Excessive Abstraction can lead to the Bends

Russell Ball — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:11:25 GMT

In his blog post on Old School Programming, Wesner Moise waxes nostalgic about his pre-high school experiences with writing his own disassembler and assembler for the Comodore 64. Apparently he used his homemade dissassembler to decode and rewrite the entire 8k BASIC ROM back to source and then used his assembler to add his own extensions to the BASIC language to support structured programming and better graphics. Aside from retyping a few bouncing ball programs from the owner's manual, I believe that the only thing I ever did with my Comodore 64 was play pirated video games with my friends. For some reason all I can remember is a break dancing video game where I felt proud of getting the little block character to spin on his head. As you can imagine, the post made me feel like I belonged somewhere between plankton and an anemic protozoa on the alpha geek food chain.

By contrast I spent most of my day today in high altitude architectural abstraction. The bank I work for has hired a consulting company to do a data strategy gap analysis and we spent a good part of the day talking about BPM, SOA, and Master Data Strategy. There were several points where I had to politely suggest that we move on to another topic because we had risen a little too high in the abstraction layer and I was sure that someone walking past might have had trouble discerning whether the topic of the conversation had to do with coding, politics, or pepperoni pizza. The next two days will be more of the same.

Does anyone know if you can get decompression sickness by ascending too quickly from the depths of creating custom interrupts on the Comodore 64 in order to implement a rasterizer that bypassed hardware limits for 8 sprites to the abstract heights of macro workflows and model driven architecture? If anyone happens to observe any of these symptoms tomorrow, please sit me down and give me a steady dose of concrete examples. Thanks in advance.

[Originally Posted Monday, June 18, 2007 11:31 PM]

The Architecture Blues

Russell Ball — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:10:25 GMT

A few years ago I shifted roles from a developer team lead who coded almost full time to an Architect. Although I am naturally a bit of an abstract thinking and find architectural issues interesting, I have always been hesitant about this role because of the ubiquitous Architecture Astronauts that have given the discipline a bad name. These guys have a knack for intimidating even the smartest of developers by throwing around architectural jargon that they can describe in the abstract but are completely unable to translate these ideas into concrete code. Last night as I was lying in bed, I realized that I hadn't written a single line of code in the last few months because of my involvement in some high level strategy initiatives, my advisory role in a number of projects, and my supervisory responsibilities over a solutions architect and a data modeler. I realized with horror that much of my time these days was spent just reading about fuzzy concepts like SOA, SaaS, BPM, EII, EAI, MDM, Data Governance, and I was sure that I had suddenly become one of those useless pieces of corporate baggage that real developers make jokes about. That thought prompted me to spend my last waking moments plotting various routes to getting back to my coding roots.

This morning I relistened to an old Hanselminutes interview with Jeffrey Snover, the Powershell Architect, to help prepare for an upcoming .NET User group talk that I will be giving on Powershell. It was an excellent podcast, but what caught my attention the most was when Jeffrey mentioned that in the beginning of the project he had locked himself in a room for a month and pounded out a 15,000 lines of code as a proof of concept that he then used to convince people to get the project started. THAT is the kind of architect that I want to be when I grow up! I need to figure out a way to get myself out of all these meetings about process improvement, data strategy, and regulatory compliance and start focusing on some nice juicy proof of concept work.

[Originally Posted Friday, June 15, 2007 12:10 PM]