Safe from the Losing Fight

For those of you who actually read this blog for the articles (as opposed to the pictures), you’ve probably often wondered: what is it, exactly, that you do? Other than make a fool of yourself? In order to answer that question, and have something to do, I present what my daily schedule is like.

8am –Wake up, scratch self, turn over, fall back to sleep. No respectable software engineer gets up this early.

8:15am –MacBook Pro’s dancing in my head. Unless you’re my girlfriend, in which case, I only dream about you baby.

9am –Wake up and realize I do not own a MacBook Pro. My dreams crushed, I see no reason to remain conscious, so I scratch myself, turn over, and fall back to sleep.

9:30am –Apartment maintenance personnel decide that I have slept long enough and begin pile-driving two feet outside my bedroom window, where in the alley they have apparently decided to construct a large shopping center.

9:31am –Contemplate the needed trajectory of a rock that would injure, but not kill, said maintenance person. I might need my ice maker fixed at some point.

9:35am –Give up on plan to maim maintenance personnel because it would involve moving a part of my body, and, let’s me honest, who doesn’t want an large 24-hour supermarket directly outside their window?

10am –Unsure if I am yet awake, maintenance personnel begin mowing what’s left of the grass outside my bedroom with a bush-hog machine.

10:01am –Stagger the 10 feet from my bedroom to my “office.” Manage to stub my toe on no fewer than seven objects. As required by law, at least three are more dense than depleted Uranium.

10:02am –My now semi-awake brain discovers that the computer/printer combo doesn’t not provide this “food” that the Wizard needs, badly.

10:03am –Stagger over to the refrigerator. My agile feet know the path well, and manage to run into the same seven objects.

10:05am –Think about how good a breakfast with scrambled eggs, bacon, and blueberry pancakes would taste. Unfortunately, I am a bachelor so anything that cannot be made from hot-dogs and month old bread is out of the question.

10:06am –With hot-dog flavored “PopTart” in hand, return to the computer.

10:07am –Digg and Slashdot.

11:03am –Decide to actually “work.”

11:04am –Start pulling down code to work on with Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management System. The file set consists of three small text files, one resource file, and a large image file describing how the software system works, assuming they had actually built it that way.

12pm –Lunch, which is a hot dog, stale bread, or some combination thereof.

1pm –Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management System, actually completes the synchronize operation, leaving me with three small text files, twenty corrupted resource files, and someone’s half eaten pimento cheese sandwich.

1:01pm –Consult Digg and Slashdot, while contemplating why anyone uses Perforce.

2:00pm –Remember that people use Perforce because the alternatives are worse. For example, Visual SourceSafe is a service by Microsoft in which they send a salesman to your place of business to kick you in the seat of your pants repeatedly. In the Professional version of SourceSafe, the salesman also steals your credit card and purchases a site license for Microsoft Money.

2:01pm –Attempt to log into the client’s bug database, so I know what to work on. Discover that I do not have access to bugbase, which is on the internal network, because I did not file a business case for why I need it, three years in advance.

2:05pm –Call the client’s IT department, explain that I need network access from my Mac. To avoid getting the wrong software, keep mentioning that I am using a Mac during any awkward silences and anyplace in the conversation a normal person might say something like “hello.” Sensing my urgency, IT promptly sends me five copies of the Windows software.

2:10pm –Call IT department back to explain that need Mac software, to which I am promptly told “We do not support Windows 98.”

2:15pm –Finally reach the one Mac IT person, whom they apparently keep locked in a cage in the basement, and feed old PowerTalk documentation. He cannot send the software via email because of the 32 byte email attachment limit, but he is able to smuggle out a CD of the software, on the back of one of the many fruit bats in his cage.

2:30pm –Discover that VPN software does not reliably connect to client’s network, but does, in fact, waste a large amount of space on my hard drive and not uninstall.

2:31pm –Call IT department again to explain VPN software does not work. IT carefully explains that I must either rewire my apartment, reconfigure my router so that it is solely and permanently connected to their network, or move to California and/or India for VPN to ever work. They are not sure which. Smoke signals are suggested in the interim.

