Wins this week:
Professional wins: This week, I've been thinking a lot about reverse engineering software. The media's wrong about this again, but I love the narrative of it. Little guy takes down the big corporate litigation happy juggernaut with his coding agents.
The problem is, that in order to do something as monumental as reverse engineering the Adobe suite... even badly, the amount of actual work you have to put in is still pretty audacious.
AI or not, large commercial products that took a team of a hundred people to build are still monster engineering efforts, with or without AI.
Trying to figure out how the Photoshop guy actually did it, I actually might have discovered an exciting new type of specification engineering that would be WAY too extravagant for a single person to attempt by hand.
This particular method would be immediately applicable to large QA departments and due diligence for private equity firms.
It's interesting.
There will be a blog post once I've figured out which pieces of the process are and aren't absolutely necessary.
For example, if you do the active documentation step, you might not actually need to decompile anything. I'm thinking that decompiling works more like an optional commenting layer, where you can see some of the pitfalls and design decisions they made in the original process.
I'm not actually sure you need that for a redux, or a modernization effort.
The deeper I get into my experiments with this, the more convinced I am that you could do this totally blind, if you wanted to; especially if you're moving outside the original era and programming language the original piece of software was written in.
I could be wrong.
The Petrolina project
Personal wins: At the same time, I've been really disheartened about some of the truck problems I've been having.
I bought a weird version of a nice truck at a military auction earlier this year, but getting it plated and fixed, and even safe has been a huge pain.
Nine months and an absurd amount of repair investment later... it's still sitting in my driveway, and my landlord is losing their patience.
I was ready to give up on my dream of building the perfect talking Knight Rider style robot truck, when I met this lady who has the non-weird version of the same truck that she's been taking care of for years.
It looks really nice, and it's going to be great for the occasional cross country road trips I do.
I'm going to go see it tomorrow morning.
Excited.
The Petrolina saga continues.