I read about Gastown. For the past month I’ve been obsessed by attempting to run into all of the same issues on my own that led Steve Yegge to come up with such an insane idea for building an Agent-based engineering team. Haven’t got remotely close to that, but I did start to think that, for me, after I had spent a couple of weeks of running across the wilderness without a compass (building Cheyss), that I’d started to sense Gastown coming up over the horizon. I could smell the guzzolene.
But then…the town is an interesting analogy, but I instinctively prefer a sailing ship in the age of sail (because the ship contained all the manpower, skills and tools to sail, fight, and build the ship, and they were harsh places atop a harsher sea, where the captain was God.)
So were does the admiral come into it?
We are the admirals. Naval tradition dictates that an admiral, standing on the bridge of a ship, doesn’t give orders. An admiral commands a fleet, but giving orders to a ship is a very different thing to giving orders on a ship. My touchstone here is navies during the transition from the age of sail to the age of steam, where you would get admirals who had been kicking around desk jobs for a few years now being reposted to a command, but they had last served on a ship that looked like this:
HMS Victoria at Valetta, Malta
…and now they’re commanding a flotilla of ships more like this:
HMS Warspite at Valetta, Malta
There were even stories told about admirals of that era that they’d give mad commands to furl the topsails on ships without masts.
Well, that’s obviously where software development is today. OK, so apparently I needed 6 paragraphs to say ‘we’ve moved up the org chart’. So be it.
I’ve now got this running joke with my 11 year old daughter who laughed out loud when she first heard me say it. We do lots of role playing games (nowadays largely for the benefit of her younger brother) and on the spot one evening she ask me to come up with a character for Old Admiral Flesh-for-Brains. I was really caught hopping, but after a few seconds of panic I affected an ancient voice, winked at her like I remember elderly relatives winking at me when I was young, tapped my finger across my nose, and I said with great authority and enthusiasm ‘Don’t worry about me. Old Admiral Flesh-for-Brains has a few tricks up his sleeve yet! Stick by me, I’ll teach you everything I know.’
She didn’t miss a beat. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
We laughed. But there was nothing behind the bluster, nothing except the promise of competence based on a lifetime of training for a world that’s vanished in a blink. So I’ll do the only thing I can.
At least if I’m only the Admiral, I can’t give any dangerous orders, can I. But what if I can?
Brace the yards and prepare to beat to windward. Don’t be so leisurely Mr Claude, we’ve got a singularity to catch!