV used to be in the mainstream stations even for the weigh-ins. Now, if there’s coverage, it’s on ESPN. That may be the best place to report on it, but it’s yet a smaller number of viewers than your local ABC news sports report.

With every hurdle and every dilution comes a smaller market share. Combine this with other interests, like mixed martial arts and the UFC, and you’ve got a recipe for decline. Once you start to coast and don’t invest in your product, you can bet that someone else will come along and take the interest away.

I was reading Jeff Atwood’s post on Programming: Love It or Leave It which was derived from a Joel Spolsky forum entry. This got me thinking about some of the responses and some of my own experiences. I’ve mostly worked on products as opposed to IT departments. As Joel points out in one of his responses, “[you're] going to get more out of computer careers if [you] work in a product company.” This is because products tend to be longer life projects, tend to suffer less from budget cuts than internal IT projects, and mostly because they involve more design and creativity components as you have to try to appeal to customers who don’t have to buy from you. In a product company, you’re more likely going to have to produce software for sale as opposed to maintaining databases, hardware, or software, or another of hundreds of mundane tasks.

There are so many possibilities in the computer programming world. When I talk to people about what they’re looking for in their next job, I point out that there are many different possibilities. Small product start-ups, small companies with established products, large product companies, web-site companies, web-site design and consulting companies, large and small embedded software companies, IT service companies, non-software companies with IT departments, universities with research programming needs and IT needs, and many, many more.

Each one of these places offers different kinds of work. Some people have said that there is a shift in programming going on today. My friends who work for a large software product company spend a good amount of their time designing code for people in China to write. They get software back that may or may not work well and may not be up to par. Then they have to either request changes or fix it themselves. They tell me that it would be easier and more efficient to simply write the code themselves. Either way, this is what’s happening at that company and they don’t believe it’s going to change any time soon.

If you don’t like what you’re doing there are several choices. Do something entirely different and quit programming. This is the extreme approach. Alternatively, find a different kind of company or software. Your experience is transferable, but you may have to convince potential employers of this. Doing some personal projects can help fill in missing job experience. For example, if you’re in web programming and are looking to move into a product atmosphere, download a Java environment and develop a small shareware or freeware application. You’ll have something tangible to point to and you’ll find out whether you really like doing that kind of development work.

There’s a world of software out there, some of it hiding where you might not suspect. Do some web searching and personal networking. The economy may stink right now, but there are many companies that still need to get work done and there are jobs out there if you dig enough.

I’ve been doing this for a long time – over 22 years, in fact. A couple of years ago I started to lose the love of programming. What happened? It was a conglomeration of things. I worked for an idiot boss for a year. I worked on a large project that was very touchy and was full of spaghetti code. Changing something that fixed your problem always caused something else horrible to happen. Probably the worst things were that I no longer felt like a vital part of the decision-making process and had been relegated to being a cog.

Being a small cog in a large machine is not unusual for a programmer; some people actual prefer this kind of role. They enjoy going to work, being given a set of tasks to complete to given specifications, and going home at night without worrying about what’s next. However, this doesn’t suit everyone and it sure doesn’t work for me. I need a little freedom. Freedom to design my code, my UI (or at least have some feedback into it), my platform, my tools, and my environment. After working in C++ for many years, where everything is hard because hardly anything is built in, the constant struggle to get a simple job done and the fact that everything takes days or weeks can get to you.

So, how do you find the love again? First, try to regain some control over your domain. Lobby for some design input. If your product is defined and designed by a product manager, marketing group, or product designer, ask to be included in the design discussions for the next release. It never ceases to amaze me what assumptions are made about implementation by people who don’t actually implement things. It also boggles the mind how complicated some people can make even the simplest tasks because they think it will be more elegant. Users like to use slick, beautiful user interfaces, but they also want to get their jobs done as quickly and easily as possible. How many UIs have you used that seem like it takes 5 steps to get somewhere when 1 or 2 is all it should take?

