Another Delphi Contract

I should mention something about my last adventure in programming. (Oh why do these things always have to be an adventure?) I moved to Edmonton and the job only lasted three month for some strange reason!
The end client of the contract was 5D Solutions... at least that is what they still call it on their web site even though they officially changed their name when they were bought out by a big American company.

In the interest of one day getting another software job I won't go deep into what was wrong at the company. But I must say that they really knew how to spend money. It helps when you have the US government as one of your big customers!

I am still surprised at how companies end relationships. I know that they are afraid of getting sued but when they break things off with no explanation it really leaves a bad taste. I do note that they are always looking for software developers and managers. They seem to have some trouble keeping people for some reason.

One of the strange things at that contract was all the money that they wasted on my training. There was weeks and weeks of testing and online courses and then I was terminated without explanation. Hardly seems a smart way to spend money. The 5D software is used to control and document blood collection and blood product testing. (I found that especially interesting with my own medical history). Because of the nature of their software the US FDA was involved. The software package was considered a "medical device". Someone somewhere neglected to document the software the first time around so 5D was spending millions on getting it certified after the fact. The only small problem was the incredibly bad software decisions that had been made early in the project. So know, because so much time and effort had been spent trying to get the darn thing FDA certified everyone was afraid to throw the darn crap out and start over even though that would have created much better software on a much shorter schedule. GIGO to the max was okay as long as everything was well documented.

Of course I was only hired as a lowly software developer even though they called all their employees "analysts". Sort of like when a big hotel makes all their front desk employees "Assistant Managers" after their first week on the job. I know that I was not actually an Analyst because in three months there was little opportunity to actually analyse anything and provide input for improvement.

Anyways I am not bitter. I got out of the Vancouver rat race for a while and I am enjoying my rental apartment in Edmonton. It has a great view to the south and is the largest space that I have ever had all to myself. (It is 20% larger than my mobile home that I recently sold in Surrey, BC). Since I have money in the bank -- another story that I have not yet written about -- I took the occasion to become a student for a while. Since April I have been a full-time Athabasca University student. It is all by "distance learning", either online or by the mail. I was trying for a Bachelor of Arts but I keep ratcheting back my expectations and will happy to get what they call a University Diploma in the Arts. It all depends on how many credits they give me for previous education. Athabasca University is taking their time getting back to me on that one.

Some Software Inspiration

As I have said elsewhere, I am once again searching for jobs and a steady salary. I went to an interview last week where they asked me to name a technical book that had inspired me. I must admit that I fumbled the answer. I have read many software manuals and technical books; many of them were useful but I can't think of one that was really inspiring.
What is inspiring? On the other hand I am inspired by many other sources. I get a lot of inspiration from magazines. When I was working in California I enjoyed reading Software Development Magazine each month. It was inspirational to read all the latest concepts and applications.
Sometimes these advanced concepts can be a hindrance to my work. I read about Agile methods and Ruby on Rails and JavaBeans. Then I return to my work repairing thirty-year old RPG code while trying to convince my employers that code can be reused and, just perhaps, that speed of software development, careful design and code reuse is as important as compile speed or multi-level object inheritance.
Sometimes knowing that there is a better way to do things just leads to frustration. I often find that the guy who quietly sits at the back of the meeting and takes two months to do something that should take two weeks, is also the guy who is offered the full time permanent job with benefits while I am out looking for my next contract.
(I just had a look and saw that Software Development Magazine has merged with the ancient -- in computer terms -- Dr. Dobbs's Journal. Both of the magazines and several others are free to American residents but expensive subscriptions for Canadian residents). [By 2014 even Dr Dobb's had gone virtual]
Other magazines? I had a subscription to WIRED magazine for several years. In its glory days of the mid nineties this was a magazine that existed to provide inspiration. I like high style, effective colours and good graphics. WIRED had them all. It also had lots of good ideas and thoughts on everything digital.
Where did they go wrong? They managed to both get too conventional at the same time that they got more weird in appearance. While in the earlier years they would use graphics to illustrate a point and provide information, it seemed that they became dedicated to the look without the additional concentration on useful information. There were far to many pages with something like silver type on purple paper designed just to make the reader squint. While in the early days WIRED would provide pages of useful and inspiring pages at the beginning they evolved having many many pages of advertising in the same place. WIRED became the Vogue of the computer industry.
Current Magazine Inspirations I currently have subscriptions to several general business and news magazines. I read Fortune magazine because of its practical information and left-wing bias. Left-wing? I don't think that there is another magazine that has done quite as authoritative biographical evisceration of the average American 'C' level executive suite. As often as they insist that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are business gods; they also give us lots of stories about their foibles and all so human eccentricities. After reading those exposés I find it hard to think of the average great financier or CEO as anything more than reasonably smart and well-educated people with good luck and supportive families.
When Fortune is at its best -- doing an in-depth corporate evisceration or essay on the business costs of American medical costs -- it makes one want to stand up and change the system. If only I had the power.
A final business magazine inspiration is Business 2.0. This is the slimmer, hipper and more concise version of Fortune. Lots of stories about the Web and things digital. I normally find myself folding over many page corners as bookmarks before I finish an issue.