Projects That Break You

Aug 24, 2016

Everyone has had one: a project that’s so hard that it breaks you.

I was recently flicking through my old project folders and found that very project. It was an innocuous form-generating WPF application (source) that I thought I had thoroughly buried in my projects-dropped/ folder. However, while browsing through that folder tonight, the project managed to catch my eye.

You can see more details about the application on the Github page. It was an application that was trying to solve every problem that COSHH-form-generating software just needed to solve. It needed composable document models. It needed a variety of IO methods. It needed to be functionally pure. It needed to be architecturally easy to understand. It also needed to be fast, run on any PC, and sell nationwide on day one.

Don't Spare the Low-Level Details

Aug 6, 2016

Abstractions are wonderful things, that is until they leak. At that point, I tend to wish someone didn’t spare me the low-level details.

Recently, I was tasked with developing a system that continually logs temperature readings from 12 hotplates. The plates’ use an RS232 communication interface, which is very easy to negotiate.

With only those high-level details available, I declared that the logging software would be an “afternoon in n’ out job” and created an appropriate design for the timescale / effort:

  • Hard-code the 12 plates’ COM/ttyS port identifiers and output paths
  • Loop through each port/path pair
  • Send the GET_TEMPERATURE request
  • Write the response to the output file

Job done.

Port identifiers can change.

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