The Gantt

Every project needs a Gantt chart. It is essential. You can’t persuade any self-respecting middle-to-upper management cone-head to sign off on your project plan unless he sees the Gantt. He’ll tell you:
”Where’s the Gantt?”
And you’ll be like:
”Wtf, I just showed you the project schedule and…”
And he’ll just go:
“Where’s the Gantt?”
And you’ll try to explain:
”Look, there is no need for a Gantt chart – all the information you could cram into that chart is right…”
“So where’s the Gantt?” comes the reply.

So here’s the Gantt.



This needs some elaboration.

Familiarization (7.11-7.12)
As noted elsewhere, you inherit your baby project (roughly) 4% of the way through. Considering the fact you’re dealing with an 18 years long project, 4% is a lot. This means you’ll need to familiarize yourself with your baby.

Research (14.11-1.1)
In about a week, you will realize you haven’t the foggiest idea. You’ll read books, Google and call-up psychics. After two weeks you’ll give up.

Learning Basics (7.11-14.11)
In order to begin with the caretaking activities you will need to learn some basics. This includes (and is not limited to) feeding the baby, taking the baby for walks, keeping the baby clean and dry and keep the baby happy.

Caretaking Activities (14.11-?)
Apart from the developing stuff, you’ll actually need to maintain your baby. Have you ever worked on a project where you needed to maintain the data while actually developing system to manage the same data? We’ll it’s just like that.

Sleep (?)
What sleep?

Playing Your Favorite Board Game
I average 12 seconds a day. Which means I’ll finish a quick game of Go in about 450 days.

Household Tasks (daily)
The Baby Project is a perfect opportunity for your spouse to off-load some of the chores to you (this is an inherently bad idea – think Microsoft product support and India). At this time you have no choice but to pencil it in.

Teaching Basics (15.10-?)
A Baby requires you to teach it some of the basic skills of living in a civilized society. This includes (and is not limited to) eating, walking, talking, taking care of nature calls and to say “I’m really, really sorry” when he does something you don’t approve of.

Blogging (whenever)
This will fall under work-time (in case your boss is a cone-head, you will need to work at it at 1 am).

A random thing you will want to, but probably shouldn’t do as a newfangled dad #4

Register a gmail account for your baby.

Nice to meet you post

Hi!

If I could keep a coherent thought in my head for more then fifteen seconds, knew how to form complete sentences, had a vocabulary, was able to type (well, strike the intended keys) then this would be written by me and not my dad.

<-- This is me today.

Well not really me – it’s a picture of me. Anyways, since dad takes care of the unmentionables and mom takes care of the food, I thought I should let him blog for me as well. As long as I’m full, dry, warm, had enough sleep and winamp is blasting Sugababes I’m good.

I wouldn’t call that high maintenance – would you? I do find my parents are hard to program. I have to guide them every step of the way. Nothing happens without my auditory signal. I swear, if I never cried they would forget to feed me! They just don’t seem very intelligent. I’ll have to work on them some more.

David

A random thing you will want to, but probably shouldn’t do as a newfangled dad #3

Let your baby write blog.

Mm,.

n ,l
, mmu89c++khcxjxo j h90

Geektionary: Baby.Diapers

The purpose of Baby.Diaper classes is to catch and handle bowel exceptions. These vary in type, smell and mass.

Baby.Diper classes implement one of two common interfaces: IWashable or IDisposable.

Programming sleep mode

First of all, you need to make sure your baby is at a stage of development where sleep method is implemented (we’re talking about the public sleep method here, not to be confused with internal InvokeUnconsciousness method which is called at random for the first few weeks).

Next, you need to realize there is no surefire way to invoke sleep. There are literally hundreds of overloads of the sleep method, ranging from simple .Sleep (MothersMilk food) to more complex .Sleep (Sound music, Toy teddy, String bedtimeStory, Int TimeoutInHours) methods. And each is more likely to throw an exception then work as advertised. But then again, they might work the next time you try them. The trick is to keep trying and experimenting!

For the past month David would instantly fall asleep to Guns’n’Roses’s Welcome to the Jungle played insanely loud while being held in my arms and gently bounced off beat with a freshly opened banana* nearby to provide the correct aromatic environment for sleeping. The key is to experiment! Naturally David stopped responding to this method two days ago – but I’m having some success with Enya’s May it be, Oranges, Mathmos space projector and circular walks through the apartment.

Did you know the word “banana” is the most commonly used password for female users named a variation of the name “Anna”?

A random thing you will want to, but probably shouldn’t do as a newfangled dad #2

Start a blog about your baby.

Basic design flaws (part II)

Subtitled: Inheritance

Despite what you might have learned at sex class – your baby does not inherit from you. Babies inherit from an abstract baby class. The bad news is over 90% of class methods are abstract and need implementation. The other 10% need redesign.

As you may have noticed – the designer of the abstract baby class had no clue and surely had no experience in OOP. Case in point is the “eat (object food)” method. You might think that putting any object as food would do. Certainly there’s nothing in the method signature that suggests otherwise. You would be wrong! You see, babies need different kind of food objects at different stages in their development. You’d think the almighty class designer would consider other solutions to the problem, but nooo. It’s up to you to know how your baby works and what to feed it and when. Talk about encapsulation…

As previously stated, the baby does not inherit from you. You see, none of your class methods will work in a baby. You need to write them from scratch. The good news is none of your spouse methods are implemented. So she needs to program them too.

And guess who’s a better programmer!

A random thing you will want to, but probably shouldn’t do as a newfangled dad #1

Name variables after your baby’s name.