Rediscovering the Benefits of Simple Design

Recently, I met a coworker from almost twenty years ago whose clearest memory of our time together was our discussions about design.   And how I got us all to make a field trip to the break room to take a look at the microwave oven there.

It had a dial and no buttons.  Pull the handle and it shut off the element automatically.   I loved the simplicity of this.   I loved how it made no demands of the user, and anybody could immediately put it to use.   There was no training, no documentation, no "insufficiently skilled users".

At the time we were rolling Microstrategy out to hundreds of users.    Microstrategy is a ROLAP (Relational On-Line Analytical Processing) tool that once you provided data in a relational database within a star-schema, defined that to Microstrategy in the form of metadata then any user could use it easily - they could quickly create new reports by dragging and dropping element names and it would generate the SQL for them.   It was a very powerful tool that in the right hands could achieve amazing results.   Prior to our roll-out of this tool the backlog on reports for our organization was ten months.   After we rolled it out I signed onto and delivered an 8-hour average SLA for the creation of new reports.

In Praise of the Embaressingly Simple

Recently, while having lunch with some former members of my project the conversation drifted to some of the old code that's still around.   These guys are incredibly good programmers, and so many of their contributions are still running today - four to six years after they've left the project.

One of the items that we discussed was our "batch broker" - a process responsible for handing out unique batch ids - that uniquely identify processes, end up in logs, in audit tables, and sometimes tagged to rows in the database.

We laughed about how embarrassingly simple this process was: just a few dozen lines of python code that

• open up and lock a file
• increment the number within
• close & lock the file
• log the requester & new batch_id
• return the batch_id

Our myriad batch programs (transforms, loads, publishes, etc) then simply call a bash or python function on their local system which calls this program remotely over ssh to get a new batch_id.   Total amount of code is maybe 50 lines across all libraries.

Learning 1 Thing Every Day

When I was 18 and a programmer in the USMC I decided the best way for me to become skilled was to learn one thing every day about programming in addition to my daily duties.   I recruited a colleague and each of us committed to learning and sharing our discoveries.

By learning I don't mean just reading about some feature or method, but instead studying it to the degree necessary to be able to easily apply it later.   Fitting this extra work into our schedules meant that most of these discoveries were fairly small.    But they accumulated and built upon one another very quickly.    Perhaps more importantly this strategy positively affected our daily outlook by helping us frame our day within an optimistic, learning context.

Decades later I'm a mid-career technologist who tends to neglect my technical skills while focusing on organization, communication, and resource issues necessary to get projects successfully deployed.  So, I've decided to resurrect this strategy to resharpen my skills and inject some more fun into my day.   I'm going to use this blog to help me track these items and summarize the impacts.