steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

I am not a programmer. I aspire at times to become one, but I don't consider myself to be in that league of extraordinary gentlemen (forgive the movie reference). I have tended to be a tinkerer, put it all together guy - figure out what the problems are and find someone who can help with fixing the technicalities (e.g. reprogramming) of a given problem. I have been spending more time lately trying to understand how programming conceptually works (object oriented vs. things like programing in c) and one of the biggest actual programing projects I've ever been involved in was done primarily in Ruby/Rails. In the years since college, I have somehow been able to avoid learning anything solid and complete when it comes to anything. (That's a subject to discuss on as one of my alter egos.) There is one thing, however, that I have learned and learned quite well: there is no lack of crap software out there and there is no lack of people who think they are programmers and yet don't have the gumption to follow through on a project when they run into problems. People often (even the smart ones who know better) expect stuff to just work and when it doesn't, they like to point the finger.
My years of reading the misc@openbsd.org list has taught me an invaluable lesson of what comment with or without context actually means. OpenBSD is known for a lot of things, the most important of which is security. The other thing that most people know about OpenBSD is that the misc@ list is relentless when it comes to picking apart people who don't take the time to do their homework. Before I felt comfortable with the inside (and mind you, I rarely post or answer anything on the misc@ list) workings and the people who put their souls into the project, I was always nervous that the questions I was about to ask would be torn to shreds and my tattered remains be paraded about in some sick sort of "let's tar and feather the idiot orgy." That never happened. I've never seen it happen to someone who is genuinely trying to do their homework and are stumped. I see it when it is deserved. By deserved, I mean someone who hasn't taken the slightest bit of time to google a question or even look at OpenBSD's main web page and handbook. Let me put it simply: people, OpenBSD is developed by people because they want to do it and it is free for you to use. You didn't pay for it, so you have no right to expect it to work the way you want. If you want something to change, you have to kindly convince a developer that your needs are their needs OR you need to learn to do it yourself. I have yet to run into a situation where OpenBSD hasn't met or exceeded my needs - not because OpenBSD is my end-all, be-all, but because I use it for what I feel it is best able to do (for me, routing, firewalling, web hosting and email hosting). Could I use it as a desktop/workstation machine? Sure, but I'd have to give up all of the media applications I've come to enjoy using on my Mac. So, I do the pragmatic thing: sell my soul for the desktop and keep my soul on the server. To be honest, I'd live fine if my desktop/workstation were taken away from me - I'd be pissed, but I would live. My servers are another story. They just have to work. Most of the requests I see from the individuals who die a fireball death are those of mememememe and you must do as I say. Bull. They don't and I'm glad as hell that they don't succumb to what many other projects seem to do. As humans, we desire to make people around us happy (unless we truly are sullen individuals) and this often causes us to do things that don't make sense. It really is difficult to say no or confront someone when they are wrong.
For some reason, programmers seem to rarely be told no and rarely say no to someone else who is asking for something idiotic. I don't know how else we could have ended up where I see us today - a bunch of people who will never become really good at what they do because they get away with producing claptrap and a lot of people asking software to do something that it really isn't meant to do.
My latest experience has to do with a bit of ego, a bit of naivety and I think a bit of frustrated laziness. Everyone wants to take the path of least resistance, but sometimes you can't and have to accept the fact that things don't always work the way you expect. I run a small web and email hosting service (that remained after I sold the ISP portion of Anywhere Technology) and had to deal with a programmer who neither wanted to listen to what I had to say nor provide me with trouble-shooting reports that would have cleared up any misconceptions sooner than later. I don't like it when people claim that something I manage doesn't work, but it is a fact of life. If the claim is made, however, the first thing I do is actually see if the problems are due to a bad configuration or something that happened (what? I have no idea, but I'll do my best to find it). I know in the past that I would often try to find a way out - a reason that had to do with bad instructions or bad programming or ... anything but me. What I found more often than not, though, is that if it is obvious that it works for others, there is likely something different about my setup or my procedure that is causing difficulties. Programming is not easy and it is less easy for those of us who do web work on different platforms. The person I dealt with was so quick to jump the gun and point out what they felt were problems caused by the environment I was giving them that they were completely ignoring that what they were given is what it is (so ist Programmieren) - that means, no environment is ideal and that is part of the difficulty of dealing with and developing technology. They were not having trouble with me because of something I had done, they were having trouble because my platform/environment was not behaving as they had expected. The problem compounded when rather than questions, accusations were thrown about.
This is the primary reason why I continue to spend money on running my own hosting service instead of using one of the better commodity hosters out there. It is not because I think they can't do what I am doing - or even do it better - it is that I realize that if I want to avoid having to adjust my programming style (rather, constantly watch that the program or application I am intending to use has been well tested on platform xyz), I can adjust the environment to fit the needs of my programs or applications. Therefore, while I trust others to do the job I do, I simply find it easier to do it myself to accommodate my constantly changing tastes. If you do chose to go down the road of using someone else, you give up the flexibility and are likely to spend more time doing bug tracking. The ideal environment that every programmer yearns for is simply that which they are comfortable using.
Pointing the finger at your platform provider is easy. (I like to do so with Apple all the time. The difference, I feel, is that I am criticizing a claim that they are making (and not fulfilling) and not the platform in particular.) It lets you off the hook from a lot of frustration and a lot of hard work. It doesn't make you a better programmer, though. It certainly won't make you successful over the long run either. If there is one important lesson I have learned from my dad it is to know thyself, know thy environment and accept it or be lazy and call it quits. The more quickly you accept that you can only change those things over which you have direct control, the more likely you will be able to finish what you are doing and move on to the next project. Successful people appear to either change and mold their environment directly or deal with the tools they were given in such a way that they find success even with what others would give up on. We are our own worst enemies, right?