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As a modern-day tool-smith, my colleagues and I build the software machines or tools of the modern economy. We developing a applications using tools from Oracle, United Codes, and others.
Who is the audience for “The Soul of an Internet Machine”? Let’s start with the curious; curious about technology; curious about history; curious about business processes and entrepreneurship; curious about invention and product development; curious about science. Is that you? Developing software is a human endeavor. Two people talk. Two people share an idea. They build a vision together. They then build towards that vision together. Building is sexy. Building is fun. YouTube is filled with makers making stuff, just like this podcast.
"The Soul of an Internet Machine". This show explores the intersection of business and technology and the internet.
1 | SERIES 2023
My name is Christina Moore. I introduced myself earlier as a modern-day tool-smith. I build the tools of the modern economy. I love what I do while recognizing it as likely boring (to some maybe). My skills tend towards financial, regulatory, and document management. So many drawn to technology and software find robotics, games, artificial intelligence sexy and cool. And they are. I create digital infrastructure the sort of stuff that permits banks to bank, governments to track money, people to manage documents and follow rules or laws. Geeks like me create invoices and track payments. While making a little robotic hands wiggle, or Mario running his maze certainly look fun. Invoices… these keep the lights on, the rent paid, food on the table. Without an invoice, nothing on commerce works.
Yeah, yeah, I live in a small rural town where we farm. We trade labor. We trade favors. We trade farm produce and sausages. We have a small barter economy going on here as there is all over the globe. But you can’t pay taxes or buy a new car with fresh eggs. Imagine that… showing up to the bank monthly with enough eggs to pay the car loan or the mortgage?
We don’t live in that world anymore. Instead, we create invoices that get sent off electronically then paid by someone electronically that lands in a bank account electronically. Paychecks get created and paid electronically. The mortgage and car payment goes from the bank electronically to those vendors. This entire economy takes place on and around the internet.
The process of making this economy work requires machines. And yes, I include software as a machine. It takes energy, does a thing, has an output, and can do it again.
When I introduced this podcast, The Soul of an Internet Machine, my team and I were developing a commercial product using tools from Oracle. The Internet Machine, also known as software, is beautiful, fully functional, and a complete flop. We are a group of software developers who excel at developing software. Our team failed at marketing the product. I offer no apologies nor excuses. The word failure does not bother me too much. Failures precede success. Sometimes follow success. Failure and success dance on two side of one line. We know the difference between failure and success after the fact, but rarely can we differentiate success from failure in the minute. We tried to launch a novel product into a market space filled with massive noise and distractions. Yes, we opted to launch just as the global pandemic hit. It appeared that all conversations focused on COVID. What was left over, at least here in the United States, got hoovered up into the chaos about our political situation.
Series 1 of this podcast fizzled as I came to grips with the failure.
Welcome to Series 2023. I ought to say Welkom allen and Bienvenue à tous. Instead of following the efforts of a small software development team creating commercial software that we sell retail, Series 2023 follows the same team creating custom software for a client in Belgium.
The audience for this podcast includes business folks who must manage data, manage software, or manage software development. Additionally, the audience includes technical folk interested in Oracle database application development. I will blend story-based narrative with some technology and real-world business examples.
We learned of the project during the fall of 2021 as negotiations became an open secret within our team. I designated 06 DEC 2021 as the official start of the project. Reviewing my email one year later, I see that through the middle part of December of 2021, we were transitioning from one European-based client to this new client in Belgium. On 22 December 2021, I have an email with the subject line: een paar issues meaning “a few issues”.
We spent most of that month finding our footing. We set up the tools needed to share code via GitHub. We established our management process with tickets and workflows. In our first European/Belgium project, we were late to the team. We came in with specific expertise. We communicated only with the existing development team who were located in Slovenia and Belgium. We never met the client. Lovely project. We came in as the “pros from Dover”.
