Welcome to all things in the Wasteland!
Why Wasteland?
Over the years, I’ve noticed that almost everybody treats legacy code as if it was a wasteland. You are forced into it, and really the most you can do is survive. You are constantly fighting foes on every side, and when you finally get a break from that, you find you’ve run out of clean water and will soon die of thirst. We yearn for a green field, a land that isn’t constantly trying to strangle us. Yet even when we find that miraculous land, we descend on it like a swarm of locusts and end up quickly destroying it, turning it into a wasteland as well.
In most of the imaginative depictions of wastelands, there ends up being somebody that seems to actually enjoy the wasteland, or at least isn’t yet tainted by the “hard life”. Somebody that genuinely wants to make it a better place, a place to start living, rather than surviving. They have stopped complaining about the situation, and are trying to change the circumstances of their environment.
That is who I strive to be. The one who is not full of doom and gloom, just because we are in the same boat as everybody else. This land, even if it is a wasteland, doesn’t have to be a crappy place to live, just barely scraping by. It will take hard work, but the work will pay off, transforming the wasteland back into an oasis, or at least profitable farm and grazing lands once again.
Recent Posts
- God, The Rubber DuckAs programmers, we are likely familiar with the “rubber duck”. The idea that just voicing your problems to somebody, even to just an inanimate object, like a rubber duck, can be helpful. Why? Why is this helpful? It is usually clear how talking to somebody else can help us. Sometimes … Read more
- Playing HealthchecksHealthchecks in the Scala Play Framework The Play framework for Scala is “marketed” as a lightweight framework used all over for folks building microservices and other quick and nimble services. While it may be fast and opinionated, it definitely does not set you up for success in a microservice world. … Read more
- SAFe ChangesI’ve been at two companies that use the Scaled Agile Framework to plan changes. At the first company I do not remember anybody actually calling it “SAFe”, but that model is essentially what we were doing. This is not a post about what SAFe is, there are many other resources … Read more
- The SDLC StoryThe SDLC process should offer reassuring guardrails, not roadblocks
- Complexities AboundBatteries We live in an Amish house. When we moved in, there was no electricity supplied from the power company, but the previous owners did leave behind a little solar setup. The batteries were getting old and in need of replacing, but the solar panels and controller/battery manager were still … Read more