Life

I made a mistake when I joined The University of Hull back in 2008. I don’t mean that joining university was a mistake, it was one of the best career decisions I’ve made. I made a mistake with the way I used social media.
Part of the role at The University was to be an ambassador, to represent and promote the university and the field of computer science. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just use my existing social media accounts.” That was the mistake.

It led to two problems. The first is that my online persona changed. I suddenly became aware that I used the account for professional purposes. That changed the image of the account, it became my professional persona and it became very difficult for me to be the person that my friends know outside of the professional environment.
The second problem is that I started adding professional “friends” and followers.  That reinforced the first problem.
I went from someone who’d been very active on social media to someone who only posted the most carefully filtered content.

If you are a professional you have to be somewhat circumspect, once you’ve hit the “send” button you’ve lost an element of control – it’s out there. Even friend-locked posts and old blog articles can resurface at inopportune moments.

At the last interview I was at one of the interviewers let slip something that they couldn’t have known unless they’d read my blog – and not only that but it wasn’t in the most prominent article either. As a professional your online presence matters.

Fortunately the Victorian image of professionalism is now fading. I maintain however that a professional image is important. It’s about giving your clients and peers confidence that when you turn up to work you’re going to do a good job. For instance, if your social media streams contain a disproportionate amount of pictures and stories of you partying with your friends to all hours that’s going to damage your professional credibility.
A balance still needs to be maintained.

For myself however I no longer work for The University, in fact being an ambassador for computer science is no longer an official part of my job at all. So you’d think it would be easy for me to rectify those mistakes I made back when I joined The University and revert my social media personas back to being more like the real me. You’d think that. It appears to be proving more difficult than I thought, however.

I’d been working for Seed Software for a few short weeks when the manager announced that he was going snowboarding for a week. “Who’s in charge whilst you’re away?” I inquired, “You are!” came the reply.

Over a year ago I posted the story of how I came to work for Seed Software, but the story didn’t end there. There’s the small matter of what happened between then and me leaving Seed in October 2015. It was quite an experience. I’m not sure if people take me entirely seriously when I say that I learnt as much in Seed as any of the interns or students but it is nevertheless true.

So I’d just about worked out where the stationary cupboard was and suddenly I was being asked to run the business. This was definitely not in the job description for a software developer but before I made that point I took a moment to think about it. I’d spent the past few years in my previous company trying to convince the senior management that some software developers understood more than just matters technical. I’d had some success, but here was an opportunity for me to prove it by stepping right into the front line of running a business, if only for week.

Nothing much happened, it was rather an uneventful week. I don’t know if I was more disappointed or relieved. Nevertheless it cemented my position as being very actively involved in the running of the business of Seed Software.

After that I started getting down to trying to learn WPF and WCF, neither of which I’d used before, and trying to build a Command and Control system. I’d got out on the road a bit too, the C&C was very much developed with the Fire Service which meant frequent visits to site with the latest developments to make sure we were all heading in the same direction. I’d also been to a few of the other sites because although the other products were managed by the Seed Manager there was only one of him and we needed some resilience.

It was that need for resilience that soon bit us, “Tom,” the Seed Manager said, “Erm… I’ve double-booked myself. I don’t suppose you could cover a sales presentation next week? I’ve got the slides and everything.”

This wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d known before I joined Seed Software that it was just a software development team. There were no sales, marketing or operations staff. A business can’t survive without these functions though which left only one conclusion: the development team were doing them. This is actually one of the things I found exciting about Seed, if the business was going to work and I was going to be successful within it I knew that I was going to have to get involved in these functions to a much greater level than I ever had been before. Sure I’d been to sales presentations, I was actually a bit of a regular, but I’d always been the “technical expert” that answered the questions that the salesperson couldn’t. I’d never actually delivered a sales presentation before.

As it turned out Seed’s presentation was part of a much larger event where several suppliers were pitching their wares at a group of senior fire officers from many services across the country.

This was a great learning opportunity for me – I was on relatively late in the day which meant that I had a lot of time to watch what the others presenters did and tune my own performance. I was expecting swish, professional salespeople to glide in and deliver polished shows that would make mine seem shambolic and amateurish.

That is not what happened. They were all professional enough but there was no performance, no spark, no charisma.

By my slot half the audience had been struck down with a nasty case of…

.

