I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Haunted legacy: a Halloween code story
It was 17:55 on the 31st October. Five minutes before the programmer’s shift ended and the night shift took over. The time when you hope that no new bugs will be reported and no new tickets will be raised.
Ping!
The ticketing system sounded an alert, and the notification bubble popped back into existence, a bright little ‘1’ in the middle of its red circle.
A moment in the project plan; a lifetime in the codebase
Software can be a source of regret as well as value. It is a common experience to find yourself looking at code and wondering what fool could possibly have written it, only to read the comments and find out that it was you.
The passage from choice to regret is often clear to developers, despite their faulty memories. You knew what you were doing when you made those decisions – and that you (or someone else) would pay for them in the future.
However, this path is not so clear to other stakeholders and non-technical decision makers – and their choices are often the ones that create the most regret.