[18+] Agbára kọ ná fi ńgbé okó dìde
This article is an attempt at self documenting my thoughts about the psychology behind writing effective, scalable and strapped code, the beauty of bugs, the lessons they teach us with respect to seduction and the implications of broken trust. If you came here hoping to meet Azolibe, I no dey there with you.
I woke up to a power outage this morning, a localized one. I stay in an apartment that has regular power supply except in unique cases, this morning was one of them.
I have been thinking of tech with respect to software and psychology a lot these days.
This morning, in an elite telegram group, a certain wise Nigerian C.E.O whom I respect a lot (prostrates prostratefully) made a joke in yoruba. It was relatable because it captured my thoughts.
“Agbára kó ná fi ńgbé okó dìde” — A wise yoruba Nigerian CEO man or woman
You can’t evoke an erection through the use of strength. — translation by Developer
“Erection is not by strength nor by might. Sayeth the lord of host.” — translation by Another Developer
“Well, it’s not your ability to file suits or spit legal jargons that determines the path a case will follow, It could blossom into a very boring lengthy treatise.” — translation by A Lawyer
[I am collecting quasi — anonymous quotes to put above. Send in a few of yours.]
If you understand yoruba, have a thing for cleverly made jokes and for associating seemingly disjoint scenarios, you’ll probably chuckle at the expressions above as soon as you get it but if you don’t, man! you need to lighten up!!! I have been thinking about how tech participants sometimes forget finesse can beat strength more often than people like to admit. Not everything should be brute forced into working, sometimes, seduce your code.
I had a bug. It felt almost sentient. It would pop up, I’d fix, it’ll work for a while, pop up again, I’ll revert and it’ll work for a while then stop work……… You get the picture.
Now, the problem with this bug is the fact that it’s one of those bugs that shouldn’t even happen, like how does actually assigning a variable correctly on one line and you get a default value initially set as a fallback when printing on the next line.
It seemed a literal imp was switching value to mess with me and it was just this variable, every other variable was working fine. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a semantic problem this ridiculous.
Coming from a background of everyday Java and the fact that everything is usually clearly defined, verbose, yes, but clearly defined, Swift was messing with me.
I got around the problem by writing an unnecessarily sophisticated solution which worked until I had to make use of the variable at a state that required stability. That was when I stumbled over a closed issue on the github account of the library giving me this problem.
The solution was to replace all instances of Int! in the data classes with NSNumber. This in itself isn’t the problem, the problem was that I assumed/expected NSNumber and Int to be used interchangeably but due to some restrictions on Swift 3.0, it wasn’t possible using reflection.
I was going to force the computer to do what I wanted when obviously that wasn’t the way to go about it. The overconfident hackers syndrome?
Anyhow, I implemented the fix and all was well. Now, I am skeptical about using Ints as types for variables. I really should find time to read the Swift 3.0 book to completion. Rude awakening.
One can only imagine what amount of chaos a simple wrong evaluation of `is_draft == MemoDraftState.DRAFT` can cause for *whispers…. bankers*.
A couple of points to make here:
- Not everything is achievable through force.
- What is broken is almost impossible to scale.
- Don’t try to force things generally. You might live longer.
- You cannot `will` solutions into existence, you have to actively look for them.
- A lot of headache can happen in one hour, as shown above. That time could have been spent reading my books.
- Sometimes, there isn’t a bug……………
“Agbára kó ná fi ńgbé okó dìde” — Repeat it till you’re blue in the face.
P.S: What does the phrase “Homo Sapiens+” mean?
P.S: A certain ex-lover of snickers has me hooked on the “Mad over you” song by Runtown.