That’s a line from the book and movie M*A*S*H. With golf clubs over his shoulder, Hawkeye walks into a hospital saying: “Just tell ‘em, The pros from Dover are here.” We are pretty darn good at managing documents. In February of 2017, I wrote an application programming interface, or digital connector, to Amazon Web Services S3 document storage system. AWS updated their security so the existing versions provided little help. The code is available on my GitHub site. I provide it for the Oracle community free-of-charge. The implementation requires skill. We used this technology to manage over 400,000 documents for the Government of Puerto Rico following the twin hurricanes of 2017. Impressively, we pushed and pulled nearly 2 terabytes of data via Oracle’s programming language PL/SQL.
The Pros from Dover, meaning Stephanie (“Stevie”) and me, we jumped right in for this first Belgium client. We implemented a document management system that pushed-and-pulled documents to both Oracle’s cloud storage system and Amazon’s S3 storage system. We did other cool things. Most of our assignment had us pulling or pushing data to external systems.
We were thrilled to start a new project for a new client in December of 2021. We heard that this is a greenfield environment. We would be starting from scratch. Oh, my favorite! I find myself happier with a blank sheet of paper, a green field, then conceiving, designing, writing, testing from zero. I recognize I am an architect. I am less happy picking up someone else’s tangled mess. There are those who love repairing and fiddling at systems like that.
In the early days of my career and with early software development projects I did have to do that – fiddling and repairing other people’s work. For one financial/enterprise management system, we were limited to two-character variable names. And two-characters mean two letters. Two letters from the English alphabet, that means that in any environment you had a maximum of about 650 variable names. They looked like AA and AB and AC and AD or BC. Total junk.
Writing code is writing.
Writing code is elegant.
Writing code is story telling.
Beautifully written code is beautiful.
Well written code follows a streamline, logical, precise process called thinking.
My father, a novelist, once said: “Writing well requires thinking well”. My corollary to that statement is that: “Good code requires good thinking”. No one can write good code without clarity.
I derive the same satisfaction from writing code as I do from writing stories. That thought; that vision; that story; that process in my brain needs to be communicated to another. That thought needs to be understood by another. That thought, when communicated, must be logical. My friend and colleague in Belgium seduced me by stating that this project is ours. We will start from scratch, from a white piece of blank paper, from an empty database, from a green field that has never been turned. The statement proved to be a little wrong. Who cares, he proved himself to be mostly correct. Yay!
I design, build, host, and support software. Software is the most ubiquitous tool of our economy and likely the least visible. You may be listening to my podcast on a computer weighing 200 grams – your mobile phone. You may be in a car. In the recent six decades, tool smiths like me have put software into the tiniest of items. We have move software from floppy disks to phone then into the Internet.
Who is the audience for “The Soul of an Internet Machine”? Let’s start with the curious; curious about technology; curious about history; curious about business processes and entrepreneurship; curious about invention and product development; curious about science. Is that you? I will not take deep dives into code and coding. That’s a visual art. Developing software is a human endeavor. Two people talk. Two people share an idea. They build a vision together. They then build towards that vision together. Building is sexy. Building is fun. YouTube is filled with makers making stuff: often they say nothings; sometimes you only ever see hands. And millions watch these videos.
Before starting Series 2023 of this podcast, I reviewed some of my statistics. This podcast has been listened to by people from at least 25 countries. Since the release of the first series, I spoke at a global Oracle conference on this topic and was awarded my Oracle ACE. Speaking a global Oracle conference would have been super cool, except the conference fell mid-pandemic. Instead of standing at a podium, I sat in this same chair in this same office looking at this same wall I am looking at today. Others were there. I only saw my ring vanity light and the blue LED from the camera.
06 December 2021 serves as the start of the project because on that day we established our first connection to new and clean database schema for this client. That is the day, we generated the SSH keys that encrypts data between our our desktops and the Oracle database. We established the Github repository on 21 December of 2021. On 27 December, there is an email titled: ‘data voor lookups’. You’ll get the sense that our team uses a funny blend of Dutch and English. Most of the folks at our client prefer speaking in Dutch. We have one gentleman there whose preferred language is French. Mais oui, Francais aussi. When Stevie and worked and lived in Puerto Rico Spanglish remained a common tongue, a delightfully and inconsistent blending of American English and Puerto Rican Spanish. As a result, I coined the term: Dutchlish to represent the funny blending of Dutch and English used in email, documents, and conversations. Regrettably, my pronunciation seems entirely German: Het spijt me / Je suis désolé.
