Life

As a senior professional in what might be termed the wider software industry I’ve worked with a lot of new graduates. On average I estimate that it takes 6 months for a new graduate to become an effective developer.

This is mostly because there is so much more to being a good developer than just writing code. Yesterday was James Croft’s last day as an intern at Seed, in his blog he takes time to thank us and gives a short précis of how he believes his year at Seed has helped him.

In The University we do the best we can to provide our students with knowledge of the working world. The University of Hull has an excellent reputation for producing well rounded, very employable Computer Science graduates. This is important, especially now that students are being asked to contribute so heavily and so directly towards their degrees: the employability of graduates is key to choosing a university and a course. A degree is an investment and you want to know you’re going to get a return on that.

I’m proud to be a member of the Computer Science Dept. at Hull, but no matter what we present in formal learning we’re never going to be able to teach what it’s like to be a software developer. That’s where Seed Software comes in.

We run a professional software development practice from right within the Department of Computer Science. We’re not playing at it either; Seed is not an academic’s idea of what a real software house would look like. Most of the software we develop is in use by the Fire Service. Currently 15 fire services in the UK use our software, ranging from risk management applications to the very systems responsible for taking calls, selecting and mobilising fire engines and assisting the crews by providing communications and information at the scene.  Commercial software development doesn’t get much more critical than this.

So how does this benefit our students and where does James fit in? James worked with us as an intern – he took a year out of his degree (between second and third years) in order to work with us. This is a paid position, we don’t expect people to work for nothing and there are several positions available. Currently we have 2 intakes, roughly one before and one after each summer.

Students can also work for with us part time as a module in their MEng or MSc programme.

I couldn’t write a syllabus for what Seed teaches, but I see how our students and interns grow over their time with us. Some come in over-confident and quickly realise that the real world is far more complex than they had imagined. Others come in lacking confidence and realise that they actually do have the required skills. Seed often puts people outside their comfort zones, being a good developer is so much more than sitting behind a computer and writing code. It’s about teamwork, it’s about communication, risk evaluation, it’s about prioritisation, estimation, strategy, presentation, politics. I could go on.

That’s what we do in Seed, we take students and we turn them into real world software professionals. As a professional business person myself I would employ every single intern that we have ever had in Seed, perhaps not as they started with us, but by the end of the internship all have proved that they have what it takes to be a valuable asset to our industry.

So I’m proud to be a member of the team at Seed, proud of what we do and of what we’ve achieved and I genuinely look forward to the future, to making Seed even better and more effective as we ourselves learn and grow.

I’m the lucky owner of rather a good turntable – I came by it almost by chance some 20 years ago. Despite the advent of CD and MP3 I kept it primarily because I own quite a lot of music that simply has never been released on CD. That isn’t why I dug it out of the store, and it’s not because I needed something “vintage” to go with the enormous tiger striped beanbag.

I dug it out of the store because I wanted to listen to music. I’m not going to pretend that vinyl sounds “warmer” or in any way better than CD or MP3 because it’s a plain lie. OK, so with a top quality deck and a brand new pressing you could in theory get better quality than a CD but that’s just not how it works. Dust happens, scratches happen, wear happens and you can hear all of it. So why listen to an inferior reproduction system? Because putting on a record is a ritual, you don’t put on a record to play in the background. As Pooh Bear says that “When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen,” when you see someone putting on a record you can be pretty sure that they’re going to Listen to Some Music.

So I’ve been working through my record collection and rediscovering the world of vinyl and how much more flexibility it gave artists and record producers. There are coloured records, shaped records, picture discs and there’s enough room  in a 12″ pack to neatly fold all sorts of things, but especially posters. Then of course there are gatefold sleeves and the whole world of cover art. I used to have a wall display that was made out of record covers – 12″ of square cardboard is large enough to make an impression. The cover art of a record really matters, I’ve bought a fair few of them on the strength of the cover art alone.

There are a few less well known charms too, like run-out groove etchings. One of the most famous that appears on a lot of records, is this.

“A Porky Prime Cut” is the signature of renowned record cutting engineer George Peckham. Quite often the band themselves get in on the act too, often with weird and cryptic messages. One of the most notorious is the run-out groove etching on the Sisters of Mercy’s 1983 Temple of Love original 12″ single. I think we can safely assume that they were not fans of the temperance movement.

Clearly it’s not worth buying a load of vinyl and forking out a small mortgage for a top quality record deck. Vinyl is easily damaged, it wears out, it’s inconvenient to store and to play and it weighs a ton. But it has a charm than CD and MP3 simply don’t have and for that reason alone I love it.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteSEED Software is fairly heavily Microsoft orientated. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Linux, indeed I started my career as a *nix developer. In 2000 though I was looking for my next career move and there just weren’t enough opportunities in the *nix world, so I jumped ship and became a Windows developer. Since then Linux has had to take a back seat.