Second, start to take control of your environment. Are you using a reasonable IDE or editor for your coding? There are lots of choices, but whatever you pick should be helping you do your work more easily. Do you have help with formatting, automatic code completion, and UI development? If not, and you think it would help, get a hold of something better. Convince your boss that the money spent on better tools will cost less in the long run because it will save you time.

Third, if you find that every task in your application looks like you’re slogging through the jungle or that you have to constantly build things that just ought to be there already, make it happen yourself. Change your mindset for a minute. Start thinking about what kind of functionality should be just built into your environment. Could you use a easy interface to file saving and loading, a better string library, or something else? Rather than simply building it into your next piece of code, think about making it part of your new toolkit. Turn this functionality into a library or module of its own. You’ll end up with something more reusable and that will help you and the rest of your team for a long time to come. Be sure to document it with some comments, a few examples, and a brief overview. I’ve found that as soon as I start to write a little documentation on something (even if it’s not extensive documentation) that I realize that I could make the design easier to use and understand.

Chances are, you may already have code in your system that could be reused if were simply packaged better. Instead, people just cut and paste code or have to figure it out on their own. Refactor the code into a toolkit and users of the toolkit. Future coding will be much easier.

Have you ever noticed that every time you have to use some code, you have to read the function or method definitions or even the code carefully to figure out what it does. These are great targets for a little refactoring, commenting, and light documentation. Even some simple function renaming may make things clearer and easier to use.

Taking control of what you’re doing and how you do it, can help you start to find the love again. Try it.

I wrote a while ago about how writing software and writing a book were similar. It’s my pleasure to announce that Design, Code, Test, Repeat: Your Instruction Manual for a Great Software Career is now available! Go here for more information.

A couple of days ago, I was working on some code. I had created a few temporary files on disk and needed to delete them. I was going to work out a scheme for recording the file names and hooking into an exit routine to delete them. I went to look for the delete file command in Java and found something brilliant: File.deleteOnExit.

I was thrilled and stunned to be confronted with the answer to my problem. All I had to do was call this function and Java would take care of the rest. It doesn’t get any easier than that. This is just one reason that I don’t agree with Jeff Atwood on his assertion that you must be a good typist to write code. If I had blindly started writing this utility, I would have added a few dozen lines of unneeded code. However, that’s not really the point here, just a corollary point.

My real point is that including deleteOnExit was brilliant. It’s just one example of why I love Java for writing an application. I’ve written loads of C++, and a little C# (but, not enough to know all of the hidden functionality). What amazes me is that I’ve been able to make incredible progress on my application than I would have considered possible in C++ in more than twice the time. Part of it is due to Java’s integrated UI, graphics, and table functionality. In C++, there’s an object oriented language, some utility classes, and the Microsoft windowing and graphics stuff that’s really old and poorly designed. In C#, at least there’s some integration of these things as an environment. But, that’s still not the point.

Getting back to the point – including useful functionality as part of the package saves people time. It’s part of picking the right tool for the job. It’s why you should write a script for repetetive programming tasks. It’s why you should refactor your code to create as many utility functions for other programmers to use. It’s why the Extreme Programming mantra you’re not going to need it is only partially on the mark. It’s why you should always think about how to make your code reusable. It’s why you should try to write as little code as you can to do the job correctly, creating and using the tools available to make coding easier.

The next time you’re writing some code, think about whether there’s a way that you can make it easier to use. Including deleteOnExit is just one example of saving thousands of users time because one programmer thought to add it to the toolkit.

Today’s world of software development is decidedly more global. Outsourcing and offshoring is common because every knows “it’s more economical.” While I won’t debate that last statement (I’m not really convinced it’s more economical), it is simply a fact of life and not really the point of this particular post anyway.

Currently, I work from home. I’m doing some contract programming work for a local company. I’m developing an application that they had had an intern start. The intern had spent several months working on it and it was allegedly nearing the stage where it might be considered sellable. As it was used mainly internally, the requirements for style, bug-proofedness (is that a word?), and functional completeness were a little lax.  And so I come to inherit a piece of code written a couple of years ago by an intern.  Most of the code was unusable due to a complete lack of comments, usefully named variables, and code that wasn’t full of bugs.  Nonetheless, I was able to lift some ideas and one piece of code that undoubtedly will save me some time, but is nearly unreadable.

