When I look at the work I do day to day (this includes any unpaid / open source work), I have to savor any opportunity to do challenging technical software development. That's not to say that work isn't challenging. In fact it is, but it is made up of technical and non-technical work. For me, the fun part is playing with the logic puzzle and making things work in an artful manner. Don't think this is a "I would rather be coding that writing documentation" type rant. I appreciate that successful software development is much more than just writing the code.
Let me share with you some of the non-technical aspects of my work
I am doing a small project where I have an applet served from an embedded web server. This applet needs to be able to read and write some configuration onto the device that the user types in. The device has 1k of flash for misc. config like this, but this is just not enough room for what I need to store. So what about using the same storage place that the web server users? It is 512k, very nice. Files are uploaded using the TFTP protocol. Well no problem because I can use the TFTP implementation found in the Apache Commons-Net package. Great so I put the data onto the device. But wait! The TFTP server implementation on the device only supports PUT, not GET! Well no problem because I can PUT using TFTP and read from the device using the web server and HTTP. Well not quite. The device has it's own format for web content. Before you upload the content, you need to run it through this program to create some special binary format that the web server knows how to read. It's really getting fun now, because the only solution is to reverse engineer the file format and have my config stored in that format to be served up as plain text by the web server. H'Ok, so it finally works and I really enjoyed it.
Damn straight tiger. Any useless input I blurted out while you were doing that rev.eng was purely out of excitement at something so nifty.
In the web gimping field we don't get much of a chance to really hax0r stuff upside the head outside of browser specific hacks, but I know what you mean about how fun it can be finding insanity veneered solutions to intestinal fortitude challenging issues.
Sorry...my manager genes got the better of me there but you know what I mean with stuff like those SQL statements I imploded your skull with :)
I curse documentation at every keystroke but under the gruff exterior I love it. You want a challenge?? Try explaining how months of sweat soaked hacking in your underpants works to someone who doesn't really care, but still hold their attention long enough for them not to think they could have written the code better or completely b0rking what ever it's running on.
Top write up fella. More. Mmmm....I love it....MOOOORRREEE...*gak gak*
On, and here's a special "as it happens" story from my private library...I just killed a Mac and can't get the OS back on. The End.
Posted by: Kris at January 23, 2004 12:25 PM