Recent Representative Line

A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.

Jul 2020

An Exceptional Leader

by in Representative Line on

IniTech’s IniTest division makes a number of hardware products, like a protocol analyzer which you can plug into a network and use to monitor data in transport. As you can imagine, it involves a fair bit of software, and it involves a fair bit of hardware. Since it’s a testing and debugging tool, reliability, accuracy, and stability are the watchwords of the day.

Which is why the software development process was overseen by Russel. Russel was the “Alpha Geek”, blessed by the C-level to make sure that the software was up to snuff. This lead to some conflict- Russel had a bad habit of shoulder-surfing his fellow developers and telling them what to type- but otherwise worked very well. Foibles aside, Russel was technically competent, knew the problem domain well, and had a clean, precise, and readable coding style which all the other developers tried to imitate.