Recent Feature Articles

Jul 2019

This Process is Nuts

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A great man once said "I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry." As pleasing of a sight as that was, what if the squirrels weren't merry?

Grady had an unpleasant experience with bushy-tailed rodents at a former job. Before starting at the Fintech firm as a data scientist, he was assured the Business Intelligence department was very advanced and run by an expert. They needed Grady to manipulate large data sets and implement machine learning to help out Lenny, the resident BI "expert". It quickly became apparent that Lenny didn't put the "Intelligence" in Business Intelligence.


An Indispensible Guru

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Simple budgeting spreadsheet eg

Business Intelligence is the oxymoron that makes modern capitalism possible. In order for a company the size of a Fortune 500 to operate, key people have to know key numbers: how the finances are doing, what sales looks like, whether they're trending on target to meet their business goals or above or below that mystical number.


The Hardware Virus

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Dvi-cable

Jen was a few weeks into her new helpdesk job. Unlike past jobs, she started getting her own support tickets quickly—but a more veteran employee, Stanley, had been tasked with showing her the ropes. He also got notification of Jen's tickets, and they worked on them together. A new ticket had just come in, asking for someone to replace the DVI cable that'd gone missing from Conference Room 3. Such cables were the means by which coworkers connected their laptops to projectors for presentations.


The Enterprise Backup Batch

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If a piece of software is described in any way, shape or form as being "enterprise", it's a safe bet that you don't actually want to use it. As a general rule, "enterprise" software packages mix the Inner-Platform Effect with trying to be all things to all customers, with thousands upon thousands of lines of legacy code that can't be touched because at least one customer depends on those quirks. There doesn't tend to be much competition in the "enterprise" space, so none of the vendors actually put any thought into making their products good. That's what salesbeasts and lawyers are for.

Kristoph M supports a deployment of Initech's data warehouse system. Since this system is a mix of stored procedures and SSIS packages, Kristoph can actually read a good portion of the code which makes the product work. They just choose not to. And that's usually a good choice.


Process by Management

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Alice's team was thirty developers, taking up most of the floor of a nondescript office building in yet another office park. Their team was a contractor-to-a-contractor for a branch of the US military, which meant a variety of things. First, bringing a thumb drive into the office was a firing offense. Second, they were used to a certain level of bureaucracy. You couldn't change a line of code unless you had four different documents confirming the change was necessary and was authorized, and actually deploying a change was a milestone event with code freezes and expected extra hours.

Despite all this, the thirty person team had built a great working relationship. They had made their process as efficient as they could, and their PM, Doug, understood the work well enough to keep things streamlined. In fact, Doug did such a good job that Doug got promoted. Enter Millie, his replacement.


Classic WTF: Working Around, Over and Through the Process

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It's still a holiday weekend in the US; after playing with fireworks yesterday, most of us have to spend today trying to find the fingers we lost. There are no fireworks in this classic story, but there may be some karma… Original --Remy

When Kevin landed a job at Townbank in the late 1980s, he came face-to-face with the same thing that thousands of newly minted developers had encountered before and since – there is more to being a corporate programmer than just writing code – there’s the process.

Second only, perhaps, to the strict rules commanded by the world’s religions, the process keeps the code consistent. Glory to the process – praised be the process - the process is good, the process should always be followed, and above all, the process is good for you!