Category Archives: technology

What is Software Development ?

According to Steve McConnell “Code Complete” there are plenty of metaphors out there:

This last view seems to be shared by many ( https://signalvnoise.com/posts/591-brainstorm-the-software-garden , Jeff Atwood likes it too https://blog.codinghorror.com/tending-your-software-garden/ and I feel close to him on really many things) and I tend to see it more close to what software development is today : a continuously changing (growing) artifact, not totally manageable, that requires constant maintenance (here the building metaphor fails a bit), designed and redesigned over time like a garden, subject to seasons (“lots of new requirements” season, “robustness and reliability” season).

September reading list

Nice article on gRPC in a js client, Envoy and go gRPC server https://medium.com/swlh/building-a-realtime-dashboard-with-reactjs-go-grpc-and-envoy-7be155dfabfb

https://blog.codinghorror.com/tending-your-software-garden/

Software development metaphors

https://blog.codinghorror.com/bridges-software-engineering-and-god/

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/591-brainstorm-the-software-garden

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-big-ball-of-mud-and-other-architectural-disasters/

The reverse technology relapse

We all know how much the apollo computer technology impacted on consumer technology : https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252466699/How-Apollo-11-influenced-modern-computer-software-and-hardware

Before Apollo computers were huge and filled whole rooms like this :

Burroughs B3500


Apollo guidance system was this :

Space industry led the way to a complete new era of digital personal computers.

We are now in 2020 and we all saw the first launch of a manned private mission to Space Station : the SpaceX dragon capsule attacched to ISS and astronauts @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug used a docking interface on a touchscreen device (try it out here https://iss-sim.spacex.com ) to dock dragon.

So consumer/private technology is currently used in the space industry : the complete opposite of Apollo/GoToTheMoon era.

Think of this from a political point of view : there were times when the biggest achievements in technology were driven by US federal agencies, pouring public money into research, universities, private companies to reach unbelievable goals (go to the moon). Those investment has been around $280 billion of today money. This drove the country into years of technological leadership, leadership US is loosing against another country (china) which is doing exactly what US did during the 60s i.e. pouring money into the economy with state participated companies.

Its time for another “go to the moon” type of effort and the new moon is giving this planet sustainable energy for sustainable growth.

Reaction/rejection to complexity and “worse is better”

Some points to further investigate : the main idea is that early 2000 years started a reaction to (unnecessary) complexity :

start here : https://medium.com/better-programming/how-unix-works-everything-you-were-too-afraid-to-ask-f8396aeb2763

simple is better (worse is better) : https://blog.codinghorror.com/worse-is-better/ the point here is all about what is considered to be better. Some furher reading “what’s wrong with word simple“

Why use inheritance when a simple object will do : https://www.philweber.com/2002/11/is_inheritance_overrated

optimism in coding is dangerous : https://blog.codinghorror.com/defeating-optimism/

worse is better : https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/WorseIsBetterPositionPaper.pdf

worse is better http://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter

again : https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Mar 2020 reading list

Image optimization and compression is one of main features of ImageEngine CDN (I work on this project). This Netflix blog article is great at going into details of why we probably need a new, modern image format : “AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding” https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-coding-b1d75675fe4

Faster Paint Metrics with Responsive Image Optimization CDNs
https://medium.com/@firt/faster-paint-metrics-with-responsive-image-optimization-cdns-d43340d4a48c

Speed up Woocommerce with an Image CDN https://hackernoon.com/speed-up-woocommerce-with-an-image-cdn-kt1q3yeg

Faster Image delivery with Chrome Light mode https://medium.com/imageengine/faster-image-delivery-with-chromes-lite-mode-93900eac126e

How to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Your Website by 50% https://imageengine.io/blog/how-to-reduce-the-carbon-footprint-of-your-website-by-50/

Images are not static content https://css-tricks.com/images-are-not-static-content/

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

grigna

On the importance of design in software

Many time we face situation were productivity of a software team is impaired by initial flaws in system design. These initial flaws require too much time to be completely removed (the effort of complete rewrite is only marginally touched here and is normally and indication of other problems in your software project )

So, in order for a software team to be able to work at its maximum, good design is a must. Design is much more responsible for productivity than any single coder, scrum master, product manager or development methodology/language in the sense that bad design can take an all-star team using top tools/methodology to perform badly.

There were times when it was taken for granted that before building a system, it was necessary to design it. That time looks gone (even though Agile does not explicitly prohibit making good design). The general idea seems to be that there is “never enough time to do something right, but there’s always enough time to do it over” again.

But what is design in software ?

