Hold on, we're goin' for broke!

[vin_petrol]

Sometimes my job involves coding away, quite slowly and carefully. I'm sat quietly in the corner, with my headphones on, writing something for release in weeks to come.

Other times, it all goes horribly wrong. Something is broken on our WAP portal, and there's bits of content lying around in a sorry fashion. Perhaps a database has behaved oddly, maybe a data provider has sent us dubious content. The end result is that someone rings me, and it's time for me to mutate into Mr Save Arse.

My role model for this is Joe Patroni from the Airplane films. The grumpy engineer who knows his stuff inside out, chewing his cigars and shouting at his co-workers. It's probably time for me to write save_arse.pl, the shittiest, ugliest piece of Perl you'll ever see (and for Perl, that's saying something). All variables will be global, and their scope held in my head. Huge hashes and arrays will be thrown around with reckless abandonment. Managers will be told that if they want to help, they can get out of my way, or perhaps go and get me a mug of coffee and a pizza!

These are also the times that you love Unix and it's wonderful command line interface and sets of tools. You have to know why things work on a starship. You can throw tiny scripts and programs together into sequences that solve problems it would take weeks of pointy-clicky bollox to sort out.

A few hours later, I'll have fixed the problem, and calm will return. I can go back to being a mild-mannered programmer.

Comments

[wibblefish.livejournal.com]

on these occasions do you dash to the toilet/phone booth/comms room to change into brightly coloured spandex?

[vin_petrol]

No, but my coffee consumption tends to rack up so that it feels like I'm flying!

[captainblue.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Who is that superhero? Petry, the mild-manered Janitor programmer?

[cyberspice.livejournal.com]

You can't be that good otherwise you'd already have the shitty piece of Perl in your toolbox ready for such eventuality. :-)

That's how I come across as a miracle worker. I've usually predicted cock ups and come up with a solution which I can present in my best Leslie Judd "Here's one I prepared earlier".

[steer.livejournal.com]

*grin* Always better to have a multiplicity of tiny tools which you can chain together. That's why I love unix -- currently running

/usr/sbin/tcpdump -ttt -q -e -r 20030424-000000-1-anon.pcap | nawk '{print $1, $3, $NF;}' | sed -e 's/://' > output

Didn't even have to write any code to get the data I wanted in the form I wanted.

I remember freaking out a consultant like this because he spent ten minutes asking a series of things like "Well what's the standard deviation of the traffic flow for the busiest 100 streets" and I was reeling off the answers as quick as he asked them by typing things like

nawk '{print $4;}' input_file | sort -n | head -100 | calc_std.nawk

(the latter being a nawk script of mine).

Eventually he just had to ask "How on earth are you doing that?" -- I think he assumed I was some kind of spreadsheet wizard.

[vin_petrol]

I was a big fan of sed and awk till I found Perl. Sadly, the old versions of these tools I had access to in the 90s had rather low arbitrary line length limits that I was always running foul of (i.e. a 512 character limit per line in sed). Perl had no such limits back then, so I stopped using sed and awk. I've just tried the GNU versions I have on my Linux box and I'm pleased to see those limits no longer exist (although they do still exist in the Solaris 5.8 versions I also have access to).

[steer.livejournal.com]

As you know, I never got that comfortable with perl. If I need code to bung data about then python is my language of choice. I don't like the way that perl tries to do something with any code no matter how bad. It's a labrador of a language -- tongue hanging out, eager to please having fetched a handgrenade instead of the tennis ball that you chucked for it.

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

'perhaps go and get me a mug of coffee and a pizza!'
Why not a meat pie? I thought they were your faves along with something else that I'm sure you wouldn't want your manager to provide unless they were busty ;-)

[vin_petrol]

Why not a meat pie?

Fair comment. I think this is because:
1) Meat pie delivery services are not as widespread as pizza delivery services.
2) Pizza is far easier to eat with one hand, so you can code with the other hand.
3) Pizza is closely associated with hacking code. It just *is*. How can I fight decades of history?

I thought they were your faves along with something else that I'm sure you wouldn't want your manager to provide unless they were busty ;-)

Oh, I dunno. I could be talked into it. The thing is, that would be something of a distraction from coding! ;-)