Author: Shelley Powers

The Line-of-Sight Developer

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 7, 2002

I heard the term “Line-of-Sight” in reference to certain breeds of dogs, such as the Afghan.

It seems that these dogs have this instinctive urge to run towards the horizon, and if they get loose, they’ll keep running towards the horizon at full speed until their owners catch them (fat chance) or until they run out of steam.

My brother and his family have a Greyhound/Great Dane mix dog named Hillary that’s a line-of-sight dog. The problem is that she has the speed of a Greyhound and the size of a Great Dane — not a dog one takes for a walk without a great deal of trepidation.

These pooches just can’t help themselves: they see, they do.

Odd thing, though, is that I know of developers that are like line-of-sight dogs: they see, they do. The problem is that you can’t leash these folks up, at least not without breaking several laws of the land.

The Characteristics of a Line-of-Sight Developer

How do you recognize if you work with a Line-Of-Sight (LOS) developer, or are one yourself? Well, there are several warning signs to look for.

You receive an email from another team member that they have “improved” the performance of a key element in the application your team is working on, have checked in the change and is ready to move it into production. Unfortunately, none of the rest of your team knew that the developer was working on this key piece of code, much less what the change was, and how it will impact on the rest of the application. Congratulations, you’ve just identified a LOS developer.

During a team meeting, you discuss the possibility of making a change to the user interface of an application, but decide to wait and get additional information. The next thing you know, the change has been made. You track the change down to a specific developer who states “Well, I had some time so I thought I would go ahead and implement the change”. Yup, one of the classic characters of the LOS breed is the words “Well, I had some time …”.

In an environment where clients have direct access to the developers, they always approach the LOS developer with requests for changes. You see, it’s an established fact that Clients instinctively know which developer will make the requested change without question. This ability is part of the client’s built-in survival instinct.

The LOS developer can program better than anyone else — at least, that’s their own opinion. So, they’ll fix other team members code whether the code was broken or not, inefficient or not, up to specs or not. After all, it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

The LOS developer: they saw, they did.

Two Different LOS Breeds

There are actually two different breeds of LOS developers.

There is the “I’m inexperienced and very eager” LOS developer. I call this type of LOS developer the “WOWIC” (Watch Out World I’m Coming) developer.

The WOWIC LOS developer brings the unanticipated changes they make to you for praise and at that point, all you can do is tell them they’ve done a good job, and give them a stock option to chew on. After all, to beat them about the head with a project plan will only break their spirit — you have to approach their training more cautiously than that.

The second type of LOS developer is harder to work with but thankfully less common than the WOWIC LOS developer. The chief signs of this type of developer is their arrogance, so I call this breed the AAH (Arrogant A**H***) LOS Developer.

You can easily recognize the AAH LOS Developer — one of their chief hobbies is to go through their teammates’ code and change it to what they believe is better code. If the teammate disagrees with the change, the AAH LOS developer looks at them as if they were an amoeba that just started to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner”. No one disagrees with The Programmer.

Dangers of LOS

Anyone who has worked on a larger application knows how dangerous a LOS developer can be. What may seem to be a simple change in the code for one application module can have disastrous effects on the application as a whole. If the change is in shared code, the developer has a responsibility to inform others before making the change. Better yet, the change should be incorporated into a staged development rollout, to ensure appropriate testing.

Another danger of the LOS developer is to the morale of the team. If you have a developer, particularly an AAH LOS Developer, grabbing other people’s code and changing it without legitimate cause you’re going to have dissension in the group. This type of behavior is discourteous. This type of behavior is costly to the development effort. Really, this type of behavior is just plain rude.

To make changes daily or even weekly and just plunk the code in without a plan only disrupts the work of other developers. I’ve found that any language that supports class inheritance, such as Java or C++ is particularly susceptible to this type of “ad hoc” code changing.

Is there a cure for LOS?

As stated there are two breeds of LOS developers, so there are two cures.

Having a well-established change control system and good software development procedures in place are about all you need to train the WOWIC LOS developer. They’re eager to please so showing them that good programming practices and teamwork support are just as valuable as lines of code will get the point across, quickly.

How about the AAH LOS Developer? Well, sometimes all you have to do is tell the AAH LOS Developer that they’ve tromped all over the team’s code and to please not do so in the future. If they’re more arrogant than A**H*** this could work.

However, the best approach with the AAH LOS Developer is to again set procedures in practice that curb the more I, PROGRAMMER urges of the AAH LOS Developer. In other words, track what the person is working on, and keep them busy enough with their own assignments to leave other people’s work alone.

Oh, did I mention that you need to have good programming practices, change control, and well understand project plans in place? I did? Just wanted to make sure.

Blast them all and let God sort them out

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 7, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve been ignoring the whole ‘humiliation’ thing going on between Dave and Glenn Reynolds and Nick Denton. To me, it resembled the typical warblogger BS, and I’ve listened to this broken record one too many times.

What changed my opinion was when Doc joined the fray with a gentle admonishment to the warbies. What caught my attention in particular, was a quote from another weblogger, Eric Olsen, who wrote:

If the Armies of Allah are defeated, humiliated, crushed, scattered upon the four winds, then the whole philosophical house of cards collapses and you have a beaten, malleable people willing to accept a new way of life, such as Japan after WWII.