This is where it struck me how just how different Seed Software really was in 2009, there was nobody else like us there. I had some Powerpoint slides, just to get across some of the key information, but most of our sales presentations were live demonstrations of the kit. This, it transpired, was a breath of fresh air. I was able to engage with the audience, sleepy heads popped up and started asking questions. I ran out of business cards and had to start writing my details on the back of potential customers’ ones.

I was beginning to settle in to Seed, I was a lead developer, software architect, product manager, deputy business manager and occasional sales guy. The phrase “can do attitude” crops up in a lot of places and generally it means something it’s not supposed to but in 2009 / 2010 Seed Software embodied it in its true sense. It didn’t seem like there was anything that we couldn’t make work somehow.

2011 was not so kind to us. The business was growing too fast for The University to react and we were all having to put in way too much work just to keep our heads above water. To make matters worse the Seed Manager ran into a spot of bad luck – a couple of serious accidents ruled him out for extended periods of time. I found myself trying to develop the Command and Control, project manage delivery to the first control rooms and the subsequent go-lives and manage the business of Seed itself.

It was insane, one day I looked at my timesheet and I’d accumulated 28 extra days of time-off-in-lieu. I had to offload the management of the business to the department’s Enterprise Director, or I would have burnt out.

Despite the workload Seed was still a hugely positive, exciting place to work. What we’d achieved was pretty amazing too, two industry professionals and a bunch of students had successfully developed and delivered a mobilising system – the single most important computer system in a fire service – into two live control rooms.

The workload however was still out of control. Even with the Seed Manager back full time it was clear that we needed to make big changes. The Seed Manager position was actually a hybrid position, half developer, half manager. It was obvious that managing the business alone had now become a full time job. The role was therefore split into two, a senior developer and a dedicated business manager.

Preferring to retain a technical role, the Seed Manager left. I had also planned to leave – I knew that a chapter in the development of Seed Software was coming to a close. Seed was going to change, it was going to become more established, less dynamic. I also wanted to move back here, to Suffolk.

I did move, but I didn’t leave Seed. The University rather unexpectedly offered me a remote working contract. This threw up a whole myriad of new challenges. When I first became a remote worker I thought I’d be knocking out a steady stream of blog articles on what the problems were and how we were trying to solve them.

That’s a subject for another time however. As for the story, In October 2015 Seed was about 3 times the size it was in 2011, had a lot more products than it did an had begun to offer a support function. Brigid Command and Control is was well established as the primary mobilising system in the control rooms of 3 of the UK’s Fire and Rescue Services.

That just about brings my story at Seed to a close. But what about the future of Seed? The changes I predicted have certainly happened: I believe that Seed Software will become a highly successful business.

“WE MUST HAVE THIS FIXED ASAP!” yells the customer’s head of ICT. The application stopped working some time last week and your support department haven’t managed to fix it yet.

“OK, OK,” you say, knowing that you will come to regret these words, “I’ll VPN in first thing tomorrow and sort it out. Will you send me the connection details.”

“I’LL SEND THE CONNECTION DETAILS IMMEDIATELY I GET OFF THE PHONE AND YOU CAN CALL WHEN YOU WANT TO CONNECT”, replies their head of ICT, because heads of ICT ALWAYS SPEAK IN CAPITALS.

08:00 the next day, no email. Send an email to the customer’s head of ICT reminding them that you need the VPN details.
No response. OK, fair enough, a lot of people don’t get in ’til 9am.

09:30 still no response. Email a bunch of other guys at the customer’s site asking if anyone knows the VPN details and is actually authorized to give them to you. Get a response saying that only the head of ICT is and he’s in a meeting ’til 10:30.

Wait ’til 10:45, no response. Try to find a phone number for the customer’s head of ICT. Apparently he doesn’t have a phone. Email him again. 11:15 get a rather terse email containing the connection details and the username and password in plain text.

Try them, they don’t work. No phone number in provided in the email. Try to find a phone number of anyone in the organisation who might actually be able to help. Find an old mobile number that now belongs to a photocopier salesperson who can’t really talk because she’s on the motorway, but she could do you a really good deal on a pre-owned Canon IRC3380i if you call back later.

Google the customer to try to find a switchboard number. End up in a multilevel call menu system where the only human option is to speak to a “customer relationship manger” about your account. Try that on the offchance. He thinks you’re from their ICT department and has no idea what you’re talking about.

