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In technology as in life, some folks get it, and some don’t. Trying to make the ones who don’t get it get it can sometimes challenge even the hardiest of tech-souls. Michelle made a valiant effort to enlighten one such individual, and failed. This is her story.
Like most schools, Andy’s requried a “capstone” project for their software engineering track. It was a group project, which meant the project’s success was largely dependent on the luck of the draw. For his partners, Andy drew Mindy and Al. Mindy, he knew from other classes and had worked with before.
While Ian was working at Initech, one of the major projects he undertook was an integration with a third-party vendor. They had recently gotten set up with this product that became known internally as the Third Circle of Hell (3CoH), and wanted to export some data from it over to the vendor's website. Sales agents needed some information during cold calls, and 3CoH promised to provide the data interactively, so that they could continue their call somewhat intelligently.
Getting in to the 3CoH might be easy, but getting out is another matter.
Roland was working on code that implemented HTTP service methods. The 'status' variable held one of those pass-it-everywhere objects that were sometimes called 'RunData'. It contained the request, response, security context, and other needed information. When JavaScript sent an asynchronous HTTP request, one of the service methods performed some backend magic and returned a JSON object with the appropriate data.
Steven quietly bowed his head as the planning meeting began. Their leader, messiah, and prophet was Jack, and today’s sermon was was the promise of Heaven- Heaven being the codename of their ground-up rewrite of their e-commerce solution.
Jack sat at the head of the table, in front of the projection screen. Behind him glowed the Spreadsheet of Pending Tasks, and the cells surrounded his head like rectangular halos. His eyes glowed with the power of his vision. “In Heaven, our customers will be able to customize everything. Everything!”
Jack had lead the development on Heaven’s predecessor. Like Heaven, it was endlessly customizable. It was also slow, buggy, impossible to maintain, utterly incomprehensible, and tied to a deceased proprietary technology stack. Jack had climbed the mountain and brought back word from management: a total rewrite.
The average big-box hardware store is like a small city. They have every piece of hardware or tool imaginable (except, of course, the one you’re looking for). You’ll find no less that 15 aisles of power tools stocked with everything from battery operated screwdrivers to arc welders. To store all these tools, you can purchase the 6-foot-tall rolling toolbox, with a 20-watt stereo, built-in beer chiller, wi-fi connectivity, and a Twitter or Facebook app. One aisle over, there’s row after row of pristine white toilets, occupied by a small army of playing children. Near the back of the store, nestled between endless rows of storm doors and windows is a quaint “grocery” section, as if someone uprooted and transplanted a gas station convenience store, and trimmed away all of the bits that weren’t junk food. Finally, outside the building, is the drive-thru lumber yard, where you drive to the end to purchase your 20 cubic feet of mulch and invariably get stuck behind an idling vehicle abandoned by a socially-clueless DIY-er who either disappeared on an epic quest to find help loading 200 short tons of bagged white river rock into his 1993 Ford Ranger, or more likely, thought it was a convenient parking spot while he left for an 8-week sabbatical on a mountain in Tibet.
“It’ll be a cold day in Hell,” Roger said, “when this system goes down.”
With those words, Roger, Systems Architect, went on sabbatical from Monocorp. The edifice he left behind served its purpose as foretold, until the day Danny O. was pulled out of a meeting by a panicked intern. “Everything is down,” the young man panted, short of breath and sweaty from a brisk dash around the office, trying to find which boardroom the IT team had been assigned for that day’s conference. “Everything! All requests to the web tier are returning some kind of duplicate record error that doesn’t even make sense! We’re dead in the water!”
It's Easter, so we're taking a little break around here. Instead, enjoy this classic from Alex. Stories like this inspired "Remy's Law of Requirements": no matter what the requirements say, what the users actually want is Excel.
-- Remy
For as long as The City (as I'll call it) has supplied water to its residents, it has had one big headache called "The Annual Water Survey." Like residents of all large metropolises, The City's residents want to make sure the water they drink has only a miniscule amount of the "bad stuff," such as heavy metals and pathogens, and just the right amount of the "good stuff" -- chlorine, fluoride, etc. The water survey -- a 100-plus-page report that details test after test after test -- was their vote of confidence.
Compiling the survey had always been a long and tedious process. At first, field technicians would take samples from across The City, add drops of various indicator chemicals and record the results in their logbooks. From there, lab technicians would transcribe the numbers and use special slide rules to create tables of meaningful results. Typists would then compile the various tables into a giant binder and send it off for duplication.
Mar 15