I have been a fake programmer for a long time. A fake programmer is someone who writes software to crush personal irritants. Fake programmers are not hackers; they don’t enjoy the process of software creation; they don’t work for the man and they make piss poor cubicle dwellers. Fake programmers detest industry standards and will wage silent, passive aggressive, war on anyone foolish enough to insist on them. The typical fake programmer is boiling with rage, “what do you mean there’s nothing out there that solves my problem!” When confronted with nasty problems fake programmers:
- Look for ways to ignore them
- Try to pass the buck
- Live with suboptimal crap
- Whine
- Complain about lesbians on welfare
- Yell at morons on TV
- Write snarky blog posts
and if all else fails: write some damn software.
By the time the fake programmer has decided to code he is looking for the quickest and least painful solution to his problem. Remember the fake programmer doesn’t care about your problems and won’t live by your rules. He only wants to kill his problem and get his blood pressure back to normal.
Fake programmers will use industry standard languages and tools if they provide the quickest fix. Of course this is rarely the case. At this point fake and real programmers diverge. Real programmers will stick to their standard software guns and plod along. The fake programmer says screw that; let’s stake out this vampire!
I recently drove a stake through the — “no decent IBM/Cognos Planning model diagram tool” — vampire. In my day job I wrestle with financial planning software. Corporate planning software is an irritant rich environment. My biggest complaint was the lack of an automatic way to quickly and accurately outline the contents of a Cognos model. Without such a guide you will be at the mercy of “documentation”, (don’t make me laugh) , or worse, Cognos Planning’s ultra-sucky user interface. Either way you can kiss your weekends good bye.
Fortunately, I am an excellent fake J programmer. J is my favorite programming language. What’s J you ask? You have never heard of it and that’s to bad for you! You have deprived your brain of a tool of thought and my human side feels for you: of course the outer fake programmer doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Using J’s excellent graphviz addon I can generate two Cognos Planning *.csv files containing model metadata and then apply my analystgraphs script to generate accurate, blood pressure reducing, diagrams like:
If you are interested in these diagrams feel free to download and use my J scripts. Of course you will have to learn enough J to run them.
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 