Hello Satellite! (or Lost at C)
I'm writing code to create instructions for things flying round in space. I wish this was a more positive post...
Read on for what is basically a whinge about work. Or don't...
Work has become increasingly frustrating following the cancelling of the initial prooject I was hired to do. The basic issue is that my XML knowledge is only very tangentially useful to the company. The industry uses XML a lot but not very intelligently. Things that could be enforced in schemas are just written in word docs and checked with custom code.
- Namespaces aren't used
- schemas aren't versioned
- customers care about attribute ordering (this debate finished about 8 years ago)
- XML is basically just used as parameter-value pairs with angle brackets and a tick against the customer requirement "we'll use XML".
- Dates are described as ISO 8601 and little pseudo regexs are written, but the schema just says "string".
- I hear "we don't want a restrictive schema - the data might change and we wouldn't want the validation to fail", which puts it about as bluntly as I can
Much of this is industry wide, and while there is progress it isn't high priority (which is why my original project got cancelled).
There's some interesting RDF and Ontology work to be done - such as the OntoGrid thing I'm working on, but we're not very heavily involved so it doesn't take much of my time. There's also still the potential that I'll get moved full time to work on the Virtual Observatory. But ESAC are being very slow to work out what they want. I worry that what they want is to cut funding and hence the project's not going to happen.
In the meantime work is trying to find things for me to do, and not very well. I've been plonked on a project where the section head "knew there was some XML" but there's actually almost none. While I've taken over the job of helping our partners define the WSDL and XML for the SOAP interface mostly what they need is C++.
I'm not a coder, and I don't want to become one (career wise). I like playing around in spare time and doing the odd little project but that's it. Being asked to start working with a new language on a lumbering old project with a tonne of existing, mangled code mostly written by people who have left the company is just aggravating.
My first work coding in years is on a satellite mission planning system - users want the instruments to do stuff, we work out what clashes and doesn't and give the ground stations instructions to beam to the satellite. It's kinda interesting, at the 10,000 foot view where I'm used to working. It's very frustrating as an introduction to C++, double pointers, iterators, private functions, and the rest.
I keep having what ought to be 'the right' conversations with the proj mgr (one of those given the title cos he's head coder, not cos he can manage projects). I say how I genuinely don't know what I'm doing with C++ and while I'm happy to help I do not want to consider this the start of a wonderful new career (unlike the crop of graduates who seem to also be being dumped into the project). He says hmmm, and entirely fails to find anything else for me to do and just says "I'll ask X to come over and you can both look at it". Which happens, and some code is undone, or solved with the removal of the word const from the legacy code, and on I go again. The bigger problems are usually structural - we have common classes and separate ones for satellite specific code and we're moving in several cases from a pull to a push model. Of course none of this is detailed and so if I don't ask the right questions I don't get any answers.
The basic problem, I think, is that I am genuinely helping the project so the proj mgr doesn't want to admit to the section head that there is none of the right sort of work for me to do (and also section head has been out of office). But I don't really want to go over his head and complain cos that isn't what good flexible employees do.
Ideally this full time virtual observatory post comes up, but if not I don't really know what to do, or how long to leave it.
Read on for what is basically a whinge about work. Or don't...
Work has become increasingly frustrating following the cancelling of the initial prooject I was hired to do. The basic issue is that my XML knowledge is only very tangentially useful to the company. The industry uses XML a lot but not very intelligently. Things that could be enforced in schemas are just written in word docs and checked with custom code.
- Namespaces aren't used
- schemas aren't versioned
- customers care about attribute ordering (this debate finished about 8 years ago)
- XML is basically just used as parameter-value pairs with angle brackets and a tick against the customer requirement "we'll use XML".
- Dates are described as ISO 8601 and little pseudo regexs are written, but the schema just says "string".
- I hear "we don't want a restrictive schema - the data might change and we wouldn't want the validation to fail", which puts it about as bluntly as I can
Much of this is industry wide, and while there is progress it isn't high priority (which is why my original project got cancelled).
There's some interesting RDF and Ontology work to be done - such as the OntoGrid thing I'm working on, but we're not very heavily involved so it doesn't take much of my time. There's also still the potential that I'll get moved full time to work on the Virtual Observatory. But ESAC are being very slow to work out what they want. I worry that what they want is to cut funding and hence the project's not going to happen.
In the meantime work is trying to find things for me to do, and not very well. I've been plonked on a project where the section head "knew there was some XML" but there's actually almost none. While I've taken over the job of helping our partners define the WSDL and XML for the SOAP interface mostly what they need is C++.
I'm not a coder, and I don't want to become one (career wise). I like playing around in spare time and doing the odd little project but that's it. Being asked to start working with a new language on a lumbering old project with a tonne of existing, mangled code mostly written by people who have left the company is just aggravating.
My first work coding in years is on a satellite mission planning system - users want the instruments to do stuff, we work out what clashes and doesn't and give the ground stations instructions to beam to the satellite. It's kinda interesting, at the 10,000 foot view where I'm used to working. It's very frustrating as an introduction to C++, double pointers, iterators, private functions, and the rest.
I keep having what ought to be 'the right' conversations with the proj mgr (one of those given the title cos he's head coder, not cos he can manage projects). I say how I genuinely don't know what I'm doing with C++ and while I'm happy to help I do not want to consider this the start of a wonderful new career (unlike the crop of graduates who seem to also be being dumped into the project). He says hmmm, and entirely fails to find anything else for me to do and just says "I'll ask X to come over and you can both look at it". Which happens, and some code is undone, or solved with the removal of the word const from the legacy code, and on I go again. The bigger problems are usually structural - we have common classes and separate ones for satellite specific code and we're moving in several cases from a pull to a push model. Of course none of this is detailed and so if I don't ask the right questions I don't get any answers.
The basic problem, I think, is that I am genuinely helping the project so the proj mgr doesn't want to admit to the section head that there is none of the right sort of work for me to do (and also section head has been out of office). But I don't really want to go over his head and complain cos that isn't what good flexible employees do.
Ideally this full time virtual observatory post comes up, but if not I don't really know what to do, or how long to leave it.