2014 Is Here

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Another year of writing nothing. So what were last year’s achievements:

  • Still alive.
  • Still doing the visits to Sydney via the Koru lounges.
  • Still trying to work out what it is all about.
  • Looking after myself, the dawg, and the kaat. The kaat remains unimpressed at my dysfunctional telephathic interface.
  • Find that I am still bored by C++ and Java, and want to pursue more interesting and different languages like Erlang, Go, Ruby and (perhaps) Rust.

2013 Is Here

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Hey, I managed to write absolutely nothing last year. This is an amazing achievement.

Having said that, I did manage to do this:

  • Looked after myself, the dog & cat when Pauline was overseas on contracting work.
  • Looked after myself, the dog & cat when Pauline started a new job in Sydney.
  • Made a few trips to Sydney when Pauline was contracting there and after her new job started.
  • Discovered the joys of the Air New Zealand Koru lounge.
  • Rediscovered that I am still quite good at this software lark after all; don’t let the technophiles blind you with jargon.

2012 approaches …

2012 is only a few days away. Perhaps this year I can do something useful with this blog. Perhaps a bunch of coding ideas in different languages. Or just something decent written once a month,

So, promise to self. One decent, Steve Yegge type post every month.

Lean attitude?

In answer to my question:

What would you do if you find a bug in another developer’s code, something you could fix right away? Raise a bug report, or dive in and fix it then and there?

The answer that came right back at me was:

Always raise a bug report.

And we are looking to move to lean development with an attitude like that. I just don’t think that is the can do attitude I expect of people that work in a lean environment. I expected to hear  “fix it now” but what I can expect of a company that has taken ages to evolve its processes?

No much I guess.

I wonder what we could do if we started again, from scratch, with people that had never worked here. What kind of culture would we get? I guess it would all come down to the kind of leadership the company gets. A cautious leader gives you  cautious decisions; a less cautious leader might give you some  risky decisions but without risk how can you win bigger than you are today?

We are cautious because of experience, and we don’t like egg on our face. Regression testing isn’t automated so it is hard to prove that a quick fix is correct.; you don’t find out until much, much later that the fix didn’t work. So the price you pay for trying to fix it now has always been way too high.

We need to fix that.

Excepted?

cheques will only be excepted with the following idIn New Zealand, the sound of an ‘a’ and and ‘e’ are very similar, so I guess this would sound correct. Still, I am amazed that a national chain supermarket would ever manage to pin such a laminated note to every one of its tills. It doesn’t say much for the manager of this store, does it?