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Seeking the Inner Ring – Revisited

01 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Revisited

In 2004 I published “Seeking the Inner Ring” in my newsletter, which I have included below with further comments. I still think about it from time to time.

Seeking the Inner Ring

Throughout our lives, we seek to improve ourselves, especially our social standing and our career prospects. But are there some things we shouldn’t seek out? I’d like to introduce you to a compelling speech on this subject, and then I’ll share a relevant experience from my youth that has weighed heavily upon me for years.

Rings

I’ve just read a through-provoking speech by C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring.” An inner ring is perhaps the same thing as an “inner circle.” Wikipedia says that an inner circle “describes the individuals who are given special status…” and goes on to discuss things like secret societies, esoteric teaching, and friendship networks. [The Wikipedia page has changed a lot in the last 20 years, and it’s now merely a disambiguation page.] Lewis warns us against seeking admittance to any of the many inner rings we encounter in life merely for the sake of being there. But this isn’t easy. Lewis said:

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods… one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

This reminds me of the many invitation-only workshops like LAWST (the Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing) that I wasn’t getting invited to a few years ago. When I finally did get invited to LAWST a few times, I either couldn’t attend on the chosen dates, or I didn’t have much to say about the chosen topic, so I declined the invitations. Reaching the milestone of getting invited accomplished nothing but to alleviate my anxiety that I wasn’t worthy of being invited. You could of course make the argument that if I were even further inside that inner ring, I could influence the choice of dates and topics so they suited me better. Maybe some day I could, but in the mean time, I’m no longer fretting so much about whether I’m getting invitations like this.

Lewis recommends that we simply strive to be “one of the sound craftsmen,” and in the long run we will find ourselves inside what appears from the outside to be an inner ring, but in fact is not, and is much more valuable. It is friendship. For Lewis, inner rings are apparently artificial creations, built upon active exclusion and forced secrecy. My interpretation is that a circle of friends is secretive merely because the friends aren’t going out of their way to announce their mutual bond. If someone were to make a genuine request to join in, they would likely be welcomed, if only they knew that this was something they could possibly ask about. If a newcomer approached one or more of these craftsmen not for the purpose of joining a clique but for mutually advancing some shared interest, it is likely that this association of friends would be introduced to the newcomer in the natural course of things.

So we can generously view the web of semi-secretive gatherings merely as groups of friends who want to learn from each other. Other friends can be brought into the gathering, just as some may go. Should we expect them to grow without bound, once more people become aware of them? That’s an interesting question, as the character of a large group is different from that of a small intimate group. Would they be wrong to limit how many people they’re willing to interact with? Perhaps the limits will come naturally, as our own circle of friends is limited by how much time we can feasibly dedicate to maintaining the friendships. To do this, we pay attention to some people and turn away others.

The Vigil

Some accomplishments in our lives must be sought, and others must not. I saw a clear example of this as a Boy Scout. There is an organization within the Boy Scouts of America called the Order of the Arrow (OA). The OA is a secret society, in that the members are asked not to discuss the details of the initiation and certain signs of their membership level to people who haven’t achieved that level.

The first step to join the OA is to satisfy a set of well-defined requirements, including merit badges, camping experience, etc. Once a year, a certain percentage of those who meet the requirements are nominated for OA membership via a vote of the troop members. So first the Scout must take the initiative to satisfy the requirements, and the next step depends on a much more subjective process, which the Scout can only influence by improving his social standing in the troop. Meeting the concrete requirements can follow a predictable time line, but there is no certainty regarding when and if the Scout will be nominated.

If a Scout is nominated, there are again a set of concrete requirements. This starts with a weekend-long induction quaintly named the “Ordeal.” Then, much like a fraternity pledge, the Scout is encouraged to learn more about the organization. A year later, he can demonstrate that he’s met the requirements and then be inducted as a “Brotherhood” member.

At this point, the path becomes subjective again, and this is where it got interesting for me. The highest membership level is the Vigil Honor, which is bestowed to a small percentage of Brotherhood members by other Vigil Honor members. The only prerequisite is being a Brotherhood member for two years.

I was a Brotherhood member. I was active in the lodge and eventually became Lodge Chief. I was planning the induction for the three levels of membership, traditionally conducted jointly over one weekend. I was eligible for the Vigil Honor for the first time, and as Lodge Chief, I was a highly visible candidate. When I asked the person who was planning the Vigil Honor induction about coordinating with the other events of the weekend, he became suspicious about my motives. He sent me a letter, urging me, “Do not seek the Vigil – the Vigil will seek you.” Like the other candidates, I was delighted by the chance of receiving the Vigil Honor, but I was not consciously trying to abuse my power to sway the decision or learn who had been chosen.

