Jenny on Tooling Up India to Work for Google, Microsoft and Meta
It's a big job. I hope these companies appreciate what she's doing! See this post of Louis Rossmann's on the state of the cobbler's children's feet.
Subscribe to Jenny's Lectures CS IT.
Here's my comment on Louis Rossman's post:
I wonder whether there is a dual phenomenon to this. I have been programming for years, since I was about 15, which was around 1980. I made lots of things, some were just fun, like a peg-solitaire program I wrote which had a "solve" button! I spent ages learning enough about the Windows C++ API Classes to be able to make hexagonal pegs that you could move around a hexagonal grid with the mouse. I learned all that and then never ever wrote another Windows application for anyone else! I switched to Linux and spent most of time trying to get the Java Runtime working. Anybody who was an early Java adopter on Linux will remember how flaky the distributions were. Then my peak satisfaction moments were when I got to see that little Java-bean guy waving at me. But I never got around to learning the Java API for graphics and I never got around to learning Java either. And I once wrote thousands of lines of code to do regular expression matching with back-references. That was hard. I had this packaged library that I thought of selling and I tried to get some marketing support from a company called Grey Matter, who were based in Ashburton, in Devon, near where I lived, but they weren't interested. I guess because I hadn't written a manual. But I was unemployed and had run right [out] of money and didn't have the time to write a manual. I needed more example applications for that. I sold two licences for that source code to two different companies in exchange for just getting them to pay me to work. I would give them the code, then work for them for a few months and get paid just for that extra work. So the code was kind of my ticket to get a poorly paid job. All I ever used it for was plugging into screen/keyboard libraries to allow people to do half-decent input verification. So, you could define a form that accepted only telephone numbers that optionally started with a +NN and otherwise contained only digits or spaces and that meant it was easier to for the users of the library to handle input verification because they knew a lot more about the class of strings they had to deal with. But actually that library was supposed to work for things like lexical analysis in compilers and fast string searching. Because there was so much it could do, it really needed a good manual that would take a year of full-time work to produce, but living in the UK and working on something full-time for a year, even in the early nineties was prohibitively expensive. So the only time I ever produced any decent work was when I went to live in Bolivia and I could afford to do whatever I wanted to do for FOUR WHOLE YEARS. By that time though I had lost the source code for my regular expression library. And now I spend all my time fighting broken package managers to install other people's code. How many projects out there have their own little bits of half-assed script-w@nk to do stupid things with curl and what-have-you just to save them from actually doing a decent job of packaging their stuff?
And phones? I look after mine. My 3 year-old Samsung A-02 is OK, just it needs a fresh screen-protector, but the phone company keep turning off 4G data to get me to buy a reconditioned/new iPhone. I bought this phone with money I begged for at the traffic lights in Mexico and it's a good phone, just it has Google's stupid mess of Java and Linux on it. Maybe I should write an App to get that Java-bean guy waving at me (https://github.com/jgneff/gif-duke) when it asks for my PIN. Here's a shameless plug for Jenny's Java DSA course. https://youtu.be/tn5FdR9bhYg And then maybe I could look at that FUTO Keyboard App and see what the hell is going on with it. I still use it for all my phone typing, and it works OK, but the predictive text stuff is a bit weird, it's always a kind of surprise if it shows up!
Comments
Post a Comment