2:45pm –Randomly change settings in the VPN configuration until I can actually connect to the internal network. Discover that although I can connect, I have no security access to any servers on their network, including the bug database. Furthermore, IT has decided that, for reasons of productivity, anyone connected through VPN should not be able to access anything outside their network, such as, for example, the computer sitting right in front of me.

2:56pm –Call IT department to be granted access to the bug database. The IT person that I reach calmly explains that, yes, he can grant me those privileges, but won’t, because he strongly suspects that will allow me to do actual work.

3:03pm –Have my contact within the client company call IT and explain that its OK for me to do work because I do not work in IT.

3:30pm –Feel smug about getting to bill client for all the time IT wasted.

3:31pm –To celebrate victory over IT, Digg and Slashdot.

3:52pm –Examine the first bug I am supposed to fix, which is marked as “severe” and a “crasher.” It states: “When I press Command-Q, the application quits.” I spend the next hour on the phone explain why that is expected behavior. The phone call ends with the quote “Well, that’s stupid and Apple should change it.”

4:52pm –Digg and Slashdot.

5:23pm –Examine the next bug I am supposed to fix. Although it is simply a misspelled word that has been in the software for seven years, it has now become “urgent,” “must fix,” and, “severe.” Oddly enough, the bug was entered by a technical writer.

5:33pm –Open up Xcode, Apple’s integrated development environment, specially designed for the Mac user who has lost the will to live.

5:38pm –Change the resource string to fix the misspelling, which the previous engineer was unable to do, because, apparently, he could not locate the second button on his Macintosh mouse.

5:50pm –UI designer notices that I fixed the misspelling, and suggests other improvements to the wording, such as rewriting the host operating system from scratch to use more color gradients.

6:04pm –While muttering under my breath about out of control UI designers, Digg and Slashdot.

6:45pm –Examine the next bug, which is from a customer, requesting that we add support for XML file formats and the ability to shave an enraged badger. After serious consideration, I decide to defer the bug for next time.

7:02pm –Receive call from marketing demanding to know why XML files/badger-shaving feature was deferred. They cite numerous customer anecdotes in which they needed the portability of an XML file combined with the ability to shave an angry badger. Most cases involve alcohol, in which the badger had consumed prodigious amounts.

7:30pm –Look at code for the first time today.

7:47pm –Marketing calls back saying what the customer probably, really, honestly, truly needed was a way sober up the badger. They swear the badger is a nice guy, but only acts that way when he’s drunk. Plus he has a bad 5 o’clock shadow.

8pm –Receive call from potential client, asking if we could port his Word processor for Windows to the Mac for twenty nine cents and a large portion on his company’s stock, currently held in a gum-ball machine.

8:28pm –Starving, I crawl to the refrigerator, where I discover a veritable treasure trove of food, in the form of Cheerios, underneath the fridge.

9:02pm –Realizing I am spending too much time reading Digg and Slashdot, I go read Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, and Pearls before Swine.

9:18pm –Return to code and marvel at the fact the compiler has not openly mocked the code in iambic pentameter or simply refused to compile it out of principle.

10:07pm –Digg and Slashdot.

10:41pm –iChat with business parter in which we ridicule Xcode’s speed, code quality, and inability to shave an enraged badger who’s had a few too many drinks.

11:11pm –Notice that the auto-complete in Xcode is actually recommending other, more reputable companies I could be working for.

11:38pm –Digg.

12:06pm –Slashdot.

12:49am –Change egregious code “if ( foo ) doFoo();” to the much more sane “if ( foo ) { doFoo(); }”, on the initial thought that I get paid by the character.

1:22am –Discover the entire Xcode help file is one page that recommends using a better IDE, such as MPW.

1:30am –Change the completely erroneous “if ( foo ) { doFoo(); }” to the actually readable “if (foo) {doFoo();}”. Note the bytes saved by the removed whitespace on my accomplishments.

