11 min
Doomers and hawks
I've spent about a decade watching the careful work get cut first whenever a date slips, so I know exactly what the safety people are worried about, and I still come down on going faster.
Culture
All writing →17 posts filed under Culture, newest first.
10 min
Something that can go red
Somebody asked me for something to read about naming conventions, so I sent them a post I wrote in 2015 and then made the mistake of reading it myself.
8 min
Rubber duck debugging, in writing
Half the questions I write in a channel never get sent, because I figure out the answer somewhere in the middle of writing them, and I've stopped thinking of that as wasted effort.
9 min
Nobody demos an upgrade
The best possible outcome of a migration is that nothing happens, which looks exactly the same from the outside as having done nothing at all.
9 min
The loan with no lender
A ticket I wrote in 2022 asking for a few days to clean up the checkout templates has now outlived 2 project management tools, and in 3 years not one person has argued against doing it.
9 min
The third proposal
A proposal landed in August to rebuild a client platform from scratch, and when I went digging in the shared drive I found two older ones saying almost exactly the same thing.
7 min
The note I wrote in 2021
I priced out everything my job gave me that wasn't salary, and two years later every number on that list belongs to a market that ended.
8 min
Somebody typed it into a text box
I spent three days on a maintenance retainer taking things out of a client's site, and the last thing on the list turned out to be holding up the one page the whole business hangs on.
10 min
They deleted the line
I asked a junior developer why a line was there, meaning it literally, and they deleted it, which is roughly when I understood that my job title had been doing the talking.
7 min
The default is 30 minutes
I booked half an hour with a coworker to ask a yes-or-no question, and then I added up the rest of the week and found 19 hours of calls in it.
11 min
I had to type my own address
A five-month redesign went out in one drop, conversion came down about 8%, and the thing doing it was a checkout field that had quietly stopped telling the browser what it was for.
7 min
The big file was dead
I spent my first full day on an inherited store reading the file everybody had warned me about, and the git log said nobody had changed a line of it since 2018.
9 min
A week became a day
I said about a week on a call and meant it, and two days later the word about was gone and there was a date in the plan with my name next to it.
7 min
The members area was a spreadsheet
Item seven on the brief was a members area, and six weeks later I found out what it was for, which was a price list somebody was sending by hand once a month.
7 min
Nothing older than May
I went looking in Slack for the reasoning behind a strange line of code and search had nothing older than about five weeks, which turns out to be all the history we have.
8 min
Just a refresh
The brief asked for new colors and what we handed over was a CMS migration, and the reason those two turned out to be the same project has nothing to do with the colors.
6 min
Worth doing badly
Chesterton's line about doing things badly is the most useful thing I know about actually finishing anything, and it goes well past side projects.