12.12.08
Posted in work at 14:13 by swong
by far, the worst tool that I’ve ever had to use in any circumstances. It’s riddled with bad design and engineering decisions. It’s flaky like a hammer made out of baklava. Standard operating procedure is: 1) try to follow the process in the manual, 2) call IT because that will irrevocably break something in the system. The people who bought this system should be sacked. The people who installed this system should be sacked. Their families should be sacked. The people that sack them should, themselves, be sacked, because of the contamination risk. That’s how bad it is.
/rant
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08.25.08
Posted in work at 10:46 by swong
Jesus Christ, I just got out of an hour-long conference call. Three project managers, another developer, and myself. The take-away from the meeting? “Move the javascript on these pages to two external files. We’ll deliver the files to you by the end of the week.” That’s it. That’s the whole message. The whole enchilada. We probably burned through about $600 worth of billable hours on that call.
Worse: the message was directed at me. I was called into this project to analyze some code that was written and abandoned by some cut-rate Chinese HTML shop. For my trouble, and the two intelligent questions I managed to come up with, I got a patronizing 60 minute lecture that basically went: “It’s good to separate your code into reusable libraries. It’s easier to maintain. When you have to maintain your code, it’s easier to work on a single library file. For good maintenance. In an external file. Which is your library. Which is easier to update and maintain. I can walk you through how to do that if you need, it’s just a really good idea and good practice. Attaboy, junior.”
I’m willing to eat crow from time to time, if it’s for the good of the company or the account, even if it’s someone else’s crow. I’m just worried that my name is in some permanent company record now. It’ll get filed away, and if I should ever apply for a job with the other vendor or one of their partners, this little flag will come up: *DOES NOT KNOW BASIC CODING PRACTICES*. Right next to the picture of me in the third grade, picking up a dog by the hind legs and pushing it around like a vacuum cleaner.
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07.28.08
Posted in pondering, work at 15:59 by swong
Something annoying about web design:
The field has been around for roughly 15 years. It’s displacing the iron pillar of print media. It’s changing the politics and business and culture of the first world. Fortunes have risen and fallen with the emergence of the Web. All of this upheaval has happened at the hands of clever designers and engineers. It’s like owning your own independent printing press in 1730 and being able to publish whatever the hell you want. We hold even more power than that.
So why is it that when I go to indicate my field on a web site, it’s never listed? Accounting gets its own entry. Ok, that’s a big one. Farming gets its own entry. Ok, sure, lots of farmers might be signing up to professional networking sites. Maritime gets its own entry. Uh, ok. Shipbuilding gets its own entry. Tobacco gets its own entry. Railroad manufacture gets its own entry separate from machining.
Seems all of these clever engineers brainstorm comprehensive lists of fields, but they never remember to add their own. Do I go under computer software, or Internet, or networking, or graphic design? Even on monster.com, you know, the big web based career web site apparently written by some clever web people to help match employers to candidates on the web, I had to drill through a couple of layers to find something that vaguely resembled the stuff I work on.
It’s kind of like a college application-
Ethnicity (choose one):
- African American []
- Native American []
- Filipino []
- Mexican []
- Brazilian []
- Ecuadorian []
- Peruvian []
- El Salvadorian []
- Cambodian []
- Laotian []
- Chinese – Mandarin []
- Chinese – Cantonese []
- Taiwanese
- Japanese []
- Korean []
- Mongolian []
- Micronesian []
- Polynesian []
- Haitian []
- Jamaican []
- Cuban []
- Indian []
- Pacific Islander []
- Basque []
- Sicilian []
- White []
- Other []
Yeah.
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06.02.08
Posted in work at 18:05 by swong
Me: “So, who is running the training session that I am attending tomorrow?”
Manager: “Um. You are. Have you updated the lesson plan yet?*”
*True story.
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05.29.08
Posted in work at 11:43 by swong
Being chronically underassigned for work is much more stressful than being chronically overassigned.
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04.23.08
Posted in development, work at 11:17 by swong
When you’re building something on a deadline, testing is not a magic fairy dust that you sprinkle on your product at the end.
You have to be prepared to deal with new findings. You have to be prepared to flip the switch and have the light bulb not turn on. You can’t stand around looking stunned, muttering “…but we tested it. It’s supposed to work, because we tested it. I don’t understand why it doesn’t work.”
Testing is a tool to help make stuff work, but not if you go through tests like rosary beads.
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04.21.08
Posted in work at 18:30 by swong
Gah… been stuck doing testing and documentation on the same set of HTML pages for the past two weeks. Every little change to the CSS spawns a fresh round of testing. It’s intricate, tedious work with little reward, especially when you get the same results every single time. I literally take screenshots of web pages and count pixels between lines and letters.
Three test cycles today. Started testing at 9AM, finished, and a noon update invalidated all of my morning’s work. Worked on another project for a while. Resumed testing, and a 4:55 update invalidated the next round’s work.
Tomorrow I’ll go in and generate documentation on this version that will be read between zero and one times. What? New comment in the CSS, you say? Guess I have to throw out all of the work I did and start over for the fifth time in two days.
Work like this is giving me serious second thoughts about my career as a web developer. I didn’t need a degree for this shit.
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02.18.08
Posted in work at 17:46 by swong
I think I need a new set of priority definitions for work. They’ll go:
- Top Priority
- Top #1 Action Item Priority
- Emergency Rush
- Priority Emergency Rush
- Ultra Priority Emergency Rush
- Clone Yourself and Work On This at Double Speed Ultra Mega Top Priority Emergency Rush
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02.15.08
Posted in coffee, pondering, work at 15:43 by swong
A new coffee maker materialized at work the other day. Someone’s been setting it to run in the morning. The old one is sitting, unplugged, on a side table, looking dejected.
A second new coffee maker appeared a little while ago, boasting a fresh pot of java. Really.
My first thought: “Is the population of coffee makers going to expand in a linear or exponential fashion?”
My second thought: “What we have here is an excellent real world demonstration of Krupps mitosis.”
I’ll be here all week.
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02.14.08
Posted in work at 23:31 by swong
Just a tip for good managers: If you call on your team to put in overtime, don’t go home in full sight of them. If you make a subordinate stay late to work on something that either of you can cover, don’t pack and leave in front of them as they power their workstation back up. Have the decency to sneak out the back.
Also, if you assign someone to grok 1500 lines of code, don’t get all indignant if they haven’t finished in three hours. Especially if you’ve also assigned several priority assignments on the same deadline.
I’m just saying.
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