But, that’s not the point of today’s post either; it’s just some background.  The real point of this post is maintaining contact with your employer, colleagues, manager, etc. (I’m going to group these people into a term called “work folks” for future ease of reference.)  In other words, being there.  If you work remotely, getting face time with your work folks is difficult, but not impossible.  There are several options for increasing your visibility.

• Take a trip.  There’s really no better way to increase your visibility than actually being visible.  Take your laptop and find a desk in the middle of the place if possible (rather than a secluded conference room.  Become “one of the guys” for a week or two.  Have lunch with everyone that you can and get to know them a bit more personally.
• Make a phone call.  If you can’t be there, at least pick up the phone occasionally rather than relying totally on email, which is far less personal.  Conversations have more range of direction that they can flow in due to their interactive nature.  The scope and types of things you can find out in a conversation are far greater than what you’ll get in an email response.  There’s also a far lower likelihood of being misunderstood or having to ask for more clarification in a followup email and the turnaround time in a conversation can’t be beat.
• Communicate regularly.  Trips are expensive (depending on distance), phone calls aren’t always easy due to time zone issues and meeting schedules.  If nothing else, a regular email update will keep you in the minds of your work folks.

Whichever mode you pick, keep up a regular pace of communication so you stay on the radar of your work folks.  It will make you feel like you’re a part of the team and make the team feel like you’re one of them as well.

Have you noticed that chipotle is the new baking soda. Back in the 90′s, you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing a commercial talking about how they added baking soda to make the product better. Crest toothpaste – now with baking soda. Try our laundry detergent – now with baking soda. Goodyear tires – now with baking soda. Arm & Hammer Baking Soda – now with even more baking soda!

Well, today, chipotle is the new baking soda. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing a commercial talking about how they added chipotle to their chicken/steak/hamburgers/barbecue/broccoli. Although I haven’t eaten out much recently, the idea is that chipotle will give the food an extra kick of flavor that will delight you.

When I was writing software in the 90′s, I used to talk about advertising our next version of software as “Version 2 – now with baking soda”. But, since we’re living in the year 2008 where chipotle is the next big thing, I’m recommending that you add it instead. That begs the question, “How?”

Now that I’m doing some private contract work, my work attitude has changed considerably. I’m no longer working for a large, bloated, cash-laden company. It’s not like I didn’t give every company my best ideas and effort, it’s just that an environment like that tends to have long development cycles, lots of waiting for specs and testing, etc. In other words, it often lacks a sense of urgency and a sense of true ownership and responsibility. Now that I’m working for a friend, I have a renewed sense of all of these. One thing that this is leading me to do is add chipotle to my software.

When I first sat down to talk about the application I’d be working on, I had tons of ideas, but wanted to make sure that I could continuously send software updates to keep my client aware of my progress. I also knew that this was a first release and that my client didn’t want to spend a fortune on it. On the other hand, a first impression is a lasting one, whether it’s your software in front of a customer, or your work for your client. So, I regularly send updates and when I do this, I outline a list of the new functionality I’ve added and ensure that everything works well. In addition, I try to add a little chipotle with every update. Sure, it’s supposed to show something on the screen when this happens, but isn’t that dialog sharp looking? Sure, it’s going to have standard printing functionality, but how about this special option that automatically does some setup that will save you tons of time?

When you’re working on someone else’s dime, it adds pressure to stay focused on task. It means not wasting time (or at least not charging the customer for it). It means adding some chipotle, especially if it doesn’t cost the customer anything extra.

I remember the first time I heard the term “legacy code“. It was said with the implication that it was old, disliked, awful, God-help-you-if-you’re-sent-in-there-to-modify-it kind of stuff. That’s not really what it applies to, however. In many cases it’s really just code that’s not the most current stuff. It could be stuff that the previous guy wrote that you have to modify. And this is where I currently find myself.

