Being anal ain't all bad

I tend to be rather short with people and process that I consider overly burdened with steps and detail. In other words I hate 'ANAL' people. Folks who have their list of steps for everything, and follow those steps with religious zeal, bordering on fanaticism. You know the folks, the ones who want the results of report x ordered the same way each and every time as and example. Such a person calls out the national guard when a software change presents output in a different order. Such a person questions the validity of such output simply because two rows of output are swapped. I used to think of this kind of behavior as a bad thing, wasteful of precious time that I have never had enough of. Sweating the small stuff, I felt sorry for these folks, while being annoyed with them in my interactions. These folks are everywhere after all.

Hypocritically perhaps, I find my interactions with systems to follow such an anal pattern. Initially this behavior on my part was undertaken to simply allow the kind of compliance that I feel will come in any such system rollout to the larger whole. Sure the steps followed religiously in testing and development are overkill, unnecessary and wasteful of precious time, but at some point, when I am going to be tasked with deployment and the whole thing gets put under the scrutiny of external eyes, those anal bastards are gonna want all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I better just do it at the outset, it's better that way. At least that's what I have always told myself.

One such measure I have found myself, initially begrudgingly so, undertaking is to have a complete history of each and every version of project z that is being deployed to a client even in test. This is not to say that through the miracles of source control I could recreate said archive. No rather I am talking about having each version archived in it's own bundle, in a repository on the clients own environment. If the client has a training and production version then there is an archive of each of these items for every version that has ever been sent along to the client. Overkill? Perhaps but required for certain levels of compliance with certain regulatory bodies whose sole existence is to ensure that measures such as this are in force, else bad things will happen inflicted by ( insert big brother here ).

I have been at a training seminar for the past few days. Each day spent from 7am through 6pm in sessions. Of course we have a client who has an urgent need for 16 new and changes to a rollout that I must also attend to. So even though I am away I have to get this stuff done as well. Long nights in hotel room working remotely, and many a early morning deployment to test environment for the clients review. As you might imagine, many of these nights have had me performing these tasks in in a very impaired state of exhaustion. Mistakes in deploying a project of this type can be catastrophic and given the mental condition I am in in these scenarios are inevitable. In these instances I now see a new use for the Anal behavior I have trained myself to follow. It provides the appropriate safety net for the require CYA necessary when you do something like deploy a training version over a production installation at 4am.......


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Location:W Flamingo Rd,Las Vegas,United States

Light dawns onto propeller beanie

It's been an excruciatingly long set of months leading up to this post. All of it spent in death march style months on two tasks that's have consumed my every waking moments attention. Looking over the past few years I am struck by one overriding thought, "What's new?".

Indeed if you read this dusty corner of the Internet, you will see that those kinds of intros have been in an overwhelmingly common occurrence. So with that astonishing revelation I am further struck by another thought, "What am I doing wrong".

I feel like I am in that STTNG episode where the ship is suddenly presented with a debilitating anomaly, rudderless and on a collision course with another ship that has appeared from the cloud. There is carnage and destruction and death and then there at the poker game again. Like a twisted cruel ground hog day from hell. The past few years have been one such occurrence after another. Each time I find myself saying, "Well we won't make that mistake again".

Indeed, we tend not to make the same mistakes again, yet we do find ourselves in the same tenuous position. Fires raging all around, doom and gloom, and a squirt gun filled with gasoline to put them out. Eventually we have either managed to extinguish the flames by sheer will and perseverance, or they have extinguished themselves by simply running out of fuel to burn. (squirt guns don't have that large a capacity).

This particular project presented itself like any other. We engage with it like we have done before, with differences gleaned from the past designed to avoid painful bruising and internal injuries sustained in prior battles. Yet I sit here headed off to Vegas for my end of phase decompression feeling just as shitty as ever. The real problem on this one is that the source of this is really not through with it's carnage yet. The project is not finished, just an important milestone has been reached.

As I sit here thinking about what has gone wrong on this particular project and what has gone right, I find myself dismayed by the fact that the measures we employed at the outset have had the desired effects, it's just that new dis-functional elements have appeared that have wreaked havoc on the project. Like some twisted game of whack-a-mole, we stamp out a problem with process and another more insidious one appears to take it's place.

In this case the new elements have taken the form of a set of overwhelmed managerial elements on the other side of the table. This has resulted in feature creep that has killed our ability to deliver. The cart is leading the horse here and that is never a good thing. Our mistake was not seeing this at the outset and enforcing some measures that stand a chance at mitigating the effects. I am very disappointed, not at the client, but at myself rather for not recognizing this sooner. The whole thing is so textbook, and yet we fell victim to the standard pressures that befall every small company, struggling to stay afloat in what can charitably be called challenging economic times. The client is really in the same boat as we are in all this. They to have economic challenges and pressures to keep parties happy and all the kinds of things that lead this kind of nonsense. from the outside looking in, the problems are as plain as the nose on my face.

I have been reading a few things from other sage's in the industry over the past few weeks, in between compilations and bathroom breaks, and I am struck by the amount of tellings of these same tales of woe. Each pundit clearly outlining the problems in all the gory details that are not fit for children to see, each pundit unable to show a solution that will surefire rectify the situation. That is unless, as a company, we want to price ourselves out of the market. A small and very cut-throat market at that.

So what are we left with? Scorched earth in our wake, bandaged and bruised, we trudge on to the next bit of green pastures. Our collective experience, the bandages for the next skirmish to be held in those green grasses and fragrant woods. The cycle will continue unaltered by the actions of our rag tag group of disillusioned developers until wars end. In my case I can see one one real end to this and it's filled with the witty catch phrase "Would you like fries with that?"




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Location:36000 feet en-route to Vegas