That kind of intellectual activity which creates a whole from its diverse parts may be called the design of a system

Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

So you compose parts to make the whole system. How you do this ?

It is basically decomposition to generate single parts that acting together will generate the goal. The 2 tools you will need as a designer are :

  • decomposition
  • composition

 But first of all you need :

  • understanding of the system boundaries : the borders of the nation your system lives in
  • understanding the global scenario of what your system is going to do. Designing subsystems without knowing the whole picture is not a good idea.

Why decomposition of a system into smaller components (services) is good for you :

  • information hiding : well identified interfaces create a contract that the component has to provide, hiding any network/system implementation details. This will make the component implementation completely free to be modified/enhanced as long as the new implementation is compliant with the contract.
  • less development time : separate components/services can be developed in parallel since they don’t require (or require little) external dependencies, so less contention between engineers. Every component is independent on integration and performance test that can be developed autonomously.
  • scalability : with little effort in design every component might be deployed in a way to be one of many instances that will make that service scalable when traffic increases.
  • clarity : the system could be studied a component (service) at a time with the result that the whole system could be better designed because it was better understood

We could go on here and analyze what are the criteria to be used in decomposing a system into services. I’ll leave this to another moment and you can find some interesting notes here :

https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/

What I would like to stress is that design is a fundamental phase in software engineering. You can’t just skip it and pretend that since you have a good team you’ll get a good job done.

Thanks to the following for inspiring me on this post :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Conway

https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/12/13/how-do-committees-invent/

https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/

Thanks year 2000 : less is (immensely) more (the 90s produced a lot of crap)

Thanks to god after year 2000 information technology has started moving towards more pragmatic, simple and effective tools and languages. Some examples that in my opinion make this evident : 

Languages and language tools

  • go, rust, swift are all born with the goal of simplifying their direct parents (c++, objectiveC) and removing their pitfalls.
  • UML abandoned : this is a relief for all coders which had to deal with it. I don’t know anyone using it nowadays.
  • git : finally some one (thanks Linux Torvalds) simplified svn/sourcesafe by putting features that are needed by developers in a clear, pretty intuitive command line interface
  • atom/sublime : reaction to the complexity of Visual Studio, IBM Rational, Eclipse ? I think yes

Databases

  • Key-value stores/noSQL are just taking ER/SQL model and making it simpler, providing only the features needed in 99% of the applications. Boyce-Codd normal form is pretty nice and interesting but in real world applications you’ll never use it. 
  • Object Databases completely disappeared and in some way also the idea that OO methodology/hierarchy could be applied everywhere (just because you are where using OO languages)

Virtualization

  • docker/rkt are slim alternatives to virtualization and virtual machines

Architectures

  • plain old REST API aren’t just a simple way for doing things without having to Corba/Soap ?
  • gRPC : provides corba like features while being 1 order of magnitude more efficent and portable on any platform.

What I’m saying is that the 90s produced a lot of unnecessarily complicated tools and technology which developer just did not need/like which is being progressively substituted with simpler stuff.

Interesting to note that the phrase “Less is more” is originally attributed to Mies Van Der Rohe for his minimalism in architecture design . Looks at his buildings : nothing more than necessary and functional elements are present.

But before him Leonardo da Vinci : “Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication”

Milan skies after fires in the alps, 2018

Decarbonize!

Friday for Future is running and I feel the need of making sure (firstly to myself) that the process that will bring us totally away from fossil fuel consumption is possible, maybe long, but possible.

Decarbonization (this is the name given to the biggest revamping project in the world) is possible; will require money and time; will require the mutual work of Politics, Science and Industry toward the goals of :

  • producing electricity totally from renewable sources, decentralize prodution
  • reducing the energy consumption in all areas were this is possible
  • decentralize smart grid and electricity storage development
  • substitute direct fossil fuel consumption with renewable alternatives
  • stop deforestation process
  • substitute fossil fuel derived products with fossil derived recycled ones (or carbon free ones if possible)
  • 100 % recycle, waste to energy for the non recyclable

Ambitious plan ? I think this is the biggest revamping project you can immagine and it is already running but I think that the message we all sent last last friday is that we need to ‘deliver’ sooner 🙂

Producing electricity totaly from renewable sources

48 % of CO2 is emitted producing heat or electricity. Many countries are already active in the area of producing electricity from renewables, take Germany for example. 7 year ago (just after fukushima) Germany started phase out of nuclear power by incrementing the share of energy produced by renewables. Some data :

source

In 1 year Germany increased production from wind energ for example by 20 GWh. Continue this for 10 years and your reach more than half the whole country energy requirements. In fact Germany has also started a plan for removing coal in energy production.