However I recently ordered a new NAS and a Raspberry Pi. This means that I currently have;

• My main workstation (Windows 7)
• A backup workstation (Windows 7)
• A SQL Server (Windows 2008 Server R2)
• A Windows 8 Test Machine
• A Windows 7 Test Machine
• A Windows 7 laptop

But I also have;

• A Linux dev / test machine (running Gentoo)
• An Android smartphone (HTC Wildfire S running Cyanogen)
• A (Linux based) ADSL router
• A backup (Linux based) ADSL router
• A (Linux Based) NAS
• A Raspberry Pi

For the first time since 2000 I have got as many Linux machines as I have Windows, possibly more as there are other pieces of hardware that I have which could also be Linux based – I’m looking suspiciously at my TV for starters…

The downside of all this is that I think I may have just blown any pretence I might have had that I am not a geek. Hom hum, I can live with that!

Reading Time: 2 minutesI’ve stopped Google from caching this blog, it’s the only logical option.

Things change, circumstances change, events happen, our opinions change. The web though appears timeless, an article written 10 years ago can easily crop up in a search today and nobody reads the date. The advice that one might have given 10 years ago however may be entirely contradictory to the advice one would give today. The opinions expressed before the current recession may be entirely at odds with today’s. The conclusion we inevitably come to is that being able to edit and delete an article is really rather important.
Not only this but from a purely selfish point of view we might need to delete or edit articles – imagine writing an article that praised a particular company only to find out later that your own company was being taken over by one of their competitors. If the first time your new managers hear of you it’s because someone is telling them you’ve written an article supporting the opposition that stain is going to be difficult to remove from your reputation.

Articles can hang around in caches for a very long time after they’ve been taken down or edited on the original site. I’ve found myself writing articles and not publishing them simply because of this – I think to myself that I may change my mind about the subject at some point, or that the article is pertinent only to the world that exists today. So it’s a no-brainer for me and I would suggest any blogger, if you want to say anything that you may ever have cause to change or delete later, you have to try to stop it being cached.

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This is my mousemat. It’s about the same age as many of our students and it’s pretty much the only piece of computing technology from 1993 that’s still relevant today.

• The 3.5 inch floppy was the standard way of supplying data and even software. Windows came on 6 to 8 of them depending on the edition.
• Mice used to use a ball and rollers to track movement. They’re now optical.
• Only cheap keyboards used membranes. Good ones were mechanical (switch) keyboards. These are now almost impossible to get hold of.
• USB was unheard of. Peripherals either had to connect via an existing serial or parallel port or use their own interface card.
• The Compact Disc was common, but the CD-ROM had not yet entered the world of computing (let alone DVD or recordable technology).
• Monitors used Cathode Ray Tubes. This made anything bigger than 19″ heavy, awkward and expensive. If the office heating failed though they were good for that.
• A myriad of interfaces have come and gone. ISA bus, VESA local bus, DIN style keyboard connections, PS/2, IDE, etc. etc.

There are a few things that haven’at changed that much.

• Hard disks – the mechanical type – still use much the same physical technology. The data capacity now though is astounding. A “big” HDD in 1992 was 20Mb. It’s now 50,000 times that.
• VGA was the latest and greatest in 1992. We still use it today, mainly for projectors although even this is fading in favour of DVI / HDMI.
• Cases are still made of cheap steel and PSUs are still cheap switch-mode devices that fail every  more often than any other component.

Having said all this it’s not so long ago I lifted the lid on a piece of equipment that had just been decommissioned from a fire service. I recognised the CPU instantly, it was a Zilog Z80 in a DIL40 package, placing its vintage firmly in the 1980s and possibly as early as 1976. 

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Or why to but a top efficiency freezer.

So the power company decided to schedule a 9 hour outage for today and not bother telling us. At 09:15 the power went off and we were suddenly in the dark. No power, no network and even the cordless house phone was off. Sure we have mobiles but we live in a dip and have minimal signal.

We’re screwed, right?

Not at all, because when I became a remote worker I spent some time working out exactly what I’d do if this happened. Dress this up in fancy clothes and a consultant will call it “disaster recovery planning” and relieve you of the contents of your wallet. The reality is that it’s just a bit of common sense, but it is important that any small business actually does it.

There’s an old phone I keep in the spare bedroom that doesn’t need external power so within a couple of minutes we have some form of communication. All the utility company phone numbers are on a board by the fridge so within 10 minutes I want someone’s head on a plate. At least I know the score though and it means we’re out of the office for the day. We both use (docked) laptops as our primary machines so we grab them, an external HDD and a bunch of other goodies and decamp to a nearby relative’s. All sorted.

If you are a small business, a remote / home worker or a contractor you need to think about what you’d do if something goes wrong. There are four things to look at.

• What can go wrong?
• How likely is it?
• How severe it it?
• What are you going to do about it?

There are 2 parts to the last one. One part is obvious, what you do when it happens but you should also consider how you can mitigate it – how you can make it less likely or its effect less serious if it does happen.

Oh, and a small piece of advice, always get the most efficient freezer you can. 9 hours of no power and not a hint of defrosting!