I’m working on a project where the code was an internal application used by the folks who put together the parts that they make. It’s about three years old, written in Java, and contains almost no useful comments. The code is most definitely not self-documenting. It was put together by a summer intern with little actual coding experience and is a real mix of working, non-working, and perplexing code. Just upgrading to the latest java development kit has caused numerous warnings and exceptions.

I talked with the boss about what he wants done and then proceeded to take stock of what I’m dealing with. The UI isn’t terribly complicated other than a large table with lots of data and a few buttons mixed into the table. There’s some interesting functionality built into it (the table) and I’m trying to figure out if this is the best way to present this to the user or not. I’ve got a lot of leeway on how to proceed, but the requirement that it be done fairly quickly and cheaply.

After looking through the code in some detail, I have determined that the overall state of it is fairly “hacked”. It’s clear that the previous programmer didn’t understand why he was doing some things, especially related to event handling, putting icons into buttons, and computer graphics. So, in other words, there’s a lot of unnecessary code. The rest of the code is filled with uncommented, obscure variable names that are used, but of course, leave no indication of their job.

So, what’s a coder to do? I’ve tentatively decided to start by creating a new UI. I’ve discover Jaxx, which, although it doesn’t seem to be undergoing any changes and needs some updating for the latest jdk, does have some nice functionality and can help me get my project going quickly. This wasn’t an easy decision either, and I’m still second-guessing myself, but I figure that I can probably redo the basic UI with another similar toolkit in a few days, if necessary, for the next release.

With the new UI in place, I’ve been grabbing components of the code from the legacy application and moving it into the new framework I’ve built. So far, it has been a few days worth of work and I’ve got a much smaller, cleaner code base to work with. Already, the graphics are working better and there’s some separation of functionality into proper classes.

I plan to continue to grab code for the guts from the current app while cleaning it up, and adding some #!*!$%& comments and documentation. My decision might have been different if the circumstances were different. A clean, logical, well commented and documented code base would have led me to modify the current code as is. Notes on what wasn’t working yet would have helped. Since there was no source control used, I can’t even be sure that I have the latest code.

Am I making the right decisions? I believe so. I’ve made great progress in very little time and I’m reusing the existing code, so I’m not reinventing the part of the wheel that seems to be working.

What legacy do I plan to leave for myself and/or the next person who takes over the code?

• I will comment the code and not assume that it’s so beautiful that it’s immediately intuitive. I’ll likely be the beneficiary of this a couple of months down the road.
• I will use some source control, so I can know where the latest code is and do release control.
• I will track working and non-working functionality.
• I will spend time to think about the best way to accomplish the tasks at hand by doing diligent research and design.

I hope that this will lead to more interesting projects in the future with the successful delivery of this one. Doing good work leads to more work.

I try to avoid politics with people I don’t know, but here goes; we’ll see how many people I insult with this post.

First, let me say how much I hate most politicians. With some exceptions, and despite most of them starting out with good intentions, they end up as self-interested, holier-than-thou, self-righteous, dishonest, and dishonorable windbags. Like most Americans, I have a vested interest in the current election. After eight years suffering through the results of the Bush Presidency (financial crises, foreign wars that we started, declining dollar, skyrocketing oil, etc.), I, like most of you, am looking forward to a regime change.

It’s an interesting mix of people running for the top spots. On one side, we have Barack Obama, who touts the word “change” as if that’s all it takes to make everything in Washington work as it should. He seems to have a good understanding of economic policy (if anyone can really “understand” it) and is clearly a very smart man. His running mate, Joe Biden, albeit a “gaffe machine”, has been around Washington long enough to know how it really works and can give Obama an earful on the foreign policy experience that Obama lacks.

On the other side we have John McCain, decorated war veteran, who served his country with distinction. He’s a smart man as well, and clearly cares for his country. He’s more “old school” on some issues, like maitaining troops in Iraq to ensure long-term stability. However, his plan to give more tax cuts to the wealthy (like Reagan’s and Bush Jr.’s trickle-down economics) and health-crisis plans (“we’ll assemble the best minds in the country”, gee, why didn’t anyone else think of that?) are clearly out of touch. His negative campaign has been thoroughly disgusting. If he wants to win any votes, he should run on his positive image and his policy plans. And, if he really cares about his country, he should end the divisive retoric in his messages. His running mate, Sarah Palin, while likeable, is clearly out of touch with the world. Who would have thought that she’d be tapped as a V.P. candidate? Clearly not Palin or she might have picked up a Time magazine, read it, and remembered what it was called.