In the first 6 months of 2019 Germany has produced more energy from renewables than from fossile/nuclear : here for some references.

Energy efficency

Again from Germany, a national plan to increase the efficency of systems in all areas which is estimating to produce a saving of 12 to 20% over 2020. Reducing the current energy footprint is fundamental for allowing new segments of activities to start using clean energy (think at electrical traction in automotive which is going to increase national demand)

Decentralize smart grid and electricity storage development

The example here comes form Australia were private energy company GreenSync is stimulating customers to setup local electricity storage to be used when there is shortage of power on the grid. Customers are being paid for the storage. For reason not known to me the biggest development in decentralized grid and storage is taking place in Australia and Japan.

Substitute direct fossil fuel consumption with renewable alternatives, limit impatc of direct CO2 emission

This is probably the biggest task in the project because it is spread over a tens of different segments which need to be revamped to achieve the goal :

Road Transportation : around 15% of total CO2 emissions. Redesigning this segment is going to be one of most serious tasks : cars and trucks make up 1/3 of the co2 emissions in countries like US and it is mostly a consumer segment. Battery powered electric cars, pickups and trucks seems to be the directions with Tesla, the real game changer, paving the road. All automotive industry is trying to catchup. 44 Billion investments announces by Volkswagen group over the next 5 years.

Agricolture : How much CO2 is produced by agricolture is the most controversial issue with estimates ranging from 13% of total CO2 emissions to 18% on fao docs, up to 51% including the effect of not having forests where we make food for cows, pigs and chicken. These comes mainly from Cattle belching (CH4) and the addition of natural or synthetic fertilizers and wastes to soils. Here the only possible change is reducing the use of fertilizers and reduce cattle breeding by eating less meat. Read Jonathan Safran Foer book if you want to dig into this more.

Maritime Transportation : 5% of total CO2 emissions, The world’s merchant fleet consists of around 100,000 ships and these are estimated to consume 250 million tonnes of bunker fuel annually. Just one Capesize Bulk Carrier or Bulker can use 40 metric tonnes or fuel or more a day leading  to an annual fuel consumption of approximately 10,400 tonnes. This results in the emission of around 32,988 tonnes of CO2 and 959 tonnes of SOx or more. This is just from one ship. Still no real prototypes afaik in this area but good project and potential around with project like Acquarius.

Air Transportation : 2% to 3.5% of total CO2 emissions . Various activities undergoing reduction of carbon footprint in aviation.

Substitute fossil fuel derived products with fossil derived recycled ones (or carbon free ones if possible)

This is probably the biggest task in the project because it is spread over a tens of different segments which need to be revamped to achieve the goal :

  • Plastics
  • Lubricants
  • Process Chemicals
  • Carpeting
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Rubber Goods
  • Adhesives
  • Cosmetics
  • Footwear
  • Paints
  • Detergents
  • Inks
  • Sealants
  • Fragrances
  • Solvents
  • Caulking
  • Compounds
  • Fertilizers
  • Fibers
  • Tires

This point will require a complete structured analysis by its own. International energy agency dedicates a complete section on petrochemicals. They are not easy to replace : recycle will be the solution while Science and Industry find better substitutes.

I’ll stop here at least for now : the message I’m trying to share is that the matter is highly complex and cannot be simplified by just switching off air conditioning or doing these kind of things.

ALL activities have to be done at the same time (thanks Greta for having said this) and Politics IS the driver for all of them.

The Pragmatic Programmer

I think this book is full of valuable thoughts that I would like to recap in this post :

A broken window.
One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.

How often this applies to software : you can have the best design guidelines but leaving a broken windows (bad design, wrong decisions, poor code) will slowly propagate that error to all the new code written.

Know when to stop

In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them. You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you’ve done. Every now and then you’ll throw a canvas away and start again.
But artists will tell you that all the hard work is ruined if you don’t know when to stop. If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.

I read this as don’t over engineer : let your code do the jobs for some time, don’t over refine.

Dry (Don’t Repeat Yourself)

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.

We all know this right ? But it is not a matter od duplicating code : it is about duplicating knowledge.

Orthogonality

In computing, the term has come to signify a kind of independence or decoupling. Two or more things are orthogonal if changes in one do not affect any of the others. In a well-designed system, the database code will be orthogonal to the user interface: you can change the interface without affecting the database, and swap databases without changing the interface.

You are familiar with orthgonality ( modular, component-based, and layered are synonyms). I read this as : think at your module/component as a service that exposes an API to users :

  • efficient development (no one is waiting for now one else for stuff to be done)
  • easy to test : orthogonal systems can be tested independently
  • easy to understand how to use

To be continued!