The Life of a Software Engineer

Yikes

2009-06-05T08:53:00.000-05:00

Wow, I have not posted anything since December 9th! I guess that is how you know no one cares what you have to write about when no one complains you stop writing! Anyway, I am just doing my job learning as I go. Unfortunately I can't really write about my job, but I will try to post every once in a while about what I am doing in general terms.

Check back, well when ever you feel like it.

Drawing the Mona Lisa with a Genetic Algorithm

2008-12-09T07:39:00.004-06:00

I know I haven't posted much lately, but this is something that just really caught my attention.

A guy wanted to play around with genetic algorithms so he set out to try and recreate an approximation of the Mona Lisa using only 50 polygons, and he did a fantastic job!

If you are unfamiliar with genetic algorithms either you can read up on them here, you can read my description at the end, or you can simply not care and just check out the cool pictures!

You can read about it, as well as see an image from a select set of iterations, here.

The term Genetic Algorithm basically just describes a programming technique in which the developer takes an initial population or data set as the starting DNA pool, then essentially just allows the population to reproduce. This is done by various methods to include "cross over" and "mutation". In cross over, part of the DNA from one member in the data set or population, is combined with part of the DNA from another member, just as in human reproduction. The result is two new members of the next generation, each comprised of parts of their parents. Mutation generally occurs after cross over and is similar to a human birth defect in that the offspring's DNA is not merely comprised of its parents. This resulting mutation may or may not be beneficial to the survival. Once the new generation is formed, each member of the population is run through a fitness function. This takes those members that most closely approximate the desired end result and allows them to breed. This process continues until either you reach a maximum number of generations, or you have achieved your goal.

Boredom

2008-11-12T11:15:00.002-06:00

What is the point of taking a new software engineer position if you don't get to do anything fun?!? I recently took a new job, with a large aerospace/defense company in St Louis, (vague enough?) and unfortunately I have been stuck doing nothing for the last 3 weeks. Granted I have been told what the plan is to have me do, and it sounds great, but until I get started I will be stuck complaining and sitting here surfing the web!

Yes I admitt it, I am a drop out!

2008-05-08T09:42:00.002-05:00

Ok, so the end of last year my wife was being very ambitious and decided to join this blog365 thing. Well I thought heck how hard could that be, and joined as well. Yeah so if you look at the date on the post before this one you will see that my last post was about a month and a half ago. I am a drop out.

Since that last post, the person that slept through our important meeting was fired. I attended Oracle BPEL training in Atlanta. Great training by the way, I would highly recommend Oracle hands on training!

Now we are looking for another BPEL person to both help me and teach me, so that I might be able to pick up future maintenance for our customer.

Umm that is really about it. I have basically not felt like touching the computer all that much when I get home, so I don't think I will be doing the every day thing anymore, but maybe I can try to post a couple times a week!

If anyone does actually read this, let me know what you would like me to write about!!

I have many random thoughts in my head at any given time, and most of them never amount to anything more than a slight shimmer before I get busy and forget about them. So if anyone, other than my wife, wants to provide suggestions I would be happy to post up!

Just for reference, items I tend to talk about a lot are vehicles, mainly Fords, specifically Broncos and Mustangs, the Chicago Bears, just about anything computer and of course software development related.

Some people bother me!

2008-03-18T19:50:00.002-05:00

So my project manager comes in this morning and asks me if I was aware of what was going on in the meeting. I said well yes, it was a little hard to ignore. He then tells me that the person that is in charge of our contract noticed. This is bad. He apparently wasn't very happy. On top of that, the new person repeatedly denied that he was asleep. Hmm yeah, I don't think there is any way around it.

What not to do in a business meeting

2008-03-17T21:30:00.000-05:00

DO NOT FALL ASLEEP IN A BUSINESS MEETING!!! My team had a new person start today, that was the good thing, the bad, well the first sentence says it all. He got on site around 9am and we went to talk to the developer that has been doing their BPEL. That was a good meeting, I got some good info and my first view of the web application I will be modifying in this next part, and our new guy had several good questions. We left there and I went back to work, while the new person sat at an empty computer on the other side of a partition from me and was supposed to be looking at documentation. It wasn't maybe 15 minutes later I think I hear snoring. Yes snoring. I blow it off, no big deal for me. I am sure he is bored, and he did just move down the day before so maybe he didn't sleep. Our project manager goes over to talk to him and I hear him say his name twice. Then a couple of hours later, the project manager and I had to demo our changes to the business people. The new person decides to tag along to see what it is we have been doing.

