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What Am I?

Ξ August 24th, 2010 | → 0 Comments |
∇ Work | ∇ Architect, Engineering, Me, Software |

The correct answer to that question is “I’m a father, a lover, a living being… In that order.”. This is an important aspect of the answer, since how one seed himself obviously influences the way the reality is perceived, but today I want to talk about a different aspect. So, in professional terms, what am I?

The other day, during “team motivation” training there was an exercise where a colleague tried to motivate me to work with him in a new project. The idea was to have a “coaching” session in order to perceive my expectations, but the way he approached the session made me thing about what I am and what I would like to be doing in a short/medium term.

Having a computer science degree, I’m obviously very interested in Software engineering, but above all I consider myself a Systems Architect/Engineer. Of course I’m able to understand an existing “blue-print” and build the building (give me a specification, an editor and a compiler, and I’ll be a very happy man), but I’m also very interested in participating in the “sketching” of the “blue-print”. Especially, and above all, I like have a global view of what is being built.

So, this colleague suggested a baby-steps approach, where a complete birds-eye view of the system was only achieved after several months. I don’t want to start by implementing very specific I/O routines, or be in charge of a very specific infrastructure component. I don’t believe in having computer guys working the infrastructure (low-level design, I/O, supporting middleware) and leaving all the domain stuff (domain algorithms, specific computations and modelling) to the domain experts. Software should be built by software engineers with the support of domain engineers ([DDD] has a very nice discussion on this issue). I need to see the complete architecture of what I’m building, that’s when I most capable and most efficient.

References:

[DDD] Eric Evans , “Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Business Software”, 2002 (@ google books)

SW Development Project

Ξ May 15th, 2008 | → 0 Comments |
∇ Cartoon, Humor | ∇ Cartoon, Fun, Humor, Project, Software |

backtrace… up 1

Ξ March 13th, 2008 | → 0 Comments |
∇ Computer, Software, Work | ∇ Development, Software, Tools |

The themes presented in this blog are naturally evolving along with my day-by-day experiences. The last days (or should it be months) have been completely occupied with software developments tasks known as implementation, implementation, and more implementation… I must admit that C/C++ has become my second language.

Closely associated with source code production come the fine “art of debugging”. My favorite debugger is GDB (from The GNU Debugger Project).

Learning something new every day is somewhat of a life’s philosophy for me, and it is with big enthusiasm that I learn more about using GDB. The last example of a lesson learned was: how to use backtrace command to display the trace of the execution stack (which was not new to me), and navigate that same stack using the up and down commands and verifying the parameters passed to each function.

More details can be found in the Program Stack section of the GDB Quick Reference.