Dear Friends,
I used to think my coworkers liked me. Now I’m starting to wonder, since every time I open my mouth lately, it’s meant more work for them. I am the master of discovering unforseen implications. I’m used to being a lone gun when it comes to work, for many reasons. I like to do everything myself so that I know how things interact; from top to bottom, I understand the flow. It’s not easy for me to jump into the middle of development like I did with this project. Other people’s code makes me cranky; I’m more likely to scrap it and rewrite. It’s not even that I think my way is better1, I’m just a control freak. It took me a while to figure out how everything works on this project, so now I’m forced to think about it. Which means I can’t shut up. Yeah, I could keep the issues to myself and have some dumb user stumble across it in production, but that would be worse. I hate that, because it means more database changes, more admin tools, and (god forbid) more rewriting. And there’s nothing I dislike more than rewriting my code, which was unquestionably perfect to begin with. Right. Anyway. One of the truisms about applications development is that 90% of your effort goes towards protecting the data from the end user2. It’s absolutely correct. But the thing I like about this kind of work, and the reason that I’m bad at things like, say, interpersonal relations, is that chaos theory doesn’t come into play. If you know what you’re doing, you can take every variable into account. You can make something unbreakable. That’s unrealistic, of course, because you can’t possibly think of everything, but the point is that there’s nothing unknown, just unthought-of. There are also the things you intentionally ignore, like the fact that this website looks really, really crappy if you’re using Lynx. I know that, and I choose to disregard. And why the hell are you using Lynx, anyway? Netscape 2.0 is where it’s at. Jenni1 OK, I’m lying about that. My code is better.
2 Michael and I were arguing one day about a client’s request for a really stupid feature. I was irritated at having to write it, because it was dangerous, involving the potential loss of a lot of data. He said, “It’s not our fault if they asked us for the gun they’re using to shoot themselves in the foot.” Ha.