It’s been more than a year since I checked in, so I thought I’d post something to let anyone following this blog know that I’m still alive and kicking. I’m still working full-time in the industry. My company uses Kanban, Azure services as well as our own servers. We’re on .Net 6 for most of our new projects and looking at 7 (Microsoft will be onto 8 before long).
I maintain this blog because it gets a substantial amount of traffic. Mainly through Google searches since I have subjects that cover older technologies that most people don’t know anymore. It’s been a while since I’ve dragged out all of my digital circuitry stuff, maybe I’ll revisit some of that and see if I can create a post or two on this blog. No promises.
What do I do with my time?
I have too many hobbies and not enough hours in a year. That means I have to ration my time, and currently, the bulk of my time goes into writing Sci-Fi books. I’ve thought about writing non-fiction many times, but I don’t really have a subject that excites me. Any software-related books that I would tackle would probably be around the subject of handling legacy code. It’s one of those things that very few figure out on their own. I have a lot of experience with handling and converting legacy code. There are massive trade-offs for any method you may use to get rid of your technical debt, but I have enough failures under my belt that I know which ones to avoid (like the plague).
Another non-fiction subject might revolve around an executive’s guide to running a software shop or something like that subject. Some of the smaller companies I’ve worked in lack executives with the chops to put their foot down and focus their software experts on the projects that will keep their company in the green. I’ve been in a few companies that have failed and my frustration with them all revolves around the fact that they wasted thousands of man-hours on projects that brought them nothing. Much of what happened in these companies happened because they hired someone with zero business experience to run their software shop. I watched in horror as these “technical” people do ridiculous things like refactoring an entire legacy system to use IOC containers. The end result is that the company ended up with a lot of bugs and no new features or capabilities. In fact, the incident I’m thinking about ended up with a system that performed worse than the previous version and chewed up more memory on each server (by a large factor). This all occurred while thousands of man-hours were spent on contractors to do the work. For such a book, I could expand the details of what occurred while changing the names to keep it professional.
There’s a book called “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. It was a great book about a company that was going through a chaotic upgrade. I have distinct memories of an IT guy that was the guru of his team. He was also a control freak. The part that stuck with me was that the new boss told him that he was not allowed to touch any equipment himself. He was assigned to oversee his new people who needed to learn but were neglected because he didn’t have “time to teach them.” That’s one great way to solve that issue.
I could write fiction revolving around technology. I have ideas around a series of hacker books that would be in the Thriller genre. I have one story idea where a computer guy gets messed with by some other online hacker that destroys his life. He tries to report it to the police, but he can’t get his life back and the police don’t know what to do. That’s where he decides he’s going to take his life back or destroy the hacker that got to him. That story goes along until he gets in deep and suddenly discovers that he has hacked his way into a massive organization run by the mob (or a large government agency, maybe even rogue elements in the government using federal resources for their own schemes). Yeah, there are all kinds of avenues for something like that. I could see a series of books wrapped around this subject. Each book would be a struggle between the hacker and some organization. Mr. Robot probably falls into the same category of story (I haven’t watched it, so I’m not sure what it’s about, if you’ve seen it, feel free to post a comment).
I still hike. You can catch up on some of my latest hikes on my hiking blog: hiking.frankdecaire.com.
I’ll think of some relevant subjects to post on this blog to try to get it alive again.