Importance of software documentation

I believe that in regard to this matter, are mostly ignored by software developers in Malaysia.
At the moment, I am to assist the rest of the Java developers team that are working on the eQuity Online internationalization (i18n) project. The thing that really bothers me and nearly made me scream out of anguish is the serious lack of code documentation and also of the quite poor design.

Although the system works fine and marvelously as one of our directors commented during a meeting I attended 2 weeks ago, I found that the code underneath was poorly written and poorly documented. And now we're going to modify it to support i18n and I am pulling my hairs and trying to figure out what each functions do and what's not.

For the love of God, at least put some sensible comment on the codes on what it do and at least provide the Javadoc. It can be auto-generated for God's sake! As if the mixture of scriptlets, html and javascript is not enough to add up the 'coolness' of the codes.

It's more than just spaghetti codes. It is a ball of mud!

So you guy out there whose works have anything to do with software development, do put some thought on this matter!

in between..

Received a call from Jocelyn (Java developer team leader) at 8am sharp asking me where to park her motorbike. Whoa, she actually arrive at the office that early and that time I was still at home getting ready for the day. Talk about fast.

well, ain't much work for today. Today's progress of the BladeCenters started at noon so I had some sweet time surfing the internet for entertainment which I usually don't have much time to during office hours except searching for solutions to any algorithm that I'm developing and to my dismay, I was caught by Jocelyn who was actually sitting next to my partition and she began asking me to help the EO team on some coding task. So much for my sweet time. Anyway, I won't complain as I myself agreed to help. By the way, I don't have much work to do either.

I wonder when will I be really doing some R&D stuffs on that grid computing thing. It does interest me a lot but juggling between two separate job scope for the time is not really easy for me. Have been trying to do some research on my own at home, but other things kept me from it. Anyway, people do say that we shouldn't bring office work to home.

Being a Software Engineer but doing nothing in exception for maintaining existing software is not a good idea for me. This time, I wonder when will we be doing some development of new applications. That, would be the thing that will suit my likings and that would really put to use of my skills.

I wonder......

On MIMOS' BladeCenter

It's my third time going to MIMOS just to supervise the installation of the IBM Blade Center H.
For those who don't know, a Blade Center is categorized as high end server. My company had this contract to provide and maintain the Blade Center for MIMOS for 3 years. The total stuffs adds up to a sum of RM 3.6M. That's the most expensive machine that I've ever handled and helped to install. Each BladeCenter will have 14 blades, each blades are equipped with 2 dual core Opterons and 16GB of ECC RAM. Imagine the processing power that each of the BladeCenter have.

The 7 BladeCenters will be used in the Grid Computing project. The one me and my half time superior will be researching on. Well, I'll going to have a lot of readings on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to do before going to the development part. Meanwhile, at the same time, I have to deploy a test machine for the IBFM application internationalization project as we need to do some serious testing before going live and deliver it to Vietnam. Raya is around the corner now and with all that holidays, I'll have pretty limited time work on it. This will be really messy.

Ok. that's all the input for today. Gotta go or else I'll have to squeeze myself through the heavy traffic to get home.

- untitled -

Ever felt like wanting to be reincarnated again?
Well, this is what I feel when I decided to start posting again after the long silence..
Wiped out all the old posts, start out a brand new one again..
What's done is done, so let bygone be bygone..
So here I go..