11:30 Remember that you may have stored some old details for the customer’s other site, log in to the password vault. Find some that are 4 years old. Try them anyway, are genuinely surprised when they work. Make a mental note to inform the customer that they seriously need to do a security review.

Connect to the server the head of ICT said was the right one. Credentials don’t work. Neither do the stored ones. Email the head of ICT and everyone else you can think of who might possibly know how to log on to the server. Get no response.

12:00 Remember somewhere in the back of your mind that you once configured SQL Server authentication for one of their systems and there’s just a chance that they re-used the username and password from a domain account.

Log into the secure store and search the archived configs. Find a likely candidate and try the connectionstring details.

12:15 Scratch the head of ICT’s name into the side of a giant security rocket and direct it at his arse when said credentials actually work.

Spend half an hour setting up the diagnostics. Scratch head as to why nothing’s happening.

13:00 deduce that it’s the wrong server. Email the head of ICT and go for lunch.

13:30 return to an email from the head of ICT who is now working from home and doesn’t have the details to hand but has emailed an unnamed member of his team asking them to send them on.

Log back in to the wrong server. Expand the network section and have a look at the machines listed there to see if any of them look likely. No, but it does spawn an idea. Look back at the connectionstring from earlier and note that the Data Source is a name that ends -SQL try connecting to the same name with -GW on the end.
No dice. Try various combinations.

13:47 Eventually try -SVR4 and it works. Try the credentials from the connectionstring, they don’t work. Try the original details the head of ICT sent in the email, they work, but Remote Desktop is not enabled for that user. Try VNC with the same credentials, just in case. Nope.

Email the one person who responded earlier, carefully include a request for a phone number.

14:15 Get a response that contains no phone number but which politely explains that although the person can’t make the change Jack will when he gets back from lunch at 14:30.

14:45 Try logging in again. Still not enabled. Take 6 guesses at what Jack’s email address might be and email them all.

14:53 Field a call from the Customer’s Operations Director who is extremely angry that the system is still not working and your bungling incompetence at not being able to sort out your own software. Explain that there are some technical problems with the VPN connection that you’re trying to resolve right now. Try to persuade him that half hourly updates are not going to help anything and in fact are only going to slow things down.

15:07 Get an email from Jack confirming that he’s enabled the user for Remote Desktop. Log in to the server. Go to the application directory under Program Files and check the version numbers. Not only are they wrong they’re actually a mixture of the past 3 releases. Take a backup and install the latest versions.

Try to start the service. No dice. Scratch head. Just double-check the service executable location. Find it’s actually in “C:\Temp\Barry’s Memory Stick\From Old Server”. Start to get rather concerned that the customer’s assurances that “No we haven’t changed anything” omitted one small detail – the fact that they installed the app on a totally different server.

Look in the event log at the error that’s actually being reported – it transpires that none of the well documented pre-requisites for installing your application have actually been installed. Attempt to download them only to find that the server can’t connect to the Internet.

Start downloading them locally instead and pushing them one-by-one to the remote server.

15:35 Field another call from the Customer’s Operations Director who is extremely angry that he hasn’t got the half-hourly update that you talked him out of and that the system still isn’t working. Explain to him that escalating this won’t help because you are the most senior person that could possibly work on this and it’s your number 1 priority, the only thing it will do is create more admin load for everyone including him. Pretend to try transferring the call to your own CTO’s phone, pretend she’s not answering.

15:55 Ring your own CTO to let her know the situation and to expect an angry call imminently.

16:03 Final prerequisite installed; the service now starts, but it can’t connect to the database. Check the connection string. Note that it’s trying to connect to your own testing server – this is clearly the default config that someone has carelessly copied over the site config. Look at the other copy of the software and find a comment in the config that say’s it’s from Barry’s test system. There appear to be no backups of any version of the config.
Search the entire filesystem for anything that might be a past version of a valid config whilst taking a few random guesses at what the SQL Server might be called.
Email Jack asking if he knows what the configuration should be or at least where the old server is.

16:19 Answer a call from your own CTO who would just like to confirm that you really are doing everything you can. She tells you not to worry about “that email”.

