If you fix bugs by hacking code on live production machines, I don't want to work on your team. | [reply] |
I believe what I said was "I make crashbugs on production machines go away". This is so that they don't crash anymore. Often, this means any number of the following
- the OS is unstable
- I have a VT110 connection
- I have exactly 23 lines and 80 columns
- I'm probably over a crappy connection
- the CPU is going nuts
Basically, I have to take the errant application down NOW and make sure it doesn't come back up till I can fix it, preferably no earlier than Monday morning. And, of course you fix it in dev, write the appropriate tests, run it through QA, then put it back on prod. It's not a matter of hacking till it works in production - that's called DIP and is a very apropos acronym. And, shutting the machine down isn't always an option, either. You don't always have the luxury of running just one app on a given machine.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
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Yeah, especially if the only editor you can find on the system is "ed". Or whatever ancient VMS systems have by default. Or, you said a random system, what if it's all in Czech? I wonder how much use will the documentation be to you then. Or, still remember you said random, what if it's all in cyrilic? Everything in Russian. Still cool? Japanese? Chinese?
Random means a much wider list of posibilities than "any version of Linux in English".
Jenda
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XML sucks. Badly. SOAP on the other hand is the most powerfull vacuum pump ever invented. |
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Every system in the world will have an editor that speaks English, especially if it's an older machine. English is the lingua franca1 of the computing world.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
- A very interesting note - lingua franca is an old Italian phrase meaning "The language of the Franks", or French. French was considered the lingua franca because everyone who was anyone spoke it back in the Middle Ages as the language of diplomacy.
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A correction to your very interesting note.
Lingua Franca was actually a distinct pidgin language, which was used as a trade tongue. It borrowed from various dialects of Italian, Spanish and so on. It got its name from the Arabs who called all Europeans, Franks.
French became the language of diplomacy much later.
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