the corner office

About a month ago SABC3 started showing Bollywood movies on Saturday evenings. Not being favourably inclined towards the wholesome bursting-forth-into-song movie genre, least of all subtitled bursting-forth-into-song, I wasn't particularly planning to watch any of 'em. Given that there's bugger-all else on, I've ended up half-following one or two while I'm busy with other things. This evening I watched Baghban (meaning Guardian), a story of an elderly couple separated and mistreated by their conniving kids. Thankfully the singing was kept to a minumum, and the story was pretty engrossing, if not outright depressing at first. Thought-provoking stuff about how we relate to our family and parents, and all we take for granted. Moi watching Hindi Bollywood movies? Sheesh.

Apart from lunch at the Mugg & Bean in Hillfox which has unimpressive food and even less impressive waiters, the only other highlight of the day was that I woke up rather early this morning and decided to get stuck into the Boxes Of Junk which have been following us around for years. Dust off, sort, throw out. Going through these things always gets me down, me being a particularly sentimental sort and heavily prone to nostalgia. In addition to sifting through and occasionally throwing out dusty old ornaments and stationery and rusty curtain hooks and detritus of life in the 20th century, I sorted through a box of old software CDs. Sample software from computer magazines from the mid-90s. Notes 4.5 :-) AS/400 documentation libraries... recovery software for an old Thinkpad.

I find myself torn. It's not like I'll ever use the vast majority of the software on these CDs, but I can't bring myself to throw them out, either. In some cases I hang on to them for sentimental reasons - what better way to remember my first exposure to Notes than looking at a 4.5 CD, reminding me of the first time I ever installed Domino, looked at the black DOS box and thought "great, I have a server running, now what?" An early beta version of R5 cut to CD for me by a colleague, reminding me what it was like to feel privileged to be working for THE Lotus? Going further back, what better way to remember my first PC, a 200MMX, after being a Mac nutter, than looking at an old CD with the demo games that came with my S3 Virge video card?

In other cases, I know I'm hanging on to these CDs simply because I have a tough time coming to terms with the fact that so much of what we do seems commoditised and to be blunt, inconsequential. I can't help but experience a twinge seeing an old Lotus Passport software pack. I mean, which programmers worked on "cc:Mail Maintenance Release #1 for R8.3 ASP Components" and were they proud to think that the software they'd written was out there on a shiny Lotus-branded CD, even if they knew that cc:Mail was all but dead as a mail platform? How many people really bothered to haul that CD out of its jacket and use it?

It would be nice to think that the programs we toil away at are like real-world constructions - bridges and buildings and edifices that might stand for decades and even centuries, admired for their craftsmanship and beauty. That's the dream, but it's not really like that, is it? In some ways, our work ends up on CDs and backed up on tapes, hidden away in the back of a cupboard, in boxes, like a clump of old curtain hooks, gathering dust until a spring-clean sees them dropped into the dustbin.

What a cheerful thought.

Of course, the millions of curtian hooks that end up rusting away in rubbish dumps doesn't mean that the poor dude or dudette who designed 'em failed somehow: I have no doubt that your average mass-produced curtain hook is a resounding commercial success and we'd all be far worse off without them quietly doing their jobs in windows across the planet. I suppose it boils down to how you perceive and try to measure the value of the work you're doing. Just because it's probable that nobody on this planet is still using the Lotus Notes 4.5.6 client for AIX 4.1.5 doesn't mean that at least some people's lives weren't improved, for it having been written and cut to CD.

It just means that our sense of achievement as programmers comes from the utility of the software we write and the things we ultimately allow people to do, not from having some physical object that we can point to and say "Look. Touch. Admire."

All the same, I think I'll keep those CDs for a little while longer.