The Automated Curse Generator
by Alex Papadimoulis
in Feature Articles
on 2009-10-27
It was 1999, and Brian's company's new online marketing venture was finally off the ground and making a profit using an off-the-shelf conglomeration of bits and pieces of various content management, affiliate program, and ad servers. Brian's team had hit all of the goals for the first funding tranche, and the next step was to use those millions of dollars to grow the staff from twelve to fifty, half of whom would be software developers working directly for Brian.
The project was an $8 million, nine-month development effort to build, from the ground up, the best 21st-century marketing/e-commerce/community/ad network/reporting system mousetrap possible. Leading a team of twenty people was a big step up for Brian, so he buckled down, read management theory books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, learned the ins-and-outs of project management software, invested in UML and process training, and carefully pored over resumes to find the best candidates.
Forums
Sep 09
SuperbNet was by no means a bad ISP. Opening during the 90’s, they offered a nice alternative to the 15 hours of "free" disks that arrived in the mailboxes of local residents. Their prices were competitive and service was very reliable. That is until one day, out of the blue, Jonathan’s Linux box would not connect to the Internet.
It was to be the perfect system: requested by an IT-friendly internal client, managed by a competent project manager, described by insightful business analysts, designed by an experienced architect, built by intelligent programmers, and perfected by thorough testers. Its goal was hefty but noble: replace the current manual billing system with a fully automated process that tracks jobs, hours, accounting, and payroll. It was to save employees across the organization a lot of time and save the company a lot of money by bringing payroll processing in-house. But alas, it was confronted by an obstacle it just could not overcome: the Chief Technology Officer.
It was nearly impossible to find an available and fully-functioning PC in the large campus labs at West Thomson-Friedman University. It's not like the student lab administrators were lazy. Oh no, in fact the clueless-users-who-were-far-too-dangerous-for-their-own-good and the malicious-users-who-were-far-too-bored-for-their-own-good made the student admins really earn their minimum wage.
Michael L. felt the buzz of his phone go off. He ignored it.
Mark Mooney works in a fairly standard internal application development environment. His group writes code, packages it up, and sends it off the Infrastructure Group for deployment to the QA servers. Like many organizations, Mark's group has virtually no access to these servers. If they're lucky, they can use the application as an end-user would. If they're really lucky, they can directly access the server log files.
