Shockey Philosophy

Recently I was chatting with someone on Facebook about the whole concept behind naming and the cynical way we deal with failure in the workplace. This all started with Dave Sobel from Evolve who once said this to his burning jungle (paraphrasing):

“I could make more money by setting it on fire than paying you.”

The cold hard truth behind technology management is that most of it could be done by a well trained monkey. About the only thing we cannot automate at this point the the shockey stick to tase the monkey when it stops paying attention to the stuff on the screen. I am hopeful for X10 and Lego Mindstorms but in the meantime the best we can do is shell scripts…

Real Life Example

Last night I was sitting down to finally document one of the many, many, many things only I know how to do at OWN because at some point in the past I was the one stuck making it happen.. and as with everything I do, I probably had 2 minutes and used the Vanilla Ice method: If there was a problem, yo I’ll solve it. Solving problems without planning or process or consideration… almost guarantees that down the road the whole thing will either require cloning or serious training on everything I knew at the time so the problem can be prolonged.

So after an all nighter and a few really long days this week, I started my journey of 825 steps to publish enclosure content. It involved getting the bit size of the file, editing XML, updating 4 or 5 pages… and somewhere around step 18…

“What if all of this was simply rendered by the MYSQL Script? do it in AM”

This AM.. took 10 minutes to write.

This fall/winter season for OWN is all about moving to that next level as a company and getting rid of all the little crap processes I created on the fly. While it’s hard to face the daemons of past mistakes, it’s nice to think to the day when it’s not my fault everything around here is s@#.

Till that day, bzzzt, code faster monkey!

Do likewise gents, good luck!