Phine Solutions web work notes

Dr. Graham’s new article made the reddit.com’s front page. It talks about the programmers’ natural unfitness to work for a corporate environment. Being a programmer myself I can totally relate to what he had to say. I have a day job, its bring me the money to support my family; but my true passion is in my own “moonlight startup”. Comparing two kind of work styles can be interesting and Dr. Graham said it perfectly.

“Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn’t—sometimes because the company wouldn’t let him, but often because the company’s code wouldn’t let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to.”

This is so true. Working in a big corporation environment really frustrates me sometime because knowing how NOT to do things is such an important skill and you have to master it. I guess the extreme goes to the government job.

As a programmer, what attracts me starting up my own project is the freedom of thinking. My idea may succeed, or it may fail; but I learn and grow from it. The freedom of implementation also makes working such a fun thing.

I guess people are different. Some enjoy working a corporate, but not for the good programmers.

Sometimes I am getting this weird error when try to updating the CVS sandbox:

…move away the file mydir/myfile, it is in the way.

The file was checked in fine and the problem goes away if I try to run update in the directory where the file is located.

Usually deleting the whole “mydir” and do a fresh update will fix the problem, but what causes this?

One possible reason is that the directory name was not properly updated in CVS. This can be verified by going to the parent dire of “mydir”, and open the entries file in the CVS folder. It should include this line:

D/mydir////

If it’s not there, adding line to the file can probably fix the issue above.

But what caused the missing directory name then? Beats me. My best guess in my case is that the failed style checking when checking in CVS files has caused some inconsistency in the sandbox, thus the error.