No discussion of legacy preservation is complete without some "Paving the Cowpaths" stories.
The phrase refers to the way cows tend to meander across the landscape in a remarkably consistent way. The cows reliably follow a consistent path. The paths tend to wander in ways that seem crazy to us …
It's 1980-something. We're working on a fairly complex system that includes some big machines and three computers. One of the computers has a magnetic tape drive into which it writes a log of interesting events. In the 80's, this was a pretty big deal.
An operational run will produce a …
Let's visit some other conversion activities in the 1970's. The gig was at a company implementing a customized insurance application. The actuaries used a PDP-10 (and Fortran) to compute their various tables and summaries.
I was roped into rewriting an actuarial Fortran programs into PL/1 for an IBM 370 …
Wind back the clock to the late 1970's. Yes, there were computers in those days.
Some of my earliest billable gigs where conversions from old OS to new OS. (Specifically DOS/VSE to OS/370, now called Z/OS.) Back when a company owned exactly one computer, all of the …
This is important:
Rule One: Writing Software is Capturing Knowledge.
Consequence: Converting Software is Preserving Knowledge.
When software is revised for a new framework or operating system or database or when an algorithm is converted to a new language, then we're "converting" (or "migrating") software. We're preserving code, and preserving …
more ...Step 1. Look at the original HamCalc. Even if you aren't interested in Ham radio, it's an epic, evolving achievement in a specialized kind of engineering support. It's a repository of mountains of mathematical models, some published by the ARRL, others scattered around the internet.
Step 2. Look closely at …
more ...Some background:
I was vaguely pointed at one call in an API, via a 2-page "tutorial" that uses CURL examples. Told "Test this some more." by the guy who'd been doing some amount (none?) of hand "success path" testing via CURL. This has since morphed into "regression testing things, all …
more ...Unit testing RESTful web services is rather complex. Ideally, the services are tested in isolation before being packaged as a service.
However, sometimes people will want to test the "finished" or "integrated" web services technology stack because (I suppose) they don't trust their lower-level unit tests.
Or they don't have …
more ...It's impossible to step into the same river twice; other waters are flowing toward the sea. It's impossible to do "head-to-head" project comparisons. You can't have the same people doing the same thing with only one constraint changed. You can try to resort to having similar people doing the exact …
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