Kodsnack 428 - Yes, it gives me no guarantee, with Harald Achitz

Kristoffer chats with Harald Achitz about Harald’s path as a developer, test-driven development, seeing the big picture, and more.

The first part of the discussion is Harald’s background: Growing up on the far side of Europe, focusing on music, and how he eventually landed in computing. Freelancing as a developer in 1995 - what was that like? How did one find customers? The story then goes into Harald’s way into C and C++. Developing for medical devices and hospitals. Moving toward Linux, making a living as an open source developer, and eventually ending up in Sweden.

Then, the conversation moves to Harald’s increasing interest in what happens after you finish writing the code; builds, releases, integrations, package managers, build systems, and so much more. We talk quite a bit about seeing the big picture, and how our code is, at best, a temporary and unimportant part of the greater whole. Are we too focused on the next task, at the expense of thinking about and seeing the whole?

Harald explains why he likes to have 100% code coverage, how he goes about setting up his tests, and the challenges of setting up tests when responsibilities strech across teams.

Many of the hardest problems are organizational, the code we write is, on the whole, often not very important. Code is temporary. All of which is more motivation for testing more.

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Links

• Harald
• Stockholmcpp - C++ meetup which Harald arranges
• Tron
• Wargames
• The Iron curtain
• Conservatorium
• Visual basic for applications
• Novell netware
• Windows 95
• Windows NT 3.51
• Office 95
• Lotus notes
• Microsoft press
• Access
• AS/400
• Stored procedures
• DCOM
• MSDN
• KDE
• GNOME
• Red hat
• Slackware
• “Linux is cancer”
• Tobii
• Conan C and C++ package manager
• Jenkins
• Unit testing
• Test-driven development
• Boost unit test
• Github actions
• Scrum
• Devops
• Spock - testing and specification framework for Java, Nimoy - for Python
• Schrödinger’s cat

Titles

• Austria in the 80s
• On the side of Europe
• I started and stopped a lot of things
• Just jamming around
• Where you play the songs you hate
• There were computers in offices
• I was the young person
• The internet became a thing
• Freelancing back in 95
• I really loved databases
• I came back to medical devices
• Would you like to go to Switzerland?
• A different spirit in the Linux world
• I have no problem if things work
• It’s not just the code I write
• I love to have everything automated
• Holistic thinking
• All the tests are passing, but the thing is not useful
• Yes, it gives me no guarantee
• You need to fake it
• The place where people give up
• Software is their bread and butter
• The code I write is most likely not very important
• Software systems tend to change
• Code is temporary
• Throw it away as soon as possible
• Never enough, but always too much