A SolSea-verified NFT project on the Solana blockchain, Doodled Dragons, touted that they would distribute all profits "straight to charities protecting animals on the brink of extinction". They announced on Twitter that they would be donating $30,000, "our first donation", to the World Wildlife Fund. Two hours later, they tweeted, "actually. fuck that. our charity will instead now be... my bank account. cya nerds." They deleted the Twitter account shortly after.
I sent the project manager a spreadsheet filled with edits and tracked defects.
Client: "Oh, look at all the nice red and greens. Such nice Christmas colors, very festive of you!"
Me: "Thanks, 'tis the season. But the red means there’s a problem, and the green are values that need to be filled in."
The apparent owner of Bored Ape #5262, of which this site header is a derivative work, contacted me on Twitter to say "I believe you are using my ape on your website without my permission. Can you please prove you own this ape as I believe there is only one looking like this and it is mine" in an event that truly transcended parody. While this would be hilarious even if it was a prank, the Twitter account who DMed me does appear to belong to the person holding the NFT on OpenSea.
From Max Roser at Our World in Data: Our history is a battle against the microbes: we lost terribly before science, public health, and vaccines allowed us to protect ourselves.
Science is the foundation for our success. 150 years ago nobody knew where diseases came from. Or more precisely, people thought they knew, but they were wrong. The widely accepted idea at the time was the ‘Miasma’ theory of disease. Miasma, the theory held, was a form of “bad air” that causes disease. The word malaria is testament to the idea that ‘mal aria’ — ‘bad air’ in medieval Italian — is the cause of the disease.
Thanks to the work of a number of doctors and chemists in the second half of the 19th century humanity learned that not noxious air, but specific germs cause infectious diseases. The germ theory of disease was the breakthrough in the fight against the microbe. Scientists identified the pathogens that cause the different diseases and thereby laid the foundation for perhaps the most important technical innovation in our fight against them: vaccines.
Here’s what vaccines did for us, in three charts:
Even among those who accept and understand how good vaccines are at stopping disease, it’s difficult to truly appreciate just how incredible and transformative they have been. By one estimate, vaccines saved between 150 & 200 million lives from 1980 & 2018…and that’s just for smallpox. Covid-19 vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and the US in the first year of their availability. Truly a miraculous invention.
Tags: infoviz Max Roser science USA vaccines
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I’m a year and a half into the development of a new web application for managing complex data sets. Our boss has never been able to provide proper specifications for what he needs, just a flood of vague ideas with no real detail and constantly changing scope.
My job is to try and turn this into a comprehensible list of tasks that the dev team can actually follow. Each month, I have a planning session with the boss where we hash out the next period of work. Each session, I remind him that changing the scope means adding more time.
We agree and sign off the work to be delivered by the end of the month. So far, we’ve hit every deadline.
I thought we had a pretty good system in place until:
Boss: I can’t believe we’re so far behind and how poorly you’ve managed this project.
Me: What do you mean? Haven’t we met all the agreed deadlines throughout the project?
Boss: I’ve made a spreadsheet of all the dates I wanted each feature done by. So far, you’ve missed every single one of them.
Me: Excuse me? We’ve always delivered what’s been agreed on time. Where have these new dates come from?
Boss: This is how long I thought the work should take and I made up my own timeline.
Me: I’ve never seen these dates before, let alone agreed to them. At a glance, many of them seem extremely optimistic.
That’s business talk for “f****** mad”.
Me: We agreed at the start this would be at least a three-year project.
Boss: Well, I decided it should take less time and you’re late. I’m going to have to pull the plug on this project if you can’t have everything wrapped up within the next month.
I politely remind the boss that there was at least another year and a half of work left to complete the project. Needless to say, I’ll probably be looking for a new job shortly.
The post Deadlines: Emphasis On “Dead” appeared first on Clients From Hell.
Last week, a worrisome variant of SARS-CoV-2 burst into the public consciousness: the Omicron variant. The concern among scientists and the public at large is substantial, but it is unfortunately going to take a few weeks to figure out whether those concerns are warranted. For a measured take on what we know now and what we can expect, read these two posts by epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina (as well as this one on vaccines).