We can’t look at the puzzle piecemeal any longer: we can’t look at al Qaeda, Hamas, Saddam, wahabbism, Afghanistan, or militant Islam anywhere as separate entities. We must see the whole puzzle for what it is, and end the threat behind them all once and for all; this is exactly “inflicting a lesser misery to end a greater one.”

Eric bases his philosophical attitude about the importance of humiliation on his interpretation of Japan’s response to the atomic bombing, and how, in his opinion, they’ve become such good post-war partners because they believe that they deserved the atomic bomb. In reference to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Musem, he wrote:

The museum, the city, and the country emphasize peace and conflict resolution not because they don’t feel historical guilt for WWII, but because they do. The town and the museum almost revels in the details of the destruction wrought by the bomb, not out of self-pity, but out of a fundamental sense of sorrow and guilt FOR HAVING BROUGHT THIS DESTRUCTION UPON THEMSELVES.
…
The atomic bomb brought bitter remorse, not from those who dropped it, but from those whom it was dropped upon. Why remorse? Because they believe they deserved it.

I’m not going to respond to Eric’s assumptions about Japan, though I hope that Jonathon Delacour does. Jonathon, do you agree with this? Can this possibly be true?

What I am going to talk about is this widening circle of dispassionate hate against anything and all things Arab. Where once the warbloggers had focused on Al-Qaeda and the Palestinians, the focus is now extending in ever widening circles of inclusion — the enemy is not only Al-Qaeda and the Palestinians, but is also Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and we can only assume most if not all Arab countries at some point.

Eric’s opinion is echoed by Martin Devon, who wrote today:

Perhaps Iraq was really behind the Sept. 11th attack. Perhaps Iraq actually had nothing to do with it. The question of what role, if any, Iraq really played in the attack isn’t relevant. The reason that the U.S. should go to war against Iraq (and Iran, ‘Saudi’ Arabia and Syria) is simple. The advanced state of technology today is such that the world can no longer afford to allow a country to be run by an irrational actor. A world leader who cannot be rationally deterred from using weapons of mass destruction cannot be permitted to control them.

(Of course, reviewing George Bush’s past actions, his dubious corporate accountability, and his willingness to instigate warfare for no other reason then to increase ratings points, his inexperience, and to be blunt, his lack of intelligence — one could apply the same to our own leader. I do not sleep easy knowing that Bush has a finger on our nuclear button.)

Months ago I asked where we draw the line. At what point is the destruction we’re willing to contemplate no longer justified by the WTC attacks? At what point is the destruction we’re willing to contemplate no longer justified by those killed in suicide bombings? What’s the ratio of acceptable death and destruction?

What will finally sate the US and Israel?

It seems as that I’m finally getting an answer, and this time without the pretty varnish of “selective warfare” and “purely defensive combat”. The answer is: bomb them all and let God sort them out. (God, of course, being the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians.)

<edit >Most people, including many Arabs, would rather die than suffer such extreme humiliation. In this country, we refer to this willingness to die to prevent the humiliation of defeat, “patriotism”. By saying we must humiliate the Arab people — the ‘Armies of Allah’ — in effect we’re saying that Arabs who refuse to be humiliated in this way must die.</edit>

And what’s truly scary is not knowing if Eric or Marvin are examples of extremist warbloggers, or are representative of a people of a country I no longer recognize.

Tags Iraq

Weblogging

Weblogging comment spamfest

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 6, 2002

Jonathon has started a new trend in weblogging — he’s giving a prize to the person who drops in the 1000th comment.

That’s right boys and girls, this is your chance to win either a Dishmatique of your very own — the tool of choice for webloggers round the world — or a selection of that delectable treat, Tim Tams.

Run, don’t walk, over to Mr. Delacour’s home and comment, comment, comment! Show Mr. D you love him. Pass the word. This is an official call for a Weblogging Comment Spamfest!.

In honor of this momentous occasion, today I’ll be tripping through Jonathon’s comments from postings past, and pulling out and posting excerpts.

Mr. Delacour and members of Mr. Delacour’s immediate family, friends, associates, and fellow Australians are not eligible for prizes. The results are being tallied by Anderson Accounting, and are not valid until appropriate bribes are paid.

Weblogging

Comment spamfest update

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 6, 2002

Bb here, reporting live from Jonathon Delacour’s Comment SpamFest. I can see that we have a few early birds among the festival attendees, including that mad man of the weblog airways, the master of the One Word Weblog, Steve Himmer. Steve’s comment is, well, urh, “No comment”. What can I say, folks — the man is a master of understatement.

(As a side note, folks, Steve is sporting a new look, these days, based on a move to Movable Type. It’s sort of retro Arizona wasteland – very stylish, and not what one would expect from a man who lives by the sea. Very chic with those accents of rust and dust.)

Folks, while we’re waiting on other arrivals at the SpamFest, I want to regale you with some Tips for Living, compiled from my own experiences.

Tip 1: When going to a county government building to register your car, never slam shut the cover of the hard glasscase holder for your sunglasses. It has a distinctive gun sound when echoing in larger buildings. Doing so may attract unwanted attention, including several country police officers with hands strategically placed on gun holsters.

Weblogging

Comment Spamfest two

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date August 6, 2002