(It looks like I wrote most of this back in 2015. I've dusted it off and present it for your edutainment.)

It's time to rant about a technology issue close to my heart. I realize that the gold standard for technology rants has been set by Steve of Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and the incomparable Zed Shaw. This means I should either swear often or only write after consuming significant quantities of alcoholic beverages. Ever the rebel, I'm going to dispense with both of these requirements and enjoy a nice cup of tea instead.

At Benevolent Employer, they are trying really hard to fix things. As is often the case with large companies which have been around for many decades, there is much to fix. I wholeheartedly endorse fixing stuff. The problem is that they are trying to fix testing, particularly unit testing, as if it was a standalone thing that they could upgrade by creating enough PowerPoint slides and new policies. What they need to fix first is their understanding of what testing is and then they can proceed on to the step of testing better.

Updated: 28th October 2020

It's an interesting life being a Technical Lead as I discovered when I became one in an IT department. I simultaneously discovered that it is both a vitally important role and an oft mis-understood one.

At the instance of Benevolent Employer where I first made my discovery, the role of Technical Lead had absolutely no definition outside of a few required documents that you were supposed to create. Fortunately, it was realized informally within the company, that the role was where an experienced developer could bring their knowledge, experience and wisdom to a project. That they could positively influence every technical aspect from the architecture to the day to day activities of the individual programmers. It was this aspect of the role that I most loved.

I'm learning PHP. Technically I'm re-learning it, as I learned it many years ago (version 5.0 if I remember correctly), but between the passage of time ravaging my memory and all of the new features in it and the infrastructure around it, it feels like learning it for the first time.

I understand that the accepted thing to do with PHP is complain about it instead of writing programs in it, but I have no intention of doing that. PHP is a good language that is constantly improving and it has some amazing tools springing up around it. What I want to talk about is the experience of going from a static, strongly typed language to a dynamic, loosely typed one.

I'm working in PHP because reasons (as the young people like to say) and the time frame I'm trying to work with is shorter than would let me thoroughly learn one of my dream languages like Erlang or Elixir. Until six months ago, I was a Java programmer and had over 20 years of experience in the language having worked with it since version 1.0 back in the mid-nineties. I chose not to work with Java for a number of reasons, each of which deserve their own blog post, but basically I don't trust Oracle's stewardship of the Java language and Java web frameworks are generally gigantic monstrosities that I find to be a pain to program in. (I also seem to be entirely unable to overcome my irrational hatred of Spring, so that doesn't help.) The Java language itself is still nice and I continue to like it, but everything that surrounds it these days is questionable to my way of thinking.

It's been too long since we had a cover track around here, so here's a great Cool Jazz rendition of a classic track from The Clash called Should I Stay Or Should I Go.

One of my many and wide-ranging musical influences in my life growing up was punk and The Clash were at the rock end of the punk spectrum. I loved many of their tracks and perhaps this one the most.

Having grown up in a very rural area, my mother used a number of interesting phrases and one of them was about "not teaching your grandmother to suck eggs". For the record, I have no idea whether any of my grandmothers actually could suck eggs, but I can assure you that this phrase meant that it never occured to me to offer them any advice in that life skill.

I thought it was a highly localized saying, but on a whim, I recently searched for the phrase and Wikipedia came to the rescue. They have a page on this exact phrase: Teaching grandmother to suck eggs. Who knew? Most of the opinions I found on the Internet believed that the phrase originated during the 1700's, with a few believing that it may have been even as far back as the 1400's. There is also a good discussion on the origin of the phrase over at the English Language section of Stack Exchange.

As for the meaning, it means to offer advice to one who knows perfectly well what they are doing and who likely knows more than you do on the matter at hand.