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 ...Half the fun on Stack Overflow is the endless use of closed-ended questions. "Can I do this in Python?" being so common and so hilarious.
The answer is "Yes." You can do it.
Perhaps that's not the question they really meant to ask.
See "Open versus Closed Ended Questions" for …
more ...The following weirdness often happens when we encounter complex business problems.
Much of software development is best described as "problem-solving". Much of the rest, BTW, is knowledge capture.
When we look at the time spent on problem solving we can see four potential outcomes.