My Life Blog

You are wondering where I’ve been, no?

As of Monday morning at 1:30am, I completed my 80+ hour work week which included a joyful tour of duty on Independence Day.  There’s something ironic about that.

But alas, I need to step into the Confessional today and seek forgiveness for all the programming and system atrocities committed over the past 7 days.  The fact that I’m moved to do so should be considered exceptional as I’m not even Catholic.  And to be honest, I’m not sure there really is a God that can hear these tales; the God of Systems never answered my prayers.

To set the stage, for months I’ve been working on a project where there have been no requirements other than the implicit "build what we already have" directive.  We’re migrating off of an old, delapidated  platform onto the newest app server.  It must be stated emphatically that these sins were committed under duress.  And so we begin:

• I did knowingly avoid TDD (test-driven development) and check stuff straight in under the naive assumption that some development time could be saved.  To those who don’t know, this is always Fool’s Gold.

• I did knowingly allow non-semantic and table-based markup to be allowed into the system.  It must be said that I wrote none of it myself.  Zeldman would be proud.  Of me, that is.

• I did knowingly sleep at night even though our organization did not choose to set up a QA group to test the application.  If bullets one and three scare you, well, welcome to my world.

• I did knowingly vehemently complain to management on too numerous times to count.  I became an outspoken, worse-than-a-squeaky-wheel bi-atch.  The approach appealed to my passive-aggressive tendencies, but has done little to progress my "career".  Yes, the word must be quoted at this point.

• With mild regret and some strange element of power-tripping, I did knowingly code entire features after UAT and after go-live was in progress.  To compound the sin, the code bypassed testing and our QA environment and went straight to Production.  Hey, when in Rome…

• I did knowingly substitute brute force for design elegance as the aggressive timeline approached.  I’ve noticed no one cares about elegance in IT anyway.  But parts of me died with each rustic piece of code that I added.  I think I’ve paid for this sin already. 

• And saving the worst for last.  Over the weekend, I ate 2 packages of cheese and crackers, three bags of Doritos, three pieces of pizza, 8 Hershey’s bite-sized bars, four Ding-Dongs, 1 piece of blue-icing cake, and food from Chic-Fil-A, Pei-Wei, and Celebrity.  I also drank a Sprite and several Diet Cokes.  Oh…and I brought my guitar in and demonstrated to everyone that I still can’t play the damned thing.

I could go on and on, but they say you should keep blog posts short. 

I stand waiting for my judgment and am down on my knees begging for forgiveness. 

"Forgive me Father, for I know not what I do…"  Obviously.