16:21 Receive email from your CTO to their Operations Director into which you’re Bcc’d assuring him that his problem is “our top priority” and that disciplinary proceedings have been started against the employee he spoke to earlier for his “bad attitude” and that the situation is now being dealt with by “someone more senior”.

16:27 Get a call from a random junior techie at the customer’s site who has no idea what you’re talking about but has been told to sort it out because the Operations Director is very angry and wants something done. Note the phone number he’s called from. He promises to find the information you need, ensure you get his name.

16:47 No emails or phone calls, so call the number back. The person answering the phone is not the person you spoke to earlier and doesn’t know who he is, but thinks he may be “that new guy from ICT who was here earlier”. Try to get anyone’s actual phone number out of the person you’re speaking to who says he’d gladly give them out if he actually knew any of them. He transfers you to the Helpdesk, however. The guy you spoke to isn’t in the office and it’s a Thursday so Jack has gone to pick his kids up, but Barry’s about if you wanted to talk to him.

16:52 Barry sheepishly explains that it is actually the same server but that it’s got an entirely new RAID array because nobody noticed when the first disk in the previous array died, but they noticed really rather a lot when the second one did and they were hoping that they could get it fixed before anyone – especially the head of ICT – noticed. They did find a backup, but after the last security scare the Operations Director hired an external security consultant to come in and do an audit and he said that this server should be firewalled from the main network and nobody realised that this would mean that the backups stopped working and nobody noticed that either. So the backup was from just after the OS was installed and they tried to work out how the app should be configured.

Barry is fairly sure which server the database is on, but he doesn’t know which actual database because they’re all looked after by Dave who’s the DBA and he’s on long term sick leave with a major case of stress.

16:57 Talk Barry through SQL Server Management studio and find a database that looks like a good candidate and has recent entries.

16:59 Log on to the remote server and enter the connection string into the config. Start the Services snap-in and try to click the start button. No reaction. A few seconds later Remote Desktop says the connection is lost and it’s trying to reconnect. Realise that it’s exactly 17:00 and vaguely remember something about “office hours only” in the support agreement. Check the VPN, it’s down and wont reconnect.

17:03 Email your CTO with a progress update, casually scan Jobserve.

17:10 attempt to shut down laptop to find 12 Windows Updates waiting.

17:13 ignore the incoming call from their Operations Director, leave the laptop where it is and go to the pub.

At The End of the Day

Fortunately this wasn’t a real day, rather it’s an amalgamation of things that have genuinely happened to me either trying to work on a remote site or in some cases when I’ve actually been there.

My favourite example of a customer having “not changed anything” is in here but it’s somewhat watered down from the reality. They’d had a security audit and much like the story had added a firewall between two parts of their network. They’d also deleted a bunch of users from the database where they didn’t know what those users were for.

What they’d done was to revoke the server’s access to its database and put in place a firewall that not only prevented the clients from accessing the server but stopped the server accessing the external web service that it needed.

Apparently they definitely hadn’t changed anything and the application suddenly stopped working so therefore it couldn’t have been their fault.

I’m calling Oracle out on this.

I spent the first 5 years of my career working with Oracle and I used to like them. Now though the only regular interaction I have with them is unticking the “would you like to install the Ask toolbar?” box every time there’s a Java update.

It does not give a good impression. Installing software isn’t something that’s particularly well understood by the man on the Clapham Omnibus. There is a certain fear that if you don’t do what you’re told then the software might not work properly. So most people just accept the defaults on the basis that this should work.
There is also the factor that software updates often ping onto your screen when you’re in the middle of something else. So you want to get it out of the way quickly. Again this tends to make people just click the defaults.

If you do that here you end up installing a piece of extra software that has nothing really to do with Java other than it being owned by Oracle. What’s more it’s something you almost certainly don’t want.

I have no problem with vendors advertising their other products in an install sequence and I don’t have any problem actually with them offering to install it.

There are two things that I do consider bad practice.

1. Failing to clearly distinguish that you would be installing something other than (or as well as) the product you initially intended.
2. Installing the software by default. The default should be not to.

Oracle isn’t particularly bad on the first one, one could say that the dialog looks like you’re accepting the licence agreement for Java but actually it’s reasonably clear. Oracle are a little marginal here for me. There are far, far worse offenders out there.

The second however is a straight red card. No way should an installer by default install something that the user didn’t ask for.

Please tidy your act up, Oracle.