Everything is Politics

-
Politics tends to be a dirty word in the common vernacular. However, I think politics is just part of everyday living. Maybe not in the mind of every human, but at least in the mind of every worker.

My first job - not even out of high school - was detasseling for the regional farmers through the local coop. Now, I grew up in Iowa, so there's a fair amount of things I need to explain, but let's just cut to the chase and say that all you've ever heard about Iowa is probably true. Corn. It's everywhere. Pioneer was a major business in them parts, and they had enough capital to make it worth your while to work in the heat of the Iowan summer walking miles through paper-cutting corn leaves to make a buck. They paid $5/hour at a time that minimum wage was around $3.15 or $3.25 (memory lapse), so it was a Siren Song of sorts for those of us aspiring to the American Way.

A couple summers of that work, though, and one might reflect on their current situation and aspire to something more...humane. The local Hy-Vee grocery store was hiring at $3.50/hour and it was NOT outside in the blistering Iowa heat marching through nature's razor blades in an effort to help promulgate a corporate behemoth to become more behemothy. (admittedly, I'm taking a bit of artistic license here)

Hy-Vee - Where There's a Helpful Smile In Every Aisle. After being a Children of the Corn for several summers, it was a welcome reprieve to work in an air-conditioned grocery store. Sure, the pay wasn't quite as good, but the trade-off was worth it.

I used to believe that politics suck; that software was a black-and-white art. However, I now submit that the science of trade-offs is the essence of politics. Software development is a series of trade-offs. And, inevitably, it seems to be that politics is front-and-center. That is to say "trade-offs" is another term for politics. Now, admittedly, this isn't true of all situations, but compromise is unequivocally a fundamental aspect of producing software. Indeed, I submit that's is a fundamental aspect of being human. 

Compromise comes in many different guises - relationships, budgets, etc. Every decision is essentially a compromise.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Bogus to create Hierarchical Data Structures

-
I was recently asked to create an API for retrieving multitenant data. The actual implementation requires a LOT more work than I have time to complete, so I thought I would create an API with some faked data. Now, at first, I was tempted to grab some data from one tenant and serialize it into a fake service that essentially hijacks the process, returning pseudo-random data. THEN I remembered working with a class library called Bogus . This is a cool library that "generates" random data of all sorts using a fluent interface. You configure the rules using lambdas and then call methods to generate the classes. This is very straight forward for simple POCOs and works great. However, I was trying to create an object graph, essentially, with hierarchical data. Objects at the second layer need to have a valid reference to objects at the first layer. Third to second, fourth to third. That way, you can query down the chain or get objects at the next-level-lower that have references to...
Read more

Adventures in Getting a Site Hosted

-
A couple years, I decided that was the year I was going to finally get a website setup. Fast forward to a couple days ago and that's how long it took me to begin executing on that plan. I tend to be afflicted with Paralysis By Analysis when it comes to something that I don't know how to start. Rather than just try, I think of all the ways it could fail. I know this about me and I also know that it's debilitating. Sometimes the debilitation wins. Sometimes I roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty and break shit. The latter is almost always more rewarding than the former, yet the internal struggle remains.  But enough with the meta-crap, this post is meant to explain my approach to getting my domain name hosted with something. I've had this Blogger account for several years. It's free. It's easy. It's a little too easy to ignore, so I'm thinking I may resurrect it a little bit and start writing about my goings on as a mechanism for growth and learnin...
Read more

Design Patterns: An Introduction

-
I'm refreshing my memory about software design patterns by watching some videos and taking some notes. I thought I would document them here for future posterity. These are the design patterns as defined by the Gang Of Four (GoF) in their seminal book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" and can be found on Amazon (non-affiliated link) . Some of the things I'll be posting will be related to the various categories of design patterns (as defined by the GoF): Creational, Structural and Behavioral. They are broken down like so: Creational Abstract Factory Builder Factory Method Prototype Singleton Structural Adapter Bridge Composite Decorator Facade Flyweight Proxy Behavioral Chain of Responsibility Command Interpreter Iterator Mediator Memento Observer State Strategy Template Method Visitor I will try to break each of these patterns into sections: Intent, Structure, Example. For those following along, I'll have the code for these examples ...
Read more