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Showing posts from May, 2009

Some Folks are Unreachable

We have a perennial debate at work (going on 3 years now) about the "proper" and official Source Code Control tool in our company. Originally it was a crappy tool called CCC Harvest (yeah, sue me, it sucks I can't say it any other way), we then had a brief renaissance and used CVS (not great, but a big productivity boost!), then moved to Clearcase (shoot me now, it has a lot of potential and it theoretically GREAT, but in practice sucks almost as bad as Harvest), then began the migration to SVN (whopee, next step Hg!). Unfortunately, every step of the way has been met with irreconcilable folks in the change management area who seem to think that developers are simply a whiny bunch of prima donnas who are trying to rob the company blind. I say this because I keep hearing about the "superman" exploit as a reason we should use Clearcase. In case you don't know, the superman exploit is where a clever developer sneaks code in to steal money by taking money tha

ALERT! EMERGENCY FIX REQUIRED!!!

I'm taking a vacation day today. I woke up at 5:00 to take my daughter to school (trip to six flags), then went downstairs to put some finishing touches on some html I was fiddling around with to help with some new screens. While doing this a developer on my team started IM'ing me in a panic about a production problem that they where going to do an emergency deploy to fix. I attempted to calmly ask her to please explain the exact situation to me, but it came out more like "ARE YOU F'ING JOKING!? TELL ME YOU AREN'T SERIOUS!, WHAT THE HELL?". Whoops, no more coffee for me, my bad. So then I opened my email inbox and discovered no less than a dozen emails about about how the day before there was some sort of error that cropped up based on a specific data condition and stopped an extract process dead in it's tracks. For some reason, this software has run without exception for 2 months and suddenly yesterday at 5:00pm this data condition started to happen. W

Meetings gone bad

Below is a mostly fictional schedule that mimics a pattern I see in my office (names and places are fictional, just illustrating a pattern). 8:00am-9:15am Daily Status meeting (room B342) - In attendance: Susan, Bob, Bill, Steven, Mike. Review where we are in the project... Bill is going to fix bug 123 Steven is going to set up server, Mike needs to review the Spec doc and make recommendations, Susan needs to catch up on emails. 9:00am-10:00am Project Planning meeting (room B231) - In attendance: Susan, Bob, Bill, Steven, Mike (all late), and Jim. Plan the work for this week... Bill is going to fix bug 123 Steven is going to set up server, Mike needs to review the Spec doc and make recommendations, Susan needs to catch up on emails. Jim needs Mike to get with him and explain how to use the new Foobernator component. Mike agrees to do it in the afternoon. 10:00am-11:00am Requirements Review Meeting (room B243) - In attendance: Susan, Bob, Bill, Steven, Jim. Review the requireme