Our current President dug himself into so many holes due to his own hubris, ignorance, and lack of respect for the opinions of others. While he didn’t bring down the World Trade Center, his administration had clues of attacks that were ignored. He didn’t make risky loans to homeowners, but he was in office making sure that his rich friends were well looked after, got all of the appropriate tax cuts, and had little oversight in the process. He clearly wasn’t responsible for invading two countries (Irag and Afghanistan), but, oh wait, that was all him, wasn’t it? Yes, it all happened on his watch.

How does all of this apply to you and me? It applies in several ways. First, it’s our responsibility to choose the next people to run the country. I can’t tell you who will do the better job. I can only implore you to select the people who are smart, won’t repeat the mistakes of the past, and will keep an open mind to changing the status quo. It also wouldn’t suck if they could pronounce nuclear properly (it’s new-klee-ur, not new-kya-ler).

Second, when you see things that are screwy in your own life (at work or home), you have the responsibility to make recommendations to the powers that can do something about them. If you’re the manager who has the power and you know something is going on in your own group, then it’s your responsibility to make it right. Turning a blind eye and hoping it will go away or somehow just work out, will not make it so. What happens is on your watch.

A couple of years ago I was looking for work in the Ithaca, NY area. Several people helped me find local companies and gave me moral support along the way. I ended up working for a small company that subcontracted me to a very large local defense contractor. It was a great experience on many levels. Since I left that job about a year ago, I’ve been working on some smaller personal projects, including my book.

Since I’m the most recent person amongst many former colleagues to go through the job search process, I’ve become the local go-to person for help with resumes and local companies. It’s a “job” that I happily do to help out my friends and neighbors. Recently a friend of a friend came here from India after a several year hiatus from coding to take care of a sick parent. His name is Joe Pierce, like most other folks from India that you speak to over the phone. I never met Joe or even spoke to him. I told my friend to have Joe send his resume to me so I could think of what local places he might look at and see if I could give him any good contacts.

When I received his resume and cover letter, it was a disaster. It covered three (!) pages and consisted of nine mostly short-term (e.g. 4 – 6 month) contract jobs over a twelve year period. Two things were painfully obvious looking at it. One, it was too long for such a short time period (a resume should be only one or two pages). Two, Joe was over 60 years old.

I’m not suggesting that being over 60 is inherently bad, but this is what he was presenting to a potential employer: I’m 63 years old, haven’t worked in 6 years, and most of my jobs have lasted around 4 months. Age discrimination may be illegal, but that’s no reason to stick it somebody’s face either. I suggested several changes:

• Remove the years that he went to school – turns out this is becoming a common practice.
• Highlight the skills he has in a good summary.
• Shorten the whole thing to a page or two.

He was hesitant to take away the dates or change to a functional resume (people thought he was hiding something – he was, of course). On the other hand, your chances of anyone giving this guy a second thought are fairly slim. Your first job in job hunting is to get your foot in the door. You do this by having an intriguing resume and getting to the hiring manager, rather than the HR department. Once you get an interview, it will become very obvious that you’re old or young, short or tall, skinny or fat, American or not. None of these things should matter at all, but first you have to get to the interview. After that, you have the opportunity to present yourself in the best light possible and hopefully that comes out in person. You show up on time for the interview, you’re knowledgeable on the subject matter, and you seem like you’ll fit into the personality of the company.

Looking for a job is a full time job. Like any other job, you have to do some preparation, studying, and practicing to do it well. Get some good books out of the library (e.g. What Color Is Your Parachute), hit some good web sites (I recommend wandercoding.com ), and use your network of friends and former colleagues to help. Don’t dawdle – it’s your new job.

Epilogue: Unfortunately, unable to find work after 3 months, Joe returned to India.