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Aug 08The Magic Wand of Generic
by in CodeSOD on 2008-09-29J. K.'s boss loves the term "generic." Developing a feature that prompts if one specific field is left blank, that will only be used on that page? Make it generic enough to work on any page. Working on an application that will only ever be used by the local government in Podunk, MA? Make it generic enough to be able to easily change every line of text into Swahili, just in case. He didn't know the ins and outs of what was involved to make this possible, he just wanted his team to wave their collective genericification wand over the application's code.
This is precisely why he was so upset when an email form that was supposed to be generic wasn't working all of the time. It had been built to convert any HTML form with a properly named From, To, and Subject line into an email. And it worked for the most part, until they tried to apply it to a new form with more fields than others that used the control.
Phil was living the dream, working on a Hollywood feature film. The film's budget was in the $35M range, putting it toward the low end for feature films. This movie in particular would utilize a lot of green screen, and they planned to film entirely digital. The director had (correctly) decided that JPEG-style compression that was common to most tape formats was not acceptable, and that they'd need something that could handle raw, uncompressed high-definition video. They were making a movie, after all, not some podunk town's weather report!