Slashdot Mirror
Taco Bell Programming
theodp writes "Think outside the box? Nah, think outside the bun. Ted Dziuba argues there's a programming lesson to be learned from observing how Taco Bell manages to pull down $1.9 billion by mixing-and-matching roughly eight ingredients: 'The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability. This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where system administrators start writing unit tests and other things to help the developers warm up to them — Taco Bell Programming is about developers knowing enough about Ops (and Unix in general) so that they don't overthink things, and arrive at simple, scalable solutions.'"
Reminds me of a job interview I did once with an old guy, he had around 30 different programming languages on his resume. I asked him which programming language was his favorite, expecting it to be something like Lisp or Forth, but he said, "shell script." I was a bit surprised, but he said, "it lets me tie pieces in from everywhere and do it all with the least amount of code."
I wasn't entirely convinced, but he did have the resume. Seems Mr Dziuba is from the same school of thought. I read the full introduction to the DevOps page and I'm still not entirely sure what it's about. We should work together and deliver on time, or something like that.
Qxe4
exactly.
Those 8 keywords are + - > [ ] . ,
"Compilers are like boyfriends, you miss a period and they go crazy on you."
The complexity people seem to delight in putting into things always amazes me. I was recently working at a major bank (they didn't like me eventually as I'm bad at authority structures). Anyway the area I was working on involved opening bank accounts from the web site. Complicated, right? The new account holder has to choose the type of account they want (of about 7), enter their details (name, address, etc), and press go. Data gets passed about, the mainframe makes the account, and we return the new account number.
Gosh.
So why, oh tell me why, did they use the following list of technologies (usually all on the same jsp page) [I may have missed some]
HTML
CSS
JSP (with pure java on the page)
Javascript (modifying the page)
JQuery
XML
XSLT
JDBC with Hibernate
JDBC without Hibernate
Custom Tag library
Spring (including AOP)
J2EE EJBs
JMS
Awesome. All this on each of the countless pages, each custom designed and built. Staggering. In fact, the site needed about 30 pages, many of them minor variations of each other. The whole thing could have been built using simple metadtata. It would have run faster, been easier to debug and test (the existing system was a nightmare), and easily changeable to suit the new business requirements that poured in.
So instead of using one efficient, smart programmer for a while, then limited support after that, they had a team of (cheap) very nervous programmers, furiously coding away, terrified lest they break something. And yes, there were layers and layers of software, each overriding the other as the new programmer didn't understand the original system, so added their own. Palimpsest, anyone?
And yet, despite my offers to rebuild the whole thing this way (including demos), management loved it. Staggering.
But I still like to keep things simple. And yes, my name is Simon. And yes, I do want a new job.
"Cats like plain crisps"
I've found the best reuse comes from simple modules, not from complex ones that try to do everything. The one that tries to do everything will still be missing the one feature you need. It's easier to add the features you need to the simple one because it's, well, simpler. With the fancier one you have to work around all the features you don't need to add those that you do need, creating more reading time and more mistakes.
Table-ized A.I.
Once, about 20 years ago, I worked for a company who's line of business generated a VERY large amount of data which for legal reasons had to be carefully reduced, archived, etc. There were various clusters of VMS machines which captured data from different processes to disk, from where it was processed and shipped around. There were also some of the 'new fangled' Unix machines that needed to integrate into this process. The main trick was always constantly managing disk space. Any single disk in the place would probably have 2-10x its capacity worth of data moving on and off it in an given day. It was thus VITAL to constantly monitor disk usage in pretty much real time.
On VMS the sysops had developed a system to manage all this data which weighed in at 20-30k lines of code. This stuff generated reports, went through different drives and figured out what was going in where, compared it to data from earlier runs, created deltas, etc. It was a fairly slick system, but really all it did was iterate through directories, total up file sizes, and write stuff to a couple report files, and send an email if a disk was filling up too fast.
So one day my boss asks me to write basically the same program for the Unix cluster. I had a reputation as the guy that could figure out weird stuff. Even had played a small amount with Unix systems before. So I whipped out the printed Man pages and started reading. Now I figured I'd have to write a whole bunch of code, after all I'm duplicating an application that has like 30k lines of code in it, not gigantic but substantial. Pretty soon though I learned that every command line app in Unix could feed into the other ones with a pipe or a temp file. Pretty soon I learned that those apps produced ALL the data that I wanted and produced it in pretty much the format that I needed. All that I really had to do was glue it together properly. Pretty soon I (thank God it starts with A) I found awk, and then sed. 3 days after that I had 2 awk scripts, a shell script that ran a few things through sed, a cron job, and a few other bits. It was maybe 100 lines of code, total. It did MORE than the old app. It was easy to maintain and customize. It saved a LOT of time and money.
There's PLENTY to recommend the KISS principle in software design. Not every problem can be solved with a bit of shell coding of course, but it is always worth remembering that those tools are tried and true and can be deployed quickly and cheaply. Often they beat the pants off fancier approaches.
One other thing to remember from that project. My boss was the one that wrote the 30k LoC monstrosity. The week after I showed her the new Unix version, I got downsized out the door. People HATE it when you show them up...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Noli strepere.
Per tempus mei, "zero" non habemus. Numerorum Romanorum usi eramus.