During the weekend of the induction, I was briefing the people who would be conducting the ceremonies that evening. I made a terrible slip of the tongue, saying “When we are called out for the Vigil Honor” when I should have said “When they are called out.” I immediately corrected the error. It was an embarrassing slip. All kinds of things were going through my head at the time – the above-average likelihood that I would be recognized for my service as Lodge Chief, balanced by the growing cloud of suspicion that hung over me.

Just in case, I had brought supplies that I knew would be needed if I would be experiencing the vigil induction that weekend. I didn’t need them. The moment came, and I was not selected. I was disappointed, but didn’t feel I has lost out on something I was entitled to.

Later that year, we held another induction for those who couldn’t attend the first. I was no longer dwelling on the Vigil Honor. I didn’t bother to bring the extra supplies with me. But this time, I did need them. I was selected to be inducted into the Vigil Honor, and I scrambled to borrow camping equipment to survive a real overnight vigil under the stars. It was a profoundly moving experience for me, though of course I’m not supposed to tell you why.

Much later I found out that I had been selected all along, but at the first induction my name was struck off the list at the last minute. Though I was not trying to seek the Vigil, my actions implied otherwise, and those actions were highly visible. Now years later I still hear the mantra “Do not seek the Vigil” repeating in my thoughts any time I feel like I’m seeking recognition.

When to seek?

Clearly, some recognitions and affiliations must be sought, and others must not. The hard part is knowing which is which, and how to deal with the gray area in between. I’m still trying to figure out all the things Lewis was trying to say about inner rings. But I can take his conclusion to heart, that we should simply strive to do good work and form genuine friendships. As humans, we’re going to make some mistakes along the way. And we still have to choose how we seek out the work and make friends in the first place. No one said life was going to be easy!

My thanks to Matthew Heusser for pointing me to Lewis’ speech and to Matthew Heusser and Dave Millman for giving me early feedback on this article.

Epilogue – 2025

Speaking of friendships, I’m happy to still be in touch with Matthew Heusser.

Twenty years ago, I didn’t yet know that I was on the autism spectrum. I now wonder if my response to the accusations of seeking the vigil honor was purely defensiveness, and not considering what other people’s perceptions were. I never bothered to ask what was the basis of their concern. Was it a harsh punishment to make me think for half a year that I wasn’t selected? I don’t have a strong opinion about that, but I do know that the learnings from that experience will stay with me all of my life.

When I think of how this shaped my more recent behavior, I’m reminded of how I tried to get a promotion in a recent job. While trying to put together the promotion packet, at some point along the way, it started to feel like I was grasping for something that was going to distract from my daily job function. So I stopped pursuing it. I felt that if my company wasn’t going to proactively recognize my abilities and ease the path to promotion, it probably wasn’t the right path. (This decision was later validated when I read Developer Hegemony.)

black ribbon with three pins, all earned from my chorus activities
My recent merit badges

On the other hand, my latest “merit badge” was a recognition I received from the chorus I sing in, where I passed a difficult qualification on each of ten songs. Earning this one was not a zero sum game. It was nice to have a straightforward but challenging goal to achieve.

Unit Testing – A Taste of My Own Medicine

10 Friday Nov 2006

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Throughout my career, I’ve been fussing at software developers about not doing decent unit testing. Recently I had to focus that fussing on myself.

I like the idea of test-driven development, where an automated unit test is developed in conjunction with the product code. But I don’t do it very often. Sometimes it’s because I don’t know if I’ll ever use the code I’m writing again – it’s just a one-off thing that won’t need to be repeated after the code does its work once. Sometimes it’s because of the difficulty in setting up a unit test, like my code that uses Watir to automate Internet Explorer. Some of my excuses are the same kind of excuses that the developers I’ve been fussing at have used.

I’m not ready to draw any big conclusions about unit testing, either for my test automation or for product development, but I do want to relate a success story. I had been struggling for a couple of days with a Perl program that parses an SCL script (OpenSTA’s scripting language). It would read in the SCL file, piece together all the line continuations so I could search each statement as a single entity, modify some of the statements, then split them back up into shorter lines. It was mostly working, but little glitches kept appearing – extra blank lines would appear, a line would be cut off too short, etc. As soon as I fixed one glitch, another would appear – the parsing process was fairly complex.

Finally it dawned on me that if a developer were to describe this problem to me, I would suggest that he immediately write unit tests. So that’s exactly what I did. I tried Perl’s Test::Unit module in earnest for the first time. It took a while to figure out how to set up the tests – the examples in the documentation are too trivial to show how a real unit test would work. But after a few hours, I was adding tests, and the tests were finding bugs. It only took a handful of rounds of adding a test, fixing a bug, then finding and fixing the bugs that the fix uncovered. The glitches were gone.

So while I struggle to find the right balance to determine what test automation code should have unit tests, I’ve learned that the code that isn’t working is definitely a good candidate for unit testing.

Originally published on the Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter blog.