We are a couple of North American programmers based on the East Coast. I am in New England. Stevie is in Virginia. Eli, whom you’ll meet later in the series, lives now in Washington State. Our client and project manager live in Belgium. As I said, we generate invoices electronically send them digitally across the Atlantic Ocean. We get paid electronically with funds deposited to our bank in the United States which then covers payroll and other normal expenses. Yes, we wrote our own time tracking software, which is available commercially (it is called Tempest-Time). The invoices we generate in PDF use a tool from United Codes called APEX Office Print or AOP. The invoices from AOP are gorgeous! We have seen clients print invoices from our software that stand as tall as 200 millimeters or 8 inches. We wrote that product nearly a decade ago. While focused on government consulting, it has been used by lawyers, engineers, and software developers. When a firm uses its own software that it developed for commercial sale, we call that “eating your own dog food”.
We got hired for this job precisely because we are experts in back-office functions such as invoicing, regulatory affairs, document management and all of the boring things that keeps our global economy rolling along.
Let me introduce you to our client now. Our client is a Belgium firm called Electrotest. This company inspects industrial and residential properties focusing on regulatory compliance and health/safety concerns. These are the guys who inspect lifts/elevators and cranes and smoke detection systems and fuel/petrol stations. If there exists a nexus between safety, health, and human occupation, then Electrotest is likely to inspect it. In some cases, the inspections fall within governmental guidelines. In some cases, the inspections are required by the domestic gas companies of Belgium. In some cases, they provide the home or electrical inspections related to new construction or home sales.
For listeners in the United States, this process does relate. Nearly all of us have stood in a hotel lift/elevator reading the safety certificate. In the U.S., this certificate tends to be issued by a municipal or local government official. Following new construction or remodeling of a home or office, a local government official tends to inspect and certify plumbing, electrical systems, fire prevent/fire detection systems. In the U.S. these processes are fragmented by municipal, state, and federal regulations. The Kingdom of Belgium has a population of more than 11.5 million people. The New York City metropolitan area has 20 million residents. New York City metropolitan area is about half the size of Belgium at 12000 square kilometers. Belgium is about 30000 square kilometers. The central government of Belgium seems both a bit more centralized than the US, but also complicated by having multiple cultural and language borders which sometimes have their own regulatory scope. For example, rules in Flanders may differ from Wallonia.
Seriously, who wants simple?
Writing software for Electrotest to perform and report on their inspections is a bit simpler because of the stronger and centralized nature of these health and safety regulations. In my rural Vermont town where we trade eggs for homemade bacon and hang hams in the basement, I do my own electrical work. I’ve redone most of the plumbing in this house. We don’t do inspections here. There are no inspectors. It simply isn’t a thing. But a few kilometers over the line into Massachusetts, the process follows different rules because it is a different state. And we have fifty-four or fifty-five states (or state-like entities). I know, our flag only has 50 stars. There are 4 million American citizen in Puerto Rico who have no rights to vote in our national election, get no representation in our Congress, have no star on our flag, etc. We exceed others with our inconsistencies and shenanigans.
From their offices near Brussels, Electrotest is able to provide inspection services to individuals (particularen) and corporations throughout Belgium.
What does Electrotest need?
Bluntly, they need everything we can offer. Their staff appear excellent at their duties. Before we met them, they generated nearly 50,000 invoices per year by hand using Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets. I will say this often during the 2023 series of “The Soul of an Internet Machine”, Excel is the world’s worst database. In fact, it is not a database. Oh, go argue with me. Blah, blah, you can query from column and select stuff, blah, blah. Go ahead, I’ll ignore you. Databases are relational and robust. Database use internal rules to maintain data integrity. Databases manage large, robust, complex data with grace and ease (if you have developers like us who make it graceful and easy). I shall not dive deeper in to their manual and internal system. They made the decision to modernize. We praise that decision. To their credit, they have tried numerous systems both commercial and custom over the years to make some improvements.
