Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

Cross-posted from .NET @ Kape ni LaTtEX

When Microsoft came up with its Heroes Happen {Here} campaign as part of Launch {2008}, I found the campaign name cheesy. “Hero” is something you reserve for people who do truly great things, and hardly fits into the portrait of a software developer — someone like me. A flawed person who makes mistakes, writes bugs, and tries his best to go home early to the family every night even as QA bug reports come pouring in for immediate repair.

Deep inside of me, however, I knew the kind of power, and consequently, the kind of responsibility, software developers had in our hands.

Four years ago I joined the IT department of Philippine National Bank, and was assigned under the ATM unit — that small team (3 of us actually) who maintains the software for the various ATM models (which span three decades of ATM development!) the bank uses. Many days were boring drudgery, but there were some days wherein we are up on our toes all because of some error on the system, some bug that was found, some COBOL report that crashed, or some cases of fraud that required investigation, or your new software was being QAed not by your usual QA staff but by the meticulous, devil-in-the-details ladies of the Audit Department.

Whenever those days ended I always find myself spewing out a huge sigh of relief.

But beyond relief, the experience whenever I step outside of the PNB offices and use its public ATMs is quite exhilarating. It sounds weird, sure, but it was dogfooding (for the laypeople — dogfooding is when a developer using his own software for real world purposes) at its finest. Whenever I line up for PNB ATMs and everything works as intended for everyone, I’d be happy. Whenever I line up for PNB ATMs and something doesn’t work right — the machine is down, very slow transactions, unresponsive networks, I’d personally pull out my cellphone and call my colleagues over at operations to inform them of the problem. Sometimes, just seeing PNB ATMs in far-off backwater towns with the card receptor light blinking happily green makes me smile.

Sure, it sounds shallow. But there is an immense satisfaction to be gained from the knowledge that you’ve got a software working that genuinely helps people — the power that a public facing software application (which an ATM essentially is, tightly coupled with hardware as it is) holds.

(Continue reading A portrait of a software developer as hero)