But truly awesome leaders know how to fix it!!!

THEY ARE REAL.

Saw it at Bit Rebels.

Teh Awesome Spec of Greatness and Wonder

Actually, (awesome) jokes aside, a quick brainstorm with awesome developers and awesome product managers to rationalise a problem and collaboratively come up with a solution is what it takes. This is something you can never have if you outsource your software development. That isn’t to say you should never outsource, just don’t outsource those projects you actually want to make money from or be competitive with. The technology market moves too quickly to have 6 week turnaround times and still be a player.

Nothing beats a quick awesome brainstorm and an agile implementation of the result.

Finda FTW!

Meetings were had, arguments were won, business cases were created and followed up repeatedly, there was begging, pleading, ranting and finally there was WIN. Betty joined us properly this week to start her career of awesome and win with the Finda developers.

We’re pretty sure she’ll enjoy her stay since we have every intention of looking after her very well.

Before we go onto the gallery I quickly put together to showcase the hotness and awesome that is Betty, please take this time to listen to Betty’s theme song, created in 1977 in anticipation of Betty joining our team:

And now, ladies and gentlemen and Awesome Geeks, I present to you Black Betty, her nickname is “Betty The Beast”, cos she’s got pride! She’s got power! She’s a bad ass mother who don’t take shit from nobody!

A portrait of our sexy Black Betty!

Isn’t she just the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? She’s cute, clever and has the memory of a whole herd of elephants!

A close up of sexy Black Betty the super model's face!

Just look at that face! So pretty!

Betty's beautiful green eye!

Her emerald eye, bright and shining with awesome!

Betty's beautiful inside... er... brain!

Isn’t Betty just awesome! 16 cores and 16Gb of pure developer pleasure!

Welcome to Finda, our lovely Black Betty “The Beast”!

To let you have a fair judgement, I have vimperator and firebug installed, with ONE tab open. I left my computer running in the office over the long weekend.

Enter some lovely vimlicious commands on the file, and then proceed with the accidental “:w ~”. That erroneous command, will unfortunately write the file as “~” to your current working directory.

So we obviously don’t want that silly “~” file in our lovely clean directory so we’ll go ahead and remove it.

Now watch this:

$ rm ~
rm: cannot remove `~': Is a directory


That doesn’t make sense, it should be a file. Oh well. “I don’t have to stuff around.” so I’ll just:

$ rm -rf ~

And then it slowly dawns….NOO!

CTRL+C,CTRL+C,CTRL+C,CTRL+C,CTRL+C...

And there you have it. A recursive delete on ALL my files in my home directory. Nice. I’ll spend the morning rebuilding my Dev environment.

Mistakes like these are not acceptable from Awesome Coding Ninja’s.

To remind our resident Coding Ninja’s that only the most awesome things are acceptable we have two trophies. For outstanding performance and achievement in the Art of Software Engineering we have the #1 Coding Ninja Trophy. This trophy shows a developer’s peers that his skills are currently highly regarded and has recently accomplished an awesome feat of technical supremacy. Since the trophy is an empty Red Bull can (empty since people love to drink awesome and only 1 since it’s the recommended daily allowance… says so on the can…) other ‘normal’ people can also admire the technical genius of the developer in possession of this sought after symbol of Awesome.

The second trophy, cleverly designed to remind a developer that only the most awesome things are acceptable, is the “Luser of the week” trophy. As you can see from the image below, a sad face is displayed right underneath a word that may be read as “Luser” which is very similar to “User”, to remind the developer that “if it’s not awesome it makes you sad”. One might also notice that the trophy is constructed from… “green tins of liquid that shall not be named”. This indicates to everybody around what a sad situation was created by the holder of the trophy. Nobody likes sad and thus the “green tins of liquid that shall not be named” are full, since no awesome person would lower themselves to drink such awesomeless drinks.

The Luser of the Week trophy.

Always make it awesome. Don’t be a luser.

The difference between ‘existing’, though and ‘other people giving a crap about you’ is more adequately illustrated in the picture below.

I know you’re laughing but I also know your little inside voice is going ‘OMG, it happens to me… I’m so sad’. Yes, you are.

The sad reality of Facebook...

I’ve witnessed some of these epic workarounds that people invent when they don’t fully understand what’s going on. I’ve invented a couple of epic one’s myself, especially in new programming languages.

One (there are others…) specific example I remember of Epic Workaround Woo By @shawn_hamman was on a loan origination and servicing project many, many years ago in Visual Basic 6. I hadn’t been programming in it (VB6) for very long (at all, would be a more appropriate term) when I started on the project. It was during the ramp up phase and we were busy building a proof of concept to illustrate how the UI was going to function while the company hired the rest of the development team. The ‘proof of concept’ turned out to be the actual product in the end…

You may laugh at what comes next. I’m only a little embarrassed.

There was a requirement for a “combo box” that couldn’t be edited. The VB6 ”combo box”, by default, allows you to enter text or select an item from the drop down. The editable text, in this case, was an unacceptable situation.  Not being used to Visual Basic and being relatively new to commercial programming and being pragmatic about software development I set about building a work around for this. I made a OCX component with this editable “combo box” and through an elaborate set-up of triggers, methods and checks made it un-editable. Essentially replacing the text in whenever it changed to what was there before, except when you selected an item which would then… you get the idea.

It did the job ok. Sort of.

The problem was that shortly after that the feature creature got hold of it and the OCX got a built-in label and validation… it kept growing. It was a problem because every time the OCX changed an elaborate update of the entire project had to happen on every developers machine, the old OCX had to be unregistered, the new one registered, Source Safe updated… for every  bug fix. It took weeks.

Of course, a senior developer was hired eventually who took one look at my work of art, barked a laugh and pointed to the “list box” control.

Some xkcd win and awesome

The original is here: http://xkcd.com/763/

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