I think I'll open with a dubious metaphor I just came up with and a demand that the reader immediately and wholeheartedly accept that metaphor as literal truth. That's how you grab an audience!
Yes, I write intentionally click-baity blog posts. You got me.
Software is narrative
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Software is narrative
#22Just wondering if I'm the only one, but I like my logs to be the narrative of what's happening in the system.
Agreed. I think many people do a good job of logging when something goes wrong, and maybe they are good about logging inputs/outputs of a system, but I think that logging important decisions often falls off the table. Ideally I would like to take a request ID, grep the logs, and get an entire story of what happened to that request. In reality, this rarely happens!
Re: Software is narrative
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main point of the article appears to be: > You always have to design both “the product” your customers want and “the environment” in which your product will run in production. Thus any software product begins with two obvious categories of “work to be done.” People ignore this because it seems [counterintuitive.][going_there]
Hey you saved everyone a click! I am the author of the post and I approve this summary :)
I think I took the metaphor more to heart than others. I like to think of myself as a good storyteller. I can explain pretty in depth computer science topics to my business team who lack technical knowledge pretty well through stories. My problem seems to be translating this to software structures.
I wish I could be as good of a "writer" in my software, but I am always looking to others for the best practices. In this case, I am always in a constant state of doubt and "writers block", I need to figure out how to unleash my own creativity.
Re: Software is narrative
#24Okay, I'll take it at face value. Can you name a few competent programmers who are also competent book / story writers ?
[deleted]
Re: Software is narrative
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main point of the article appears to be: > You always have to design both “the product” your customers want and “the environment” in which your product will run in production. Thus any software product begins with two obvious categories of “work to be done.” People ignore this because it seems [counterintuitive.][going_there]
Hey you saved everyone a click! I am the author of the post and I approve this summary :)
what does [counterintuitive.][going_there] mean?
Re: Software is narrative
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey you saved everyone a click! I am the author of the post and I approve this summary :)
what does [counterintuitive.][going_there] mean?
Based on the other usages in the article, it looks like some kind of link syntax like in markdown or wikitext, but it isn't being parsed/replaced. If so, then it just means "counterintuitive."
Re: Software is narrative
#27I think I'll open with a dubious metaphor I just came up with and a demand that the reader immediately and wholeheartedly accept that metaphor as literal truth. That's how you grab an audience!
Yes, I write intentionally click-baity blog posts. You got me.
ajarmst's point goes beyond click-baitiness -- indeed it is about the little quote-box on the first para rather than the title. You say: "Any software system begins as a shared narrative about a problem and the people who come together around solving that problem."
I can, in fact, bend my view of facts to fit this metaphor. And if am also dubious about doing so, that's OK as it makes it all the more likely that I will learn something new from your post.
So why spoil that with some the arrogant demand that: "If you don’t accept the above proposition completely then nothing I have to say about software is going to work for you."?
Re: Software is narrative
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I write intentionally click-baity blog posts. You got me.
ajarmst's point goes beyond click-baitiness -- indeed it is about the little quote-box on the first para rather than the title. You say: "Any software system begins as a shared narrative about a problem and the people who come together around solving that problem." I can, in fact, bend my view of facts to fit this metaphor. And if am also dubious about doing so, that's OK as it makes it all the more likely that I wil…
Just to advocate for the devil here, I think some advice is predicated on a shared model, between the giver and the taker, of how things work. If you don’t buy the model, then you probably won’t deeply understand or agree with the arguments that would get you from the model to the thesis.
Re: Software is narrative
#29Just wondering if I'm the only one, but I like my logs to be the narrative of what's happening in the system.
Agreed. I think many people do a good job of logging when something goes wrong, and maybe they are good about logging inputs/outputs of a system, but I think that logging important decisions often falls off the table. Ideally I would like to take a request ID, grep the logs, and get an entire story of what happened to that request. In reality, this rarely happens!
> take a request ID, grep the logs, and get an entire story of what happened to that request. In reality, this rarely happens!
If that's the situation you find yourself in, I cannot praise centralized logging with a good frontend highly enough because I frequently find myself trying to figure out what happened to a request, and it's like night and day.
Needing to ssh anywhere and run grep against log files is functional if there's only one or a handful of VMs, but it gets complicated with a handful of machines, and even just SCP-ing the logs off becomes time consuming if there are a lot of machines. Then once the logs are off, 'grep' quickly becomes inadequate. (And I should know, I've built some truly horrible regexps to try and grep for dates because I didn't know any better.)
All that friction means that answering the original question; figuring out a detailed internal reason for why my customer received a 500 http status response error, is just too toilsome for all but the most (as you noted) doesn't happen in .
With centralized logging, I'm able to search for a request ID and see the logs, and this is a reality as often as I need, in order to debug complex multi-system issues.
Re: Software is narrative
#30Okay, I'll take it at face value. Can you name a few competent programmers who are also competent book / story writers ?
Coetzee comes to mind. Ted Chiang is a technical writer in the software industry, and while I don't know if that means he's a competent programmer, it seems logical that he can do some programming.