Can we automate systems for invoicing and save them money? How do we do that? Is money leaking out of their manual processes? Are they or were they losing money due to process management?
Can we automate processes for pricing?
Can we automate the processes needed for taking a service order?
Can we automate and standardize the process of generating inspection reports?
The first time I saw the CEO of Electrotest get quoted in the press for her endeavors she did not focus on the financial gains. Instead, she revealed several specific climate goals for the software. I never once thought that back-office automation of a national company could or would have a positive impact on climate policies. She made the connection.
In an early release, Stevie demonstrated some of our preliminary tools for planning inspections for inspectors. Through our digital connections, APIs, to mapping services at Google and Oracle, we can estimate both the travel time and the travel distance between two appointments. Therefore, this software can and will aid Electrotest in optimizing inspector’s travel. Yes, in days of escalating fuel and electricity costs, reducing the kilometers driven each day has a positive impact on our planet. It also saves the company money. A kilometer not driven is a bit of carbon not launched into our atmosphere. Yay for the home team.
In case you are curious, this process of route planning is generically called the “travelling salesman problem” – yes it was named before women were invented or something. We’re not the geeks who write the code that does that type of analysis. We are the kind of geeks that can bring that tech into an everyday situation.
Another challenge we face, falls on the French and Dutch fracture lines in Belgium. In short, the Company must offer materials such as inspection reports and invoices in the language preferred by the customer. Here in the United States, we don’t even try to pay attention to this. Read any street sign. We don’t even use international icons on our street signs. Read it in English or die or get a ticket or whatever.
Stevie and I are native English speakers. My language background is a total mess. I am a left- handed dyslexic who learned at the knee of a classically educated author. My father, although entirely American, used the British spelling for nearly everything. We stuck extra “u” into words such as color and honor. My father’s father was also a writer. He was a nationally syndicated news columnist on the NBC Red Network during World War II (that was on something called “the radio” which preceded television which preceded the internet and streaming and podcasting. My grandfather hosted a nationwide podcast that broadcast from coast-to-coast telling people the news during World War II). Then I got to school and learnt I spelt stuff all wrong and even said stuff wrong. Learnt isn’t a word in American, it is learned. I worked through that for a few years, then I got tossed into French class at a young age. I had to toss the “u” back into color, honor, and such. So close but wrong. In seven years of studying French at school, I never made it past third-year French. I would pass French 1 with a minimal mark, then fail to matriculate to French 2. I had to do French 1 over again. You are asking a left-handed dyslexic who can’t spell in her native language to spell it correctly in another language. Seven years of trying. Spanish was common in the streets of Boston where I grew up. I took several Spanish courses at university. My mother and aunt were fluent in Spanish during my youth. It was nothing to be yelled at in Spanish: ¡Cierra le porte! or just ¡Le porte!
I still try and I still can’t spell well in any language.
Stevie took Spanish and her mother’s spoke Tagalog from the Philippines.
Now the two us read documents in Dutch and generate cool reports, invoices, and such in both French and Dutch. Our applications, written with Oracle APEX, operate in English, Dutch, and/or French depending on the user’s preference. We store the data in three languages. Furthermore, we use a digital connector (API) to DeepL to perform automatic translations behind the scenes.
Our team has grown since we started in December of 2021. Our internet machine, our software, exceeded several expectations, but not without hard work, small setbacks, frustrations, and immense joy. I love this project. I see how our work positively impacts the hundreds of people at Electrotest. I see that our work increases the value of this company and enhances their competitive position. I feel like a member of a winning team. That’s everything to me.
