Four Diseases

How a developer can tell if the system is sick just by taking a look at the input and the output? If you’d like to know that (plus you like standup comedy), come an see! The treatment is safe ;-)

One approach to get familiar with a system is a long and intense reading the manual (and to run an eye over the source code sometimes). Another approach is to take a deep dive into the data model (often in the DB) and to surf the user interface. Both are natural ends of the system, the legendary Input and Output. By examining these ends one can check if there’s a good digestion or if guts are rotten. Careful examination can confirm “common DDDosis”, “malignant stringosis”, “regex diarrhoea” or “not-made-here syndrome”. Unfortunately, sometimes developers get infected in their prenatal life (meaning: at their university). Let me invite you to a treatment. A laxative one. (That is: a sequel of “Passwords. Do you keep them safe?”)

Dear Reviewers

I gave this talk two times in English so far: During DevFest Wroclaw and CoreDumpConf (Krakow). Most recent slides: http://przybyl.org/pres/2018/CoreDump_4Diseases. Sadly, I didn’t get any formal feedback, no recording is available too. I also gave it in Polish a few times, got formal feedback from SpreadIT, which made this talk “generally the best talk in the Architecture path”: https://translate.google.pl/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fpiotrprz%2Fstatus%2F1045306030022938625. However, what I admire the most is the paper for feedback I got from a very shy lady. One guy passed me a piece of paper saying: that lady wanted me to give you this. And it was: http://przybyl.org/pres/2018/CoreDump_4Diseases/pics/feedback.jpg. It reads: “I’ll be dreaming about your talk at nights”.

I made this presentation because I’m really tired seeing dates stored as strings (and other diseases too). So I decided to do something about this. Also, I wasn’t quite aware the form of this talk. After giving it for the very first time my friend asked me: ‘do you know that this is standup comedy?’ Well, I didn’t know till then… Of course, this is not a proper standup, I don’t talk about sex-related issues or abuse anyone. However, I believe that our universities are full of sad talks, our companies are full of boring managers, so people deserve also nice talk to entertain them during the conference. (Maybe that’s why my talk is usually scheduled right before the lunch or right after, so people are kept in the room. One of the organisers told me they do that on purpose.)

Thank you.

Best regards Piotr