Making Kool Aid

I wrote this piece years ago and wanted to add it to my blog.  It basically explains what a Build/SCM Engineer does.

For those of you who don't know I'm a Software Build Engineer at a major tech company (I'm not going to mention its name in this post as I make way too much fun of it).  In order to explain to Felicia what I do I've been using a Kool-Aid analogy lately that has actually gotten really hilarious so I thought I'd share it with you:

I make Kool-Aid for a living (metaphorically, of course).  More specifically I mix ingredients together to get specific flavors of Kool-Aid.  And I make a tremendous amount of money doing it.

At my company, there are four primary ingredients to Kool-Aid:

• Water (Apps)
• Flavor (Driver)
• Sweetener (Docs/L10N)
• Cyanide* (Install)

For the longest time the way we made Kool-Aid involved a black box that you stick your hands into with gloves.  You mix the ingredients by looking through tiny holes in the black box.  You can only see a little bit of the process at one given time, but you can smell it just fine!  The purpose of the black box is to make sure that no dust or anything gets into the Kool-Aid and therefore affect the flavor of the nice refreshing beverage.

Now we have robotic arms in those gloves doing the work for us.  I can still look through the holes, although they are smaller, and I can still smell the Kool-Aid.

When the Kool-Aid is finished we pour it into 5 glasses inside the black box (still unable to see exactly what's being done).  This was really messy in the old days when we had to do it by hand, but luckily with robots we can give it rates of pouring and exact duration.  So these glasses end up almost exactly the right size.  After the Kool-Aid is poured, one of them gets extra flavoring, another is very small and has no Cyanide.  Yet another is just some flavoring in a cup with no water or additives.  The cup we give Dell has Sweet N 'low instead of sugar... etc...

Once this is completed we take the black box off and hand it out.  Since these are software/metaphorical cups a nearly infinite number of people can take drinks from them and we'll never run out.

Also please remember, that from beginning to end it takes 4-6 hours to make Kool-Aid.  So I can only make one batch per day.

Food for thought:  Corporations aren't satisfied with just normal Kool-Aid, so we are constantly adding minerals and hormones to our water, as well as preservatives/chemical agents to the flavoring in order to make it better.  Generally this makes the Kool-Aid taste and smell better, but sometimes it has unwelcome side effects like:

• May cause breast development/lactation in men
• May cause facial/chest hair growth in women
• If the cyanide is not perfect, instead of releasing your soul for the mother ship you may die

This is why there are multiple versions (1.0 etc) and why we have bug fixes/security patches.  That's why you have to agree to the EULA and sell your soul.  That's why we have so many versions of Kool-Aid, we are constantly trying to make it better and perfect, but of course as the consumer demands prettier/larger cups we have to change our proportions and ingredients.

You may ask yourself why does it take so much to make Kool-Aid?  The answer: because of corporate red tape.  We are liable if we can't reproduce a batch of exactly the same Kool-Aid 7 years from now.

By the way: I NEVER drink the Kool-Aid.