Free Reconfigure by Epredator, Ian Hughes

The non-functional requirements were less obvious, or less in her control. Some of this would only be under the control of the conduit services she was using. Security and accessibility she could manage partly at her end, any downtime would all be outside her influence. She had an idea of the sort of usability improvements she was heading towards. Number one, NO CLI! That was her goal. She liked to have a spirit or core for a project. She was extrapolating the concept to a much loftier end experience in her mind. She was thinking of a meta Minecraft or a real world OpenSim. Virtual worlds are altered and interacted with by their users, with the visual tools provided. If she could get a decent connection to RC she could make the next layer of abstraction, from CLI to a visual 3D environment. Roisin felt another shudder of excitement as she took the idea further and mentally zoomed through the possible futures this all hinted at. It was not a totally clear vision. It was like a misty shimmering haze in her mind with sparkling gems floating around at the very edges of her thoughts. She knew from playing so many exploration games that this ‘Fog of War’ could only be cut through by visiting the places, or sending out probes to map the areas. Right now she felt she was about to set out on a long journey of discovery. The last few hours she had been just strolling around smelling the wild flowers. She smirked to herself as she thought of all those free roaming sandbox games she loved. No matter how tough the lead character was, they always ended up collecting wild flowers for some odd game mechanic. Now, to keep her gaming analogy, she was going to build a vehicle to help her reach out further. Whilst this first stage was inventing the wheel, she knew that once she had the basic building blocks she would be building a veritable kick ass Warthog APC in no time.
    Picking a language to write code in may have been straight forward once upon a time. Roisin had learned a good few at college and written in even more out in the real world. There were literally hundreds of languages to choose from. “Do you know C++?” or “PHP experience?” would litter many a conversation as she pitched for work on various projects. Back in the day she had known that people just specialised in one language, that was it. The Web and the explosion of open source meant every woman, man, dog and their grumpy cat were creating new languages or extensions to languages. Class libraries, helper routines and the most annoying, the API stub littered the digital landscape. Repositories were full of half done pieces of code. Still, if ever Roisin needed anything new she would always check first before ploughing into writing custom code. What was the point if it was already done and working? She had become increasingly wary of other peoples libraries. They often did the simple stuff really well, then so did everything else. She would get excited seeing a function described like ‘Solve fast Fourier transform’ and then see the code comment ‘//TO DO’ at the difficult bit. She was fairly certain there wouldn’t be a handy terminal layer abstraction to Twitter Direct Messages. Primarily because, well, why would you need one? She started to feel a slight paranoia. If she was too specific in asking or searching for help she might give the game away. Not that she was doing anything wrong? Yet? Being able to reconfigure the World started to worry her, especially if lots of people might end up doing it. She tried an abstract Google search. She looked for ‘Terminal Emulation on Twitter.’ All she got back were either Tweets about terminal emulation, which to be fair was what the question could have sounded like in a different context, and the odd terminal emulator product, that had a Twitter account itself.
    She was back to deciding what language to write in, and where to run it. Ideally she was aiming for a mobile solution. Whilst she could Zone anything from