Monthly Archives: February 2008

Users never mess with the system

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I’m still in Vegas, and this city is crazy. But it’s funny, us people in IT have a thing or two to learn from these people in gambling business. We have all been hearing from our customers how they want their systems reliable, available, and so. Well, what I’ve been seeing here for the past two days is a highly-available 24/7 service with full redundancy and failover clustering all in place. There are roulette and blackjack tables and slot machines in every free square foot, so it’s pretty darn scalable, too. There is zero downtime, entertainment never stops, and that’s pretty much the reason I write this post now, instead of sleeping. I almost feel the music is louder by the minute, probably proportionally so to how sleepy I am. I’m too old for this sh*t.

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Code of coding 2: Documenting changes

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Few days ago, when I wrote about coding, I didn’t have a slightest idea that at the same time, at the completely opposite part of the globe, Dave was blogging almost about the same thing. It is interesting to know that I am not the only one out there actually worying about code, and how it looks like.

The most common thing I used to hear when I asked bad coders about their code was: “It works, why shoud I care.”

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Manufacturing quickie

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Today, I got an e-mail from a reader of this blog, who asked me to help them with an actual problem on a project. Their customer is a small manufacturing customer in textile vertical. Whenever they calculate consumption, quantities for certain items get rounded to full numbers. Since the items are usually textile, measured in meters, a consumption of 1.27 meters can end up registered as 2 meters instead. Not that it’s something which can’t be overridden manually, but it is pain in the butt, and hey, why do we have computers in the first place if we have to do their job.

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Code of coding

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Code is boring. It is geeky. And it’s ugly, too. In C/AL it is especially ugly. While contemporary development tools come with all sort of gizmos which make coding easier, such as color-coding, auto-completion, refactoring, etc., C/AL editor seems like having awaken from a thousand-year sleep. Take a look at the color coding: there is none. Or there is, but palette is limited to that of Charlie Chaplin’s. There is some functionality which looks like auto-completion but it is not, and the text editing capabilities make you dream about Notepad at night. But you can look at it from a different angle. C/AL editor is the way it is for a reason: to keep programmers away. It’s the defence mechanism developed over twenty or so years of evolution of the system, to protect the system from rookie knowitall programmers ripping away that stupid Gen. Jnl.-Post Line codeunit and rewrite it the way it should be. With this, we come to Rule No. 1: Know what you are doing.

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