Monday, July 18, 2016

A software life

Imagine you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. In each chamber, you discover clues that help you to piece together the secret code of that chamber, allowing you pass from it to the next chamber.

In this way, you progress through a large complex, one chamber at a time, having revelations and setbacks along the way.

But this never ends! There are small triumphs and defeats, but ultimately, you just keep navigating this or that set of passages forever. Frequently, you have to repeat almost exactly what you’ve done before, with minor but critical differences.

Such is a career in software engineering. It goes a little something like this:



1 comment:

Bill Costa said...

Definitely worth posting on the cube wall, and saving in my archives. Well done and frighteningly all too accurate.

Unfortunately I've found that using "XYZZY" never seems to help. (For many years my change-password program watched and waited for somebody using "xyzzy" as or in their proposed new password. This would have revealed an small Easter Egg if it happened. But after more than a decade, it never did, so I eventually removed it.)