Information Technology Dark Side

For the last few weeks we’ve had a serious problem – we couldn’t keep up with customer support requests. Every day our lead time grew. When it hit SIX FREAKING DAYS I started to panic. Fortunately, I’m a good panicker. I hired a truckload of really smart teenagers, put them through a crash course on […]

[Read more →]

Testing software saved my (professional) life. A long time ago I was totally stuck professionally. I was a project manager in the IT department of a giant insurance company that had absolutely no clue about freaking anything. I was miserable beyond belief. I wanted out. Out of project management, but most of all, out of […]

[Read more →]

The longer I do this, the more I agree with @dhh If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch @dhh’s talk from RailsConf2015. In it, @dhh introduces the notion that “monolithic” applications aren’t really bad in and of themselves and rebrands them as integrated systems. As I listened to @dhh talk I realized that […]

[Read more →]

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. This style of headline is all over the place. It’s tacky, so this is me mocking it a little bit. Yesterday I blogged about a distinction regarding DRY and posited an example of view code that is better with repetitive code than DRY code. I won’t rehash that, so here’s […]

[Read more →]

I’m starting to realize there is a difference between code that is functionally repetitive and code that is coincidentally repetitive. Here’s an example of some functionally repetitive code: class Admin::CoursesController < Admin::AdminController def index @courses = Course.all end def show @course = Course.find(params[:id]) end def engagement @course = Course.find(params[:id]) end def new @course = Course.new […]

[Read more →]

Best Sleep EVER I woke up this morning at 6:00 am feeling totally awesome. I slept like a log last night, better than I’ve slept anytime in the last six months. Shannon tells me kids came in and out of the room, talking, even snuggling, and I didn’t even roll over. It was a deep, […]

[Read more →]

Hiring IFL (Intern for Live) Until recently, we really struggled to provide consistent customer service. Sometimes we were awesome – customers would put in a ticket on a weekend in the wee hours and would get a response right away. Other times… not so great. It was hard to provide consistent customers service when it […]

[Read more →]

Benjamin Franklin said So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for anything one has a mind to do I’m not being a reasonable creature, and it’s darned inconvenient Last night I stayed up playing Civ 5 until 2:00 am. I didn’t […]

[Read more →]

Bootstrapping Sucks Winston Churchill famously said the following after losing power following World War 2: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. After six long years of bootstrapping, I feel much the same way. Bootstrapping sucks. It’s freaking hard, at least […]

[Read more →]

I load a lot of data into TroopTrack from CSV files by mapping fields in the CSV file to active record. Most of the time I am importing data from my competitors using CSV files they provide (and control the format of). In the past I have tended to write pretty sucky code for doing […]

[Read more →]