Put six adults together for 41 hours with a pile of parts and a vague goal and what do you get? In my case, amplified lessons in secure software development — and a game where you take a robot to do battle.
So last weekend I participated in a make-a-thon. Described as "like a walk-a-thon with less walking and more making," it was a fund-raiser and a way for me to scratch my ongoing geek itch. Since mechanical engineering isn't my forte, I was assigned to be half the programming team. And, as is true for so many real-world dev projects, we began on Friday night with only a vague sense of what the hardware would ultimately look like.
So the first thing I did was sit down, write careful specifications, and start hand-crafting the finest in artisinal code, right? Of course not: I headed for the Internet and started grabbing routines described as doing what I wanted to do. And just like that, I was neck-deep in the reality of most agile and dev-ops software shops.
Now, I was lucky in several respects: I was doing classic OT stuff in a variant of C — I could look at the code and tell what was going on. But the thing that struck me in retrospect was just how easily I was grabbing routines and throwing them into my application, and just how little regard I was giving the variables and code that didn't have an immediate impact on my job.
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