The meeting is going ok, first the computer in the conference room will not come on, then it comes on but the projector will not. Crap, so we move to a new conference room. I get signed in to the computer, open a web browser, and, yeah I can't remember the web address of the development server, so I try a few before I figure it out. So I am starting the demo now probably 20 minutes late. Within around 20 minutes I am trying to answer questions when I hear a, quite loud, snore and snort coming from the new guy to my right. Yeah, once was bad enough, but there were several more that I would have to talk over through the course of my meeting, which ran a tortured hour and 20 minutes.

Word to the wise, falling asleep in a meeting with your project manager is bad enough, but don't ever do it in a meeting with a client!

Oh and Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

Short weeks rock!

2008-03-16T10:28:00.001-05:00

I am so thankful for short work weeks! Of course I don't get tomorrow off, St. Patrick's Day, but I do get Good Friday off!!!

Deep thoughts from a software engineer

2008-03-15T18:25:00.000-05:00

Come on, you don't really think engineers have any deep thoughts do you? Granted software engineers are a little better than most, of course I am biased!

Umm yeah, I really wish today was nicer, along the lines of last weekend... I am soo sick and tired of the dreary weather...

Finally Friday!

2008-03-14T20:22:00.000-05:00

Oh gosh I am sooooo glad it is finally Friday!!! Today was another slow day. I spent the first part of the day preparing a demo script for my meeting Monday, and the rest of the day was spent playing with SOA suite again! Ugh.

Slow days suck!

2008-03-13T19:14:00.000-05:00

I absolutely hate slow days! I sat at my computer today trying to get Oracle SOA Suite setup on my computer and not having a very good time of it. So of course I sat there checking google most of the day!

Who knew the unknown was so easy!

2008-03-12T12:13:00.002-05:00

Well after all my work documenting yesterday how to tackle this one task, my project manager said to go for it. What do you know, it took less than two hours to implement! Makes a person feel great to knock another item off the todo list! Now to keep my team mates motivated and moving forward on their items! Only two left in this phase of development, and we hope to have one done by the end of the day Friday, and the other done by the end of the following Friday!

Now to tackle the unknown.....

2008-03-11T21:14:00.000-05:00

On our project work list we have this one task, that is about as clear as mud. So I decided I will at least look into it. It looks like the web service I was working on a few days ago has a few parts to it that all run as seperate threads. For anyone that doesn't know and wants to, a thread is kind of like multi tasking. For those that use windows, you can think of this like the running processes in task manager. While a process and a thread are not the same, they are close enough for this discussion. Ok, so this task involves on thread that looks at the database every 15 minutes and decides if it needs to send out some emails. The problem is that under heavy load this thread can generate an error. When this happens it sits in this error state for the next 15 minutes. The IT department uses a program called Nagios to check that everything is ok. Right now if this thread does die it reports an error in Nagios and the IT department is notified, even though it was just an issue with increased load. My plan on to setup a loop. We would try to run the thread, if it failed we will wait 30 seconds, then try again. We would repeat this until either 3 minutes has passed, or the thread runs with no errors. If 3 minutes passes and the thread still doesn't run successfully then we go into an error state and let Nagios report the error to IT. I am not sure if my project manager wants me to work on it or not, but I emailed him what I have found out and what I planned and I will let him decide!

Ummmmmmmmmmm

2008-03-10T10:12:00.000-05:00

Yeah that is how I feel. I got like four hours of sleep Saturday night, two one hour naps Sunday afternoon, and like 8 hours of sleep last night. Why do I feel like my brain is on vacation?

What on earth did I do wrong???

2008-03-09T04:15:00.000-05:00

So I went to bed around 10pm or so, and I have been up for an hour now!?! What did I do to deserve this?

Happy Birthday Sis!

2008-03-08T22:00:00.000-06:00

Yeah, so unfortunately my older sister and I are not all that close. I don't know what it is about her, but we just don't, and never did, click. She was nice enough to get a hold of me on my birthday, ok so she had to call several times the day before, of, and after to get me to answer, but I did and she wished me a happy birthday. Because of this I thought it only nice to do the same. Since today is her birthday I gave her a call. At least I planned to. I woke up and my phone was dead, dammit! I plug it in and we go shopping. Come late afternoon my mom starts sending me messages via instant messenger asking why I hadn't called her. Dammit again, I forgot. So I grabbed my phone and called her. Her first question, did mom get a hold of you to remind you? Umm, no why was she going to? Yeah I tend to tell little white lies some times. After a great deal of time on the phone I wish her a happy birthday and hang up, have I mentioned I hate talking on the phone? There, conscience cleared, I am a good brother again, for now!

Finally Friday!

