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A Gentle Rant About Software Development and Installers
Nerval's Lobster writes "This is the story of the comparison that just wasn't meant to be. It's a story of everything that can go wrong in the customer end of the software world, and some thoughts on what needs to be done, especially in an area known as Installers. I'm a software engineer with 25 years of experience, and for years I've wanted to point out some of the shortcomings of my own industry to help make it better for everyone involved—not only for the end-users, but also for the IT people who have to support the products; the salespeople who have to sell and later, possibly, apologize for the software; for the executives whose hands are tied because they don't have the technical knowledge to roll up their sleeves and help fix problems in the code; and for the programmers themselves who might get stuck with what some consider the absolute worst position for a programmer: maintenance of crappy code written by programmers who have long since left the organization."
Problem solved. I will come by later to pick up my consulting fee.
As long as you can incrementally improve the design and code, maintenance isn't a bad position to be in. I've seen far too many programmers who whine and whine about how much the code base sucks, but they never do anything to make it better. They insist that the only way to go forward is to rewrite the whole thing, a project that is almost inevitably doomed to failure. If you actually design new code, implement policies if the company doesn't have any in place, and clean up the old code while you're hunting bugs, it can be every bit as rewarding as new development. ANY programming project can be a joy to work on, or a nightmare to work on, and it's entirely the discipline and ability of the team and its management that makes all the difference.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why does every windows application programmer think their program is so special or important that it needs to run in the background? The first thing to speed up any computer is to kill all the crappola trying run at start up. A program should run when started and when exited from it should completely shut down and even delete any temp files it created. I did a cleanup on a customers machine once and deleted over 10,000 temp files. That is lazy and stupid programming.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Bullshit. There's not one thing in your list that cannot be handled with an installer. You just don't care to automate the process, and are making up excuses to justify that after the fact.
I agree. By thinking about installation when creating complex enterprise software, you end up making better quality software. When you're forced to handle the inter-dependencies of complex systems in an installation process, you end up having a better handle on how everything interacts. This has been my experience at least.