That Voodoo that I do
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006
I was at DemoCamp 8 last night and as usual stayed later for the social networking. I got into a discussion with Pete Forde and others about who does what.
I have real trouble explaining to people what it is that I do. I often try to explain the nuance between being a scripter (which I am in spades) and a programmer (which I am not exactly) and the distinction falls short of conveying the gestalt that is the technical side of me.
I spend a lot of my time making a whole mess of things work together that were never meant to be integrated. It often takes a wide and deep range of knowledge to figure out the bits. I have variously called myself a technical spot-welder, a duct-taper, a spelunker, and a special-ops data diver, trained to get in under the wire and get out with the data.
Here’s an example – at one of my clients, something we do is give realtime tests against devices in the field. A diagnostic page could tell you, for instance, the contents of the ARP resolution table on a remote router. There is a bunch of magic that goes on behind the scenes to do this (simplified here):
-
the user presses the “get ARP table” button
- the external portal web server (ASP.NET/Win2k3/MSSQL) makes a SOAP call to get the information
- the soap call is received at an internal webservices server (Apache/PHP/BSD)
- connection information is resolved against a PostgreSQL database
- a shell script is invoked on the webservices server
- the shell script uses ssh to connect over a secure tunnel to an API server at the customer premises that can route to the destination
- a script is run on the API server (bourne shell, perl, telnet, curl, grep, sed, awk, lynx etc)
- the script connects to the router, logs in, displays and parses information, logs out
- info gets routed back to webservices server via the ssh connection
- php assembles SOAP response
- ASP.NET receves SOAP, builds result page
- Result received by user
I make all that stuff happen.
Now how do I distill that into an elevator pitch?
I was at DemoCamp 8 last night and as usual stayed later for the social networking. I got into a discussion with Pete Forde and others about who does what.
I have real trouble explaining to people what it is that I do. I often try to explain the nuance between being a scripter (which I am in spades) and a programmer (which I am not exactly) and the distinction falls short of conveying the gestalt that is the technical side of me.
I spend a lot of my time making a whole mess of things work together that were never meant to be integrated. It often takes a wide and deep range of knowledge to figure out the bits. I have variously called myself a technical spot-welder, a duct-taper, a spelunker, and a special-ops data diver, trained to get in under the wire and get out with the data.
Here’s an example – at one of my clients, something we do is give realtime tests against devices in the field. A diagnostic page could tell you, for instance, the contents of the ARP resolution table on a remote router. There is a bunch of magic that goes on behind the scenes to do this (simplified here):
-
the user presses the “get ARP table” button
- the external portal web server (ASP.NET/Win2k3/MSSQL) makes a SOAP call to get the information
- the soap call is received at an internal webservices server (Apache/PHP/BSD)
- connection information is resolved against a PostgreSQL database
- a shell script is invoked on the webservices server
- the shell script uses ssh to connect over a secure tunnel to an API server at the customer premises that can route to the destination
- a script is run on the API server (bourne shell, perl, telnet, curl, grep, sed, awk, lynx etc)
- the script connects to the router, logs in, displays and parses information, logs out
- info gets routed back to webservices server via the ssh connection
- php assembles SOAP response
- ASP.NET receves SOAP, builds result page
- the external portal web server (ASP.NET/Win2k3/MSSQL) makes a SOAP call to get the information
- Result received by user
I make all that stuff happen.
Now how do I distill that into an elevator pitch?