2008-03-07T23:03:00.000-06:00

I think I need to make "Finally Friday!" a weekly thing what about you? Nah, probably not. If I did I would end up forgetting to post anything through the week, so I would have a blog full of Finally Friday posts! Yes dear, I know I already forget to post! So sue me! No, not really....

Oh, and I finally got that damn web service to debug and what do you know my modifications work just like they are supposed to!

Debugging web services sucks!

2008-03-06T10:10:00.000-06:00

I know I have expressed that I really don't like JAVA, well this is a little of the same, and a little different. Right now I am trying to modify a JAVA web service. The modification is easy, it is just the fact that it doesn't want to pay any attention to my break points. GRRR!!!

I greatly dislike no-shows.

2008-03-05T20:03:00.000-06:00

So once again I get to the work site and our contact person is not there. No big deal really, but I would not have driven down there had I known he wasn't going to be there. I see no point in making an hour drive to work along side someone just to find out they won't be there! Monday at least he sent the message out in plenty of time, so had I checked my email before I left at 7:15am I would have known he wouldn't be there and I could have gone to the office. Tuesday I though hey maybe I will check email before I leave, so I checked it around 7:10am, no email. Great! I load up and drive down there. I get my computer fired up a little after 8 and of course there is the message from him at like 7:45am. This morning I also thought maybe I would check email before I left. Again there was nothing, but I wasn't sure if that meant anything. I drive on down there, get my computer up and running, check my email...... Nothing! Great! About 15 minutes later there it is, out again. I can't really complain much, after all his daughter does have the flu, but I wish I knew ahead of time he wasn't going to be there so I could avoid burning a tank of gas in the truck! Here is to hoping tomorrow is better!

Update from yesterday.

2008-03-04T20:51:00.002-06:00

Well, the engineer with the other project did not talk to the project manager, and did not let me know what was going on. I knew I would not see this person today, so I emailed the project manager and asked him if he was contacted, and if I should work on this persons task to help speed it along. He let me know that no he was not contacted, and that he really wanted this other person to work on the task. I really would like to work on this task. I looked it over, made a lot of notes, and I think I have it basically figured out and outlined for this person. It just needs done! Let me do the damn thing and get it over with..

Take one for the team...

2008-03-03T19:39:00.001-06:00

The project I am on for work has three engineers working on it, myself and two others. We have a project manager, but he is busy with other projects, and wouldn't have much to add to the development on this one anyway. He has very little experience with Java web applications, which is what this one is. Anyway, I was pulled off of one Java web application, to work on this one, so when it came down to getting up to speed I have had it easy. Because of this I have been the technical lead on the project, taking over management of the development team, and pushing to get tasks completed, while the project manager can deal with schedule issues, and interfacing with our customers. One of our engineers is trying to finish up another project though, and is running into problems switching between projects. I suggested consulting with the project manager and letting him know that I could handle one of the remaining issues. We have five weeks left, and only two items to complete, so it shouldn't be a problem. I guess only time will tell!!

Glorious Sunshine!!!!!

2008-03-02T19:03:00.000-06:00

Wow, it actually 50F today!!! I was outside trying to chip away at the 8inches or so of ice still at the end of our drive way, wearing a t-shirt and all sweaty!! I am sooooo ready for spring! I can't wait for those warm spring days when we can cruise around in the bronco with the top down!! Sigh, much colder temps and even more snow on the way.....

What a day!

2008-03-01T08:29:00.000-06:00

Well I will tell anyone reading that I had a great birthday! My wife took me to Lone Star Steak House for dinner, ok so I took her ;-), I had steak and lobster, she had chicken as usual. My food was great, but my loving wife mentioned to the waitress that it was my birthday... Yeah, I bet you can guess what happened right after dinner... Yeah, she asked me what I wanted for dessert. I selected the apple cobbler, and here she came, with about 8 other servers.. Yeah to sing to me...

It's my party...

2008-02-29T08:16:00.002-06:00

Final BPEL training day!

2008-02-28T19:08:00.000-06:00

Wow, so the training was as close to a waste of time as I really think you can get! I should say the training itself wasn't THAT bad, but the format was not the best. It was of course online training, so I sat there listening to a teleconference while watching the instructor flip through a power point presentation... Anyway, around noon I kept dozing off!!! Anyway, I got the basics of BPEL, and I think I would modify an existing process without any issue, so I guess thats what counts!

BPEL Training day 3

2008-02-27T19:06:00.000-06:00

Well today was the final day of the fundamentals portion of my training. It was basically just covering the basic operation of a bpel process. The training itself wasn't too bad, but I think I got just as much out of the tutorial built into the free software we were using! I hope tomorrow proves to be a little bit more fruitful!!