Chaos and entropy
A little annotation on my phlog might help me in clearing my mind.
My life became complicated. Having a small kid is not a walk in
the park. Moreover, I've got a fairly new job that is throwing me
into a different world. Put it together with my general lack of
sleep and energy, and it will be easy to understand why I'm currently
confused. Or at least this is how I justify it to myself.
I spent several months working on what was my "first assignment":
a task that was assumed to be an introduction to the company products,
but that ended up being - indeed - several months long. Nobody in
the company ever blamed me for this. They in fact told me not to
worry about how long it took, since the task was not as simple as
they initially thought.
I managed to go through the whole of it, despite the almost complete
lack of information, despite the chaotic ways of working that I
found. Not that it has been different in any other company where
I worked so far, to be fair.
Now that I'm basically done with the first assignment, I find myself
into a new "first assignment". How is so? Because what I worked
on so far was bound to the legacy product, while there's now a new
milk-cow. The new project happens to be a completely different
beast, of course, so all I've learned is not relevant.
From the company perspective, this is not a big problem. They
needed a certain feature on the legacy system, and that's what
they've got. Now they need more people on the new thing, and it
is similar of hiring a new employee who knows nothing. From my
perspective, it feels like being at square one again. With this I
don't intend to blame anyone! I'm just saying that I don't feel
very productive, in the same way as TCP connections don't operate
to their full throughput in the early stages of the communication.
Sorry, it is the only analogy I could come up with.
All right, let's start over.
I've been put in a project where the hardware platform is not
available quite yet. Everyone is experimenting on what they *think*
the hardware platform would be, or at least this is the general
picture I've got in my head.
Yes, everyone builds pictures in their heads.
There are many teams, each working on a separate area of what will
be the final product. The common starting point seems to be the
Yocto Project (open source). For some reason, of the three teams
two are working on the same git repository, while the third is
working on a different repository, which however contains the same
base system, that is Yocto.
Yocto, in turn is a weird beast.
My own experience is restricted to the Buildroot project, which is
somewhat similar in purpose, but *way simpler*. I've been playing
with Buildroot, some time ago, since I wanted a minimal operating
system to be running on my Raspberry PI. What I aimed at was a
little platform I could reach from anywhere on the Internet, a
little walled garden of minimality and silence. Eventually I
discarded the Buildroot idea, and went for a FreeBSD installation.
In the evaluating process, however, I experimented with it, and it
I found it neat.
Yocto, on the other hand, seems to me a gigantic monster of complexity,
the way that only a bunch of Python developers could end up with.
The documentation, for one thing, starts by throwing you in a sea
of domain-specific terms, completely lacking of a fucking *starting
point*. There's a ton of abstraction, an ad-hoc build system that
seems to come from the depths of hell... I find it completely
overwhelming.
I ironically recommend the following read, to get a grasp on how
brain-damaged the simple task of configuration can become.
https://docs.yoctoproject.org/bitbake/bitbake-user-manual/bitbake-user-manual-metadata.html
For some reason, I'm inclined to think that the blamed should be
on the (ab)use of Pyhton.
Being overwhelmed, I decided to ask a colleague. I had difficulties
in explaining myself. I don't even know what to ask. Perhaps I'd
like to start small, with the equivalent of 'Hello World'. My
colleague, on the other hand, seemed genuinely more confused than
me, and had no shame in admitting that he doesn't know shit.
It took me some effort not to lose my temper when I've been told
that "I don't need to know how it works to operate it". I'm having
a bit of a tough time.
