Software Enthusiast - KOY

Way back when I just set out in the IT world, I attended an interview for an open position as a Programmer/Analyst (I hardly see any opening bearing that title anymore). The Interviewer asked me, amongst others, to explain my understanding of the concept of "Portability" in relation to software development. To be frank - I did not know the answer but I thought I could pull a fast one by just explaining it within the concept of the gramatical meaning. So, I replied that it was when a piece of software code was "small" and "compact". The Interviewer kept nodging me on as if I was on the right track. To my surprise -I did not get the job but of course, my response was way wrong but the interviewer gave me false hope with his body language. Moral of the story - don't try to adjudge the outcome of an interview based on the body language of the Interviewer - it could just be a red herring. Why do interviewers always ask - "where do you see your...

I posted this question to a couple of online AI engines and to my surprise, none came up with the correct anwser. This is the question - "Two Americans were crossing a bridge on a bright summer morning, one was the father of the other and the other wasn't the son. So, what was their relationship?" This is a classic IQ question - supposedly, employed by Microsoft in the easrly 90s in the recruitment of top talent for its work pool. Essentially, this is a mis-direction fixation challenge. On the surface - it is a fairly straight forward question with the requisite hint at solving it. For whatever reason, most people asked this question are always fixated on the "father and son" narative, which in reality - is the hint to solving the question, but always end up getting it wrong. My point really is - the so called AI engines got the answer to the question wrong as well. The real poser is - should we still be referring to the encompassing ecosystem...

Mythical Man Month is the title of a collection of essays in software engineering  and project management - covering the  good and bad practices in the IT sector. It was first written in the 70s and later updated in the 80s and 90s subsequently. One of the chapters in the book that caught my fancy then was the one aptly titled - "The second time effect" . Basically, the chapter is a treatise about the desire to tend to over do things when given the chance to upgrade or rewrite an existing application - so called version 2.0 There is always the tendency attempting to fix all the so called real and imaginary flaws found in version 1 and more often than not - you'll end up with a revised edition that is unduly bulky and overtly prone to more errors than version 1. I had a first hand experience in a similar situation and I'll be sharing my observations and hopefully, this could serve as a panacea to avoid a similar pitfall. Essentially, I became the honcho man supervisin...