Convex is dead, long live Convex

01 Tuesday Apr 2003

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I don’t think I have a tendency to dwell on the past. Yet an employer that I thought I had parted company with years ago always seems to be popping up in my thoughts. The company is Convex Computer Corporation, the pioneer of “affordable supercomputing,” where I worked from 1992 to 1995. Convex as an institution is gone, but much to my amazement, its culture is very much alive. I’d like to pay a tribute both to the demise of the institution, and to the unique spirit that lives on.

Convex is dead

What happened to the institution? After outliving practically every other competitor in the market that they created, Convex ran out of money and sought a merger with Hewlett-Packard, which was completed officially in December 1995. Cultural changes were inevitable, but mercifully, most of the changes came slowly. The first big shock for me was when management removed all Convex paraphernalia and pictures from past events from the walls in the hallways. They laid them all out in the company meeting room and told us to take what we wanted, and served ice cream to “celebrate.”

I consider the next big milestone to be the end of the Friday parties, which happened after I left what was then Hewlett-Packard. Convex had a long-standing tradition of bringing beer kegs into the main breakroom on Friday afternoons, along with other drinks and snacks. I vividly remember the one time my wife attended. She stood there, shocked, and said something like “My God, they’re all geeks!” I did some of my most inspired test tool development after the Friday parties. I’m told that the last Friday party was Friday, the 13th of April, 2001, canceled for the sake of cost-cutting.

Then on September 23, 2002, I got a disturbing announcement stating that the entire software development lab I had worked for was shut down. There are still a few ex-Convex employees working for H-P at the old Convex site in Richardson, Texas, and definitely a number of Convex folks who have relocated to other H-P locations. But it’s hard to find much of the Convex legacy that’s left at H-P.

Long live Convex

Nowadays, Convex lives on in the people who were there. As I wrote this, I received an April Fool’s joke in an email on the “ex-convex” mailing list. April Fool’s jokes are a prominent component of the hacker culture, and the Convex culture has a lot in common with hacker culture.

I got a blast from the past when a political discussion recently broke out on the ex-convex list. It was a full-scale, flame-throwing, no holds barred debate. It was old friends, who saw no need to tread lightly. It was the same sort of discussion that used to take place on the internal Usenet newsgroups at Convex, and several people were amused to see that the group was still up to the task.

I didn’t realize how many Convex connections I’d maintained until I sat down to write about them. I recently sent congratulations to Ron, a former manager of mine, who decided to retire rather than try to find another job after the shutdown. I worked on a project with Prathibha and Hema, testers I had worked with at Convex and who landed contracting positions with one of my clients. Matthew, another ex-Con (the affectionate shorthand for an ex-Convex employee), is an employee on that same project. I spent a week at a training course last year with Daryl, who was my first team lead when I started at Convex. I worked on a writing project with ex-Cons Eric and Martin. I met Mark at a local networking event. I touched based with Orion and Darrell when passing through San Francisco last month. I met Prasad and his wife for a social visit when they came through town last December. I consulted with Peter about writing this article. That’s just a sampling.

I don’t try to seek out my former Convex employees any more than anyone else in my network. But they’re still a core part of my network more than three years after I left H-P, and seven years after Convex officially went kaput. Countless times, I’ve heard ex-Cons say that Convex is still their favorite work experience, even after they worked several different places since then.

I asked Jason Eckhardt recently why Convex was his favorite job. He started as a co-op student, writing software tests for the compilers. He says,

I grew a little bored and decided to not only find the defects, but then go isolate the assembly code that caused the wrong answer. Then I thought I could accelerate the codegen effort by just fixing the compiler bugs instead of merely finding them…. I don’t know any other place where I could have gone from junior co-op to compiler developer (on one of the world’s most advanced compilers, no less) in such a short time and with amazing support from my supervisors and peers–including the ‘compiler guys’ who were remarkably tolerant of me getting into ‘their’ code before they even knew me.

He also mentioned a supportive manager, a highly cohesive and friendly team, a tremendous amount of technical growth, and the freedom to spend the time to research the right solution to a problem. Individually, none of these things are terribly unusual to see in a company, but perhaps they’re not often seen all in one place.

Was Convex my favorite job? Actually, my all-time favorite job was as a temporary laborer with the Moving and Hauling department at the University of North Texas. You want a sense of accomplishment? Move 300-pound desks upended on a dolly single-handedly down three flights of stairs. I felt a real, concrete sense of accomplishment from that. But as far as bit-twiddling goes, Convex ranks right up there. After all, I haven’t talked to anyone from Moving and Hauling since I left that assignment. If they were to shut down the Moving and Hauling department, I doubt I’d shed a tear. Plus Moving and Hauling didn’t have any supercomputers for me to play with. So I save a special place in my memories for Convex.

Originally published in the Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter, v3 #2, April/May 2003