Classic mistakes (part I)

Having recently been reminded of the classic mistakes in software development I decided to see how well they apply to parenting. As this covers a large area I’ll split the posting in three parts covering 12 points each. So here we go:

1. Undermined motivation

   Your parents will (without fail) tell you (in excruciating detail) exactly what you are doing wrong. On rare occasions you'll do something right just to be reminded of the many times you did it wrong.

2. Weak personnel

   Uhm… I should skip this one.

3. Uncontrolled problem employees

   See 2.

4. Heroics

   In this field you’ll need heroism. Especially at 3am while forming the words: “Honey, I think it’s your turn now.”

5. Adding people to a late project

   Grandparents, friends, babysitters, friendly neighbors will add new behavioral patterns to your baby (they will not correct or improve them).

6. Noisy, crowded offices

   The emphasis is on noisy.

7. Friction between developers and customers

   Your baby may feel you are not cooperating and not meeting his/her needs. You may feel your baby is being unreasonable. This leads and is partially caused by poor communication.

8. Unrealistic expectations

   You may expect to do a good job – give your offspring a happy childhood and all. Fifteen years from now, you’ll get a chance to explain it all to their psychiatrist.

9. Lack of effective project sponsorship

   There are no sponsors in this business. There are however family members eager to fill the role.

10. Lack of stakeholder buy-in

    See 9.

11. Lack of user input

    You need to read this one as lack of meaningful user input. There’s plenty of meaningless user output (also see 6.)

12. Politics placed over substance

    You’ll receive unbelievable amount of hints, suggestions to follow and vehement criticism for not following some latest parenting model (apparently - Indigo parenting has been renamed Fundamental Communication Parenting).

There’s nothing like taking a word most unrelated to children and stick parenting at the end. I recommend making-up your own parenting model to counter such advice. Lately I’ve had some luck using (well Agile and Asynchronous parenting were already taken!) Ajax parenting. The idea behind Ajax parenting… well it deserves a separate posting. Keep an eye on your rss reader for the next 12 points though.

OT: International Slow Server Day

As a Chief Paradigm Administrator at my current place of employment I nominate this day - 13th of June as the International Slow Server Day. It's free - I checked!
You know those days when queries just seem to take forever, when transactions have a way of getting entangled, when every (l)user just has to access just about every record in the database, when rendering a simple "Hello world" is more then the poor ol' web server can handle, when disk access is maxed and constant and there's no free memory left? Well, today was that day...
So If you agree with my notion that we need a special day, dedicated to just keeping the servers cool and giving them a day off - sign up below.

Polyphonic David

Following some late night debugging sessions and feeling like I reached a dead-end I took a break. I browsed around my bookmarks (OT – I’m in the habit of book-marking interesting sites I discover while hunting for something else. Whenever I feel bored hor desperate I go rummaging through that dusty attic to see if there’s anything there to get me going again) and reading through some interesting articles I had an epiphany. It was right there in plain sight. This was the reason David had failed to respond to direct requests. My calls were blocked with no apparent cause – till I put on my reflector glasses. The signature of the main metod call was quite revealing:

public void Execute(CommandObject request) 
& public async Bribe(ISweet sweets)
{
   ...
}

The calls to the Execute method were stacking up but I failed to call the Bribe method. After this things went smoothly – it looked like anything implementing ISweet would do…
… that is until mom showed up and depreciated the Bribe method.

Why don’t you write about… #1

… that new cool Japanese robot called CB2.

Well, for starters – it’s freaking me out. I can’t even bring myself to post a picture of the thing. It’s too big, it has the weirdest color they could possibly choose and it has a big mouth that is always open, so it looks like it wants to eat you. And I bet it could!

I love (nearly) all things Japanese (hey I play go :)) but this thing jumped the shark. Stop digging it – please!