1:40am –In an attempt to find a snippet of code in my project, Xcode inadvertently finds life on Mars. Still unable to search an arbitrary directory in less than ten steps.

1:44am –Change “if (foo) {doFoo();}” to “if ( foo ) doFoo();”, and wonder what fool added the unnecessary braces and removed the spaces.

1:54am –Against doctor’s orders, read old copies of Inside Macintosh, Volume 1 until I fall asleep. He recommended a large mallet to the head, for the reason that it is less likely to cause severe brain trauma.

As you can see, the life of an independent software engineer is not for the faint of heart. No doubt you have more respect for me now than you have ever had before.

My business partners and I were reviewing an NDA for a potential contract today. We were marveling at the dense prose used in it. I mean, the lawyers really earned their keep on this one. No one with a soul was going to understand it.

Anyway, that got us to thinking about NDA’s in general. I suggested that NDA’s should be written in a lighthearted poem format. My suggestion was:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Please work for us
But don’t tell anyone you knew

Its a good thing I’m an engineer.

The other guys tried, but they were even less successful than I was. I mean theirs didn’t even rhyme. psh. Whoever heard of a poem that didn’t rhyme?

After coming to the realization that we weren’t poets, we started talking about how much we should charge this sucker. I mean mark. I mean customer. Customer. Whatever.

Its always a delicate balance. If you charge too much, they assume you’re trying to rob them outright. But you charge too little, they assume you’re going to steal something on the way out. So you have aim for the price range that says “I’m probably not a thief.”

Regardless, I’m pretty excited about this. Its always good to have new suckers come in. I mean customers.

I’m about three weeks into my new partnership at Order N Development. Its a lot different from my previous job as a full time software engineer at Macromedia.

First, I’m an actual partner, meaning I own a large part of the company. That comes with a lot more responsibility. I have to fill out a lot more paperwork and just in general do a lot of non-engineering tasks. Expense reports, reading contracts, making bids, and so on. Of course, the fact that there only four of us influences this too.

There’s a lot more multitasking involved. For example, I’ve already written up a spec for a potential client, hammered out a rough schedule for another client, reviewed a couple of contracts from potential clients, and brainstormed ideas for our own product. Oh, and somewhere in there I did some actual coding on a contract that we already have. Hopefully this is making me more “well-rounded” as opposed to “crazy”.

I have to say, the contracts are the most disturbing part of the whole process. I can deal with generating product ideas, writing specs, architecting a feature, coding it, and debugging it. Contracts are a whole ‘nother story. They aren’t written in code or English, the only written languages I happen to understand. Contracts are written by lawyers with the express intent of trying to pull a fast one on you. The contract is a legal attempt to put all the responsibility on you while removing all responsibility from the client. But that’s not clearly stated, its written in legalese so you have to spend $400 paying another lawyer to tell you how screwed you really are. A good measure of screwedness appears to be how hard the lawyer is laughing when he hands the contract back to you.

I’d go into specifics, but a lot of contracts say we’re not allowed to mention the client’s name without their express written consent. I understand that the clients are trying to protect their name, but come on. I just did a bunch of work and I’d like to be able to tell people about it. I’ll admit that telling people “I can’t tell you who I’m working for” sounds all cool and mysterious, but it doesn’t really seem to bring in more contracts.

The other scary part is the money doesn’t come in regularly. Well, since we’re working several contracts right now, it kind of does, but nothing is guaranteed. I don’t draw a salary; I just get money when the company actually makes money. The flip side is I’m not limited in how much money I can make. And that’s kind of cool.

One of the things I am enjoying is ability to freely think of product ideas. What’s so “free” about it is that I own any idea that I come up with. Yep. I’m not sure how many people would want a hamster powered beanie, but that’s my idea, and I get to keep it. Seriously though, knowing that I get to keep any idea I generate is a pretty liberating feeling. It also makes the whole brainstorming process a lot more fun. I’m not trying to come up with an idea to make some large corporation another $100 million, I’m trying to come up with an idea that I’d like to work on and that I’m interested in.

And that’s my goal: work on something that interests me.