Off By One

It’s funny how subtle things can bring memories… or at least fuzzy, vague recollections, trickling back into the foreground.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have few clear memories of my life before leaving Grande Prairie. It’s not much of a stretch for me to claim that I only really ever became a whole person once the last vestiges of that place were stripped from me and I stepped out into the world anew. This isn’t to say I’m the best at the social interaction thing as it is. I can see from my relationships now that I still carry some of the baggage of what was, easily, the worst way I can imagine anyone having to grow up barring famine or warfare.

Thanks to the all-powerful Facebook, it so happens that I’m reliving some of the … less pleasant parts of my life so far, albeit with only one clear memory to act as an avatar of all of the unpleasantness.

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I am, as Char will no doubt agree, occasionally a bit on the negative side. This isn’t always a good thing; I need to learn to tone down my vitriol in situations in which it does not advance my needs, and in those in which it is not necessary or constructive.

There are times, however, that merit a vigorous negative response.

I’m taking two project courses in school this semester; Cmput 414, which is a graphics and multimedia course with a heavy algorithmic programming component, and Cmput 401, a software engineering course and the focus of this rant.

Software Engineering is, according to Wikipedia, “is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.” Among other things, it requires the application of good design practices to the development of code, and following beneficial design standards.

So, I have to ask, why is it that people taking this fucking course cannot do something as basic as grok that it is fundamentally bad practice to add public methods to hidden implementing classes instead of using the goddamned design?! I spent three days nailing down, and countless hours tuning up, the data model for our project application, only to have one of my fellow team members simply come along and, instead of reading the goddamned documentation, which I provided as a first step, add new hooks into the mechanism, just to get at the information in a way that is not only wrong, but disables some nice and (I thought) needed functionality.

I have spent the last hour looking over his code, marveling at the glorious unification of layers that, according to good design practices, should ever remain separate — the intermingling of UI code and logic that I’d already written elsewhere, better was a real high point for me.

Gods.

I cannot wait to get back to full time work with people who know more than I do, so that instead of raging at the pathetic efforts of people whose skills are not even up to the level of an academic programmer, I can instead find faults with my own approaches, be told that I’m doing it wrong, and learn how to do it better.