I'm a "Software Engineer"
Welcome to my blog!
My name is Brian Douglas. I'm a husband to my wife and father of two girls.<br>We live together on our farm in the hills of Donegal, Ireland. We have sheep,<br>chickens, rabbits, and some dogs and cats.
I also have a hobby, which is computer science. I have a master's degree in the subject, and<br>it's handy for paying the bills.
This blog is dedicated to that hobby and my thirst for knowledge and understanding in regard to<br>the field of computer science.
I hope you'll find some of my writing interesting. If you do, then email me, and we can have some<br>correspondence, like it's 1998.
I've been working as a "Software Engineer" since 2014. Before that I studied a Master's<br>Degree in Computer Science. Where I learned about C, C++, and how computers worked. This<br>was all in preparation for a wonderous career in the software industry.
Well fast forward to 2026 and I am taking time away from said industry in order to get to<br>grips with Sheep farming. A surprise, but welcome, venture after my Wife inherited her<br>Dad's farm. I now get up at 7 every morning, pull on overalls and go out to feed, lamb,<br>inject, and solve various Sheep related problems. Sheep, as it turns out, are highly skilled<br>at finding new and elaborate ways of getting themselves into trouble.
This work is very physical. I often have to wrestle with unruly animals, which weigh about<br>70kg each so they are quite strong. While I use my body, my mind is on somewhat of a vacation.<br>I spend very little time in front of a screen now. I have no office, and as we live up a hill,<br>no phone signal. Perhaps you could call it a detox. A welcome side effect of this detox is<br>that I am no longer stressed, fitter than ever, and happy. I also work harder than ever, and<br>deal with actual life and death issues, if you are a sheep that is, and often this takes place<br>in dangerous environments, mostly in confined spaces with large excitably animals. Despite<br>this I am not anxious or worried, I simply deal with the task at hand.
As lambing season comes to an end, I have been reflecting on my past work as a Software Engineer,<br>the people I have worked with, their attitudes to life, and the industry in general. Mostly I<br>think about what a truly ignorant bunch of people make up the tech industry. Detached from the<br>real world and nature. For example, I woke up this morning and the first thing I had to do was<br>chase and catch a sheep whose dead lamb was hanging out of her and needed to be removed. The<br>unfortunate fellow had come out backwards and his mother was unable to complete the job. It was<br>not a pleasant task, Sheep have a higher internal body temperature than humans which means their<br>insides feel very hot. They also stink. The stink hit's you hard when the lamb flops out and the<br>placenta follows. But alas I got the job done, and tied the Sheep to a nearby tree so I could run<br>home and get an injection of anti-inflammatories and anti-biotics to stave off the pain and possible<br>infection that might ensue. As I sit in front of my laptop writing this, I think of how clueless<br>I was in the height of my tech career. I would go to work and stress about having to pull a ticket<br>from one kanban column to the next. Complain about the endless and pointless meetings I'd have to<br>attend. All the while fighting mini wars of attrition with my colleagues.
In reflection I wonder what that was all about. In theory it was to deliver a product, one that<br>had value for a customer. In practice very little was ever delivered and the value to the customer<br>was very much secondary. Before you think that this is just the experience I had, I will caveat it<br>by saying I worked for multiple highly respected companies, in multiple industries. But the tech side<br>of the job was always the same. The typical scenario would be that I was placed on a small delivery<br>team that looked after a certain product. That team would be made up of a product owner (manager),<br>scrum master (manager), business analyst (manager), QA (programmer who cant program), front end dev<br>(junior programmer), 2 backend devs (made up of one senior programmer and one programmer<br>who can speak very little English). So roughly fifty percent managers fifty percent technical. It<br>would be the task of the managers to ensure that every feature was delivered as slowly as possible.<br>You may have a small feature request to add a feed of data to a web page. This should take a<br>software engineer a day to do without limitations. It's the manager's job to ensure that it takes 6 months.<br>To do this they will employ a number of sophisticated techniques. One of the most popular is the religion<br>of Agile. Agile has been the hot new managerial technique in the industry for about 20 years. No<br>one person can truly understand it, as your Agile may be different from my Agile. It's somewhat<br>akin to the many forms of Christianity present in the United States. They are all essentially the same,<br>but every one else's version is wrong.
A...