my give-a-damn meter is broken
well as some of you gathered from my post yesterday, i have started a new job. it's not the most glamourous job, i basically support the network and all applications for about 100 different small businesses. one of them, who i will refrain from naming for the time being, is our biggest client, who basically make up about 90% of our issues.
their biggest issue of the last couple days is that some of their reporting programs created in crystal reports are breaking. specifically, the applications are failing to connect to the database server, thereby preventing the retrieval of some pretty important data. this also is occuring after a complete network rebuild which was done on friday night, and after the cio of the company decided to restructure the file server where these reports are run from.
i can hear you say it now: "why don't you just open up the code, find out where it's referencing the database server and replace the old location with the new location?" well that would be a great idea, had the original creator of these reports done any of the following: a) written any documentation regarding these applications; b) left the code for these applications to allow us to modify them, should we find the correct settings; and/or c) not quit from our company, leaving no contact information.
it's situations like this that make me hate the world of i.t. yes, in the past couple years, documentation has become a big issue with the advent of the enron scandal/sox compliancy, easier to manage knowledge repositories (such as wikis, microsoft sharepoint services, and the like) and just the fact that applications are getting too large for a single person to maintain them, forcing developers to create knowledge bases if only for their own team. however, applications that are more than a couple years old, either do not have adequate documentation, or the documentation that does exist was written after the fact by some combination of using it and making notes along the way or reverse engineering the product and hoping that you can read assembly.
at any rate, i'm getting sick of it. in my opinion, documentation should be as important, if not more so, than the application itself. so long as you can let the users/support teams know what the application should be doing, the application will survive, as there will always be developers available to you that could read said documentation and correct any problems. however, if you're leaving it up to the support team as an exercise in figuring out how you're creating a connection to a database, you should be taken out behind a dumpster, and beaten with a 4u sharepoint server to get it into your head that not everyone can read your fucking mind; not everyone learned how to code the exact same way you do.
at this point, i'm ready to throw in the towel and go back to school for something else. stuff like this happens on a daily basis. developers who create even the smallest program think that "oh, it's just a teeny program, no one will ever need to know how to fix it" are kidding themselves. if you're involved in the creation of any application that is used by any business, you damn well better make documentation, because you may not be involved in it, but that application might need to grow, and if i don't know how your shit works, rest assured, i will hunt you down and it will not be a pretty sight.
now where is my goddamned latte?
their biggest issue of the last couple days is that some of their reporting programs created in crystal reports are breaking. specifically, the applications are failing to connect to the database server, thereby preventing the retrieval of some pretty important data. this also is occuring after a complete network rebuild which was done on friday night, and after the cio of the company decided to restructure the file server where these reports are run from.
i can hear you say it now: "why don't you just open up the code, find out where it's referencing the database server and replace the old location with the new location?" well that would be a great idea, had the original creator of these reports done any of the following: a) written any documentation regarding these applications; b) left the code for these applications to allow us to modify them, should we find the correct settings; and/or c) not quit from our company, leaving no contact information.
it's situations like this that make me hate the world of i.t. yes, in the past couple years, documentation has become a big issue with the advent of the enron scandal/sox compliancy, easier to manage knowledge repositories (such as wikis, microsoft sharepoint services, and the like) and just the fact that applications are getting too large for a single person to maintain them, forcing developers to create knowledge bases if only for their own team. however, applications that are more than a couple years old, either do not have adequate documentation, or the documentation that does exist was written after the fact by some combination of using it and making notes along the way or reverse engineering the product and hoping that you can read assembly.
at any rate, i'm getting sick of it. in my opinion, documentation should be as important, if not more so, than the application itself. so long as you can let the users/support teams know what the application should be doing, the application will survive, as there will always be developers available to you that could read said documentation and correct any problems. however, if you're leaving it up to the support team as an exercise in figuring out how you're creating a connection to a database, you should be taken out behind a dumpster, and beaten with a 4u sharepoint server to get it into your head that not everyone can read your fucking mind; not everyone learned how to code the exact same way you do.
at this point, i'm ready to throw in the towel and go back to school for something else. stuff like this happens on a daily basis. developers who create even the smallest program think that "oh, it's just a teeny program, no one will ever need to know how to fix it" are kidding themselves. if you're involved in the creation of any application that is used by any business, you damn well better make documentation, because you may not be involved in it, but that application might need to grow, and if i don't know how your shit works, rest assured, i will hunt you down and it will not be a pretty sight.
now where is my goddamned latte?
posted by Justin Smith at
12:22 p.m.
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