blackbox revisited

[caption id="attachment_767" align="alignright" width="275" caption="Oh shit they\'ve miniaturized HAL "][/caption]

The other day I wrote about the concept of the blackbox. I focused specifically on the idea of a blackbox as us programmers think about it. I've been thinking about it more and more though and realized that there are blackboxes all around us. There are processes that our often complicated, confusing, manual messes that our non-programming friends and family have to suffer through. If they knew a little bit of ruby or maybe some batch programming they would be able to save mountains of time and effort, but they don't, so that's where programmers can shine. The problem is that to help our friends and family we have to shine some light into their blackbox tasks and figure out what they do, that's not the easiest task for a programmer to take on.

Recently at work they announced a change to the timecard system that we use, all timecards MUST be submitted by 10:00am Monday morning. The old system was, they should be in sometime on Monday and if not then our very nice receptionist will send out a sternly worded email shaming you into submitting you timecard. Being curious (and being that the explanation was just a few more lines down in the email) I wondered what change had occurred to the system to require this 10:00am deadline. Ends up that our receptionist used to enter this data by hand from the system we enter it in into the accounting software. This was a tedious and error-prone task, once someone bothered to look at it they realized that with a little bit of code they could automate this all and get these programs chatting back and forth like old bridge partners. A couple hours of programmer effort later and now our receptionist is able to answer calls and do all the other receptionisty things that she is great at instead of spending time copying numbers from one program to another.

The blackbox, timecards turning into accounting information, was illuminated and the process was horrible, a little bit of code applied and BAM new productivity abounds. It gets me to wondering, how many other blackboxes are all around me, waiting for someone to shine some light in, see the inefficiencies, and offer up some soothing code. I've given myself a new little game to play when talking to my friends and loved ones, when they start complaining about something that they have to do in their day to day, instead of just offering a sympathetic, "Sucks to be you loser" I start digging deeper. "These reticulated splines are giving you a lot of trouble, how exactly do you make them?" Normally they will reply with a bit of hesitation, maybe even a polite, "Oh, its boring, you don't need to know about that." But if you keep on gently nudging, you can find out enough of the process to help.

It doesn't always have to be by providing code, sometimes just the general nerdy computer knowledge that we have can be incredibly beneficial. It's easy to forget that not everyone knows the little tricks to make the computer easier and more fun to use. I was able to save my mother hours a day by explaining to her that despite what her boss told her, she does not have to shut down Photoshop between opening every file. Until then she had been instructed and believed that she had to wait a good minute for Photoshop to boot up in between every file, opening hundreds of files a day, you do the math. By asking my girlfriend some questions about something she does at work I was able to throw together an Excel spreadsheet to save her a ton of time. The magic of VLOOKUP and some well placed formulas was all that was needed to take a boring repetitive task and make it much simpler and less error-prone.

For those in the computer-know it's easy to look at the computer as a simple tool, something to be mastered and leveraged to make our lives easier. For many people though, computers are blackboxes, confusing little machines that spit out weird error messages and are constantly fighting them to get things done. And there is the other edge of this sword, by shining light into a process blackbox and making life easier you do the double duty of helping illuminate the blackbox for a computer novice. You help show by example that the computer is not mean or frustrating (well sometimes they are frustrating) but just a tool that with careful skill, some essential knowledge, and most importantly a lack of fear, you can make bend to your will.

Go find the blackboxes around you, help someone save 15-20 minutes a day, show someone that computers are not just useful in general but can be made personally useful. You will be a technology hero to them, you will find an interesting puzzle to play with for yourself, and at the end of the day everyone will be better off. Find the blackboxes and start pouring in light, you will be pleasantly surprised at what you find.

blackbox

[caption id="attachment_751" align="alignright" width="241" caption="Something happens in there... with gnomes I think."][/caption]

The Blackbox, cornerstone of computer science, thing of mystery and beauty. It is the fundamental concept that allows us to build bigger and better abstractions, making life easier for everyone. A blackbox is something that has well defined inputs and outputs but the manner in which it functions in unknown. The classic example of this is a library function, sqrt(9) takes the number 9 and returns the square root 3. There is a well defined input (in this case 9) and a well defined output (the square root, 3). How does the function produce this result, who cares?

As programmers we can focus on what we are good at, if someone loves programming math algorithms they can make a kickass math library, if they love web programming, here comes Rails. Then when I'm interested in writing a web app that needs to do some math, I don't have to worry about how to find the square root of some number, there is a handy blackbox all ready to go. This is a huge boon to productivity, I'm happy, math programmer man is happy, and the user is happy because they don't have to use my buggy homegrown math libs that say they owe a $47 tip on a $9 check. (And my math degree weeps at me)

This is all well and good, the problem comes when you need to know what's going on in a blackbox. There are any number of scenarios in which you may need to shine light into the depths of a blackbox. You have some strict performance or memory requirements, the blackbox's "well-defined" outputs are failing (what do you do when you call out to sqrt(9) and get 7.2 back) or the use of a blackbox is having some negative side-effect. In these situations the whole damn thing comes crumbling back down to earth, you now need to roll up your sleeves and get it done. Here is how you should approach the problem.

• RTFM (Read the Fucking Manual) - This is the first step, if a blackbox is eating up too much memory see if there is a way to force a limit, if it is throwing an exception, check why that could be the case. Basically before you do anything else you should try to make sure that the blackbox is actually broken, because chances are that any sufficiently popular blackbox is going to have much more real-world use and rigorous testing than your new client code. This boils down to, don't blame the compiler for your shitty code.


• Ask someone familiar with the blackbox - After you've actually RTFM you can move on to this stage, seek help from someone more familiar. If there are colleagues that have used this particular blackbox ask them first, they may have already gone through this entire list and can shortcut you to the answer. If you have no colleagues to turn to, try turning to the community or the creator, if that fails try throwing it up on a more generic community like, stack overflow.


• Go to the source - If you are working with an open source blackbox then it isn't really a blackbox, just go read the code and see what it's doing. This is much easier said than done, so make sure you have exhausted the first two steps before diving into this one. If you are using a closed source blackbox you can either attempt to get the source through some sort of development channel (although this is unlikely) or you can decompile and look at that. Tools like RedGate's Reflector or the Java Decompiler Project can help to get at that closed source.


• Workaround - Sometimes no matter how dogged your determination, you can't seem to figure out why the blackbox isn't working right, at this point you have exhausted the detective route, time to pull a MacGyver. If you can figure out someway to use the blackbox and workaround the deficiency then go ahead and do that. The important thing is to take this workaround and record it properly. Create an adapter, thin wrapper, or function. Make your own lightweight blackbox that is 1 part the old blackbox and 1 part workaround aggregated together.


• Roll your own - Sometimes you get seriously desperate, you have researched your fingers to the bone and tried to work around the problem. You are at the end of your rope, the deadline is looming and the only thing standing between you and your project compiling is some pos third party closed source blackbox. Sure it would be nice to have a sqrt function nicely wrapped up for you, but hell you can dust off that part of your brain that remembers what a square root is and write your own function to find it. The important thing is that this should be the very last thing you do, after all other options are exhausted. Many a programmer will do this first or second, and that is Seriously Fucking Wrong©.

The power of a working blackbox is only matched by the frustration of a wonky blackbox. The good news is that a lot of blackboxes work really well sitting there quietly trimming our strings and rooting our squares. There is that every once and a while though when despite our best efforts we have to dive headlong into a blackbox and shine some light around.