coneblog

I’m sharing some of my experiences in building the Skycam – a formative software experience for me. I’ll draw some lessons to Project Management, but these are mostly for your interest and entertainment. On the day of the “First Flight” – my code wasn’t ready.

In my defense, it was really the “First Integration” event. This was back in the early, early days, before we moved into an industrial space. We were each working in our spare bedrooms or basements, working on our parts. I was using the keyboard on my Osborne 2 to run an IEE-488 interface connected to a motor controller. The motor was hoisting a fistful of fishing weights thru a hardware store pulley.

I had gotten the specs for the control panel several weeks ago, and I had written an interface for it. So I had most of the pieces that I needed – control interface, line length calculation module, motor control module, basic display. But I was missing something, and I didn’t know what.

Those of you familiar with process control will laugh, but I was a Mainframe programmer, skilled in PL/I and processing files. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know that I needed a control loop, to connect the steps in the process. About four days before the scheduled all-hands demo event, I figured this out.

I coded madly for four nights – I had a day job. By 2 am the morning of the meeting, I had a basic loop running, but without everything connected in it. I caught a few hours of sleep, got up feeling groggy, and loaded everything into the car.

As I drove across New Jersey towards the bridge, I felt sicker and sicker. About mid-span on the Commodore Barry Bridge, I was ready to vomit. I saw the scene ahead – surrounded by Garrett and the rest of the project team, I would be forced to confess that I wasn’t ready. It was almost more than I could bear.