I’ll digress before closing. I spent a year in Iraq as a civilian member of the United States Army during 2005 and 2006. I served as a technical specialist within a military unit. My boss was a major. Together, we supervised the activities of a platoon of soldiers. Their mission was to improve the digital communications platforms in central Iraq, although we travelled to Northern Iraq too. When we arrived with fiber optic or microwave systems, soldiers could call home and talk with family. Yes, all the secret military data moved better too. I walked about 10 kilometers most days in that blistering heat. We called ourselves “The ATT of Iraq”, and yes, we did interface with the local telephone company too. A long the way, we stood up antenna masts and poles. Often in the soft concrete, I would write my name or my initials or my call sign (the soldiers called me “Charlie Mike”). I can still find several of these poles and masts on Google Earth. I cannot zoom in well enough to see my little signature though. I admit the war was ill conceived, resulted in a disaster, and I happen to be there when a civil war broke out between two factions within the country. Basically, that all sucked. I envisioned that twenty years later, I could return to Iraq to see what remained of my work, of our work.
That sense of seeing and touch your own efforts years later brings pride. Imagine being part of the team that built the Brooklyn Bridge or having an ancestor that built it. That’s pride. You look and say: “I built that!” Frankly, we are always part of a team. The pride we feel is personal. I look down from Google Earth and feel pride that once I did that. That’s mine. I was a part of that, that 1 pole, that 1 fiber optic line, that 1 microwave shot.
That’s everything to me. I love that sense of pride from building something good, yes even in a horrible combat environment. The pride remains. I did that. We did that. I was a part of that.
Our work contains a bit of our soul, our personality, our sweat, our tears (yes, occasional tears no matter how many times I insist: “There are no tears in software development”). That is our investment. The reflection of our work whether it is the Brooklyn Bridge, a tall mast tower in Iraq, or software is the reflection of our own effort. We put the soul into our machines. In the early 1980s, Tracey Kidder wrote a book called “The Soul of a New Machine” where he explored the process of building a new computer and told us stories of the people. He gave us a story about people while they built a thing. I challenge you to look at the modern tools around you, the software you use, and think to yourself: A team of human beings made this. That might lend to why? What decisions did they make? For example, Microsoft Word which has been around for decades is not a soulless tool. Before it became a monopoly, there were other products. I learned to word process with Word Star. The people who build that software understood the touch typist. One could navigate up, down, left, and right with a few keystrokes from the left hand. You never had to move your hands for their intended spot on the American-style QWERTY keyboard. People would argue and disagree about which word processor is the best. We don’t have that choice anymore if we seek compatibility with other organizations globally. Microsoft Word, a ubiquitous office product is filled with bias and decisions, right down to how the menus are presented. For example, spelling and grammar. If your profile says you speak and write American English, then you will be reminded (or chastised) for straying off the course. Don’t spell a word in British or Canadian English. Toss out the “u” from color and honor. For shame. And bicycle has only 1 “Y” in it, which was not how we spelt the word in my youth. The IBM Selectric typewriter did not attempt to be so helpful. Microsoft Word will announce that your word choices may offend if you step onto George Carlin’s list of seven Anglo-saxon phrases, except of course the list grew. Word chastises for writing what it considers jargon. Once upon a time, the developer left us a few Easter-eggs in the software. I remember teaching people that if they typed a long series of the letter “z”/zed, it replaces it with the word sleep. That’s a human mind at word. In fact, I may argue that Microsoft Word has done more to unify American English than all of the primary school teachers put together. We’ve lost our regional differences. Similarly, Microsoft Word artificially builds and reinforces barriers between the variants of English. We’ve all observed that English has become a global language, the lingua franca of the 21st Century. With global platforms of blogging, social media, and YouTube, I am observing a leveling of global variances between the versions of English. The language appears to be converging a bit. Here’s old Word reinforcing the differences. There is no good or bad, just a decision made by a series of software developers who happen to be human beings. That’s what we are. We make stuff up.
That’s what this series is about. How is it that a few human beings make stuff up, make things happen, and build a machine together.
What comes next for this series?
I’ll start at the beginning and explore the beginning from the perspective of a newbie to a team and a project. I’ll also bring in other points of view from other teammates. My personality will show through including some sour or frustrated opinions of some of the work I had to do. Yuck. And the great things we accomplished. You’ll get to know our team: Stevie, Eli, Dimitri, Bram, Dirk, and others as they join.
See you next time. Be well, do good and have fun.