B.1.1.529 has 32 mutations on the spike protein alone. This is an insane amount of change. As a comparison, Delta had 9 changes on the spike protein. We know that B.1.1.529 is not a “Delta plus” variant. The figure below shows a really long line, with no previous Delta ancestors. So this likely means it mutated over time in one, likely immunocompromised, individual.
Of these, some mutations have properties to escape antibody protection (i.e. outsmart our vaccines and vaccine-induced immunity). There are several mutations association with increased transmissibility. There is a mutation associated with increased infectivity.
That sounds bad but again, we presently do not have enough information to know for sure about any of this. As Jetelina concludes in one of the posts:
We still have more questions than answers. But we will get them soon. Do not take Omicron lightly, but don’t abandon hope either. Our immune systems are incredible.
None of this changes what you can to do right now: Ventilate spaces. Use masks. Test if you have symptoms. Isolate if positive. Get vaccinated. Get boosted.
This Science piece by Kai Kupferschmidt also provides a great overview about where we’re at with Omicron, without the sensationalism.
Whether or not Omicron turns out to be another pandemic gamechanger, the lesson we should take from it (but probably won’t) is that grave danger is lurking in that virus and we need to get *everyone* *everywhere* vaccinated, we need free and ubiquitous rapid testing *everywhere*, we need to focus on indoor ventilation, we need to continue to use measures like distancing and mask-wearing, and we need to keep doing all of the other things in the Swiss cheese model of pandemic defense. Anything else is just continuing our idiotic streak with this virus of fucking around and then finding out. (via jodi ettenberg & eric topol)
Tags: Covid-19 Kai Kupferschmidt Katelyn Jetelina medicine scienceClient: I do have the logo on a Mac Disk, will that help?
Me: Please email the logo.
Client: Trouble is we don’t have any Macs, and our PCs don’t even accept floppies. How about I mail it to you?
Me: Are you saying the logo is on a 3.5″ floppy disk?!
Client: I’ll have to double-check.
A few minutes of waiting.
Client: The floppy disk measures 3.5 inches, yes.
Yet more floppy knowledge, from the Clients From Hell archives.
The post Their Knowledge Is A Bit Floppy appeared first on Clients From Hell.
Epic Games has acquired Rock Band and Fuser developer Harmonix. The developer says its talents creating rhythm-based video games will now be used to “bring our unique brand of musical gaming experiences to the Metaverse.” Harmonix says that it will now work with Epic Games to “create musical journeys and gameplay for Fortnite.”
It’s unclear how Epic Games and Harmonix will begin to incorporate more music in Fortnite, however, as the studio simply says to “stay tuned.” Games like Fuser as well as DLC for Rock Band will continue as planned, with the studio explaining that little is changing for current fans. All Harmonix games to date will remain purchasable on Steam and console platforms, and all still-running servers for the company’s games will remain online as well.
Since Fortnite took the world by storm a few years ago, Epic has continued forward, more than ever before, as a force to be reckoned with. Harmonix is part of the company’s move to grow, but other past acquisitions – such as Rocket League developer Psyonix and Fall Guys developer Mediatonic – have also helped further posture itself as an industry titan. The company has invested in its indie partners, with the most recent deal being with Eyes Out and Spry Fox. This is all in addition to advancements in Unreal Engine and other technology, with Epic recently even moving into filmmaking with Gilgamesh. Now, with Harmonix under its belt, the Fortnite creator’s future only holds more possibilities.
“Harmonix has always aspired to create the world’s most beloved interactive music experiences, and by joining Epic we will be able to do this at scale,” said Alex Rigopulos, Harmonix co-founder and chairman, in a separate announcement at the Epic Games website. “Together we will push the creative boundaries of what’s possible and invent new ways for our players to make, perform and share music.”
While NoSQL databases have definitely made their mark and have an important role in applications, there's also still a place for RDBMSes. The key advantage of an RDBMS is that, with a well normalized schema, any arbitrary query is possible, and instead of optimizing the query, you optimize the database itself to ensure you hit your performance goals- indexes, statistics, materialized views, etc..
The reality, of course, is wildly different. While the execution plan used by the database shouldn't be dependent upon how we write the query, it frequently is, managing statistics and indexes is surprisingly hard, and when performance problems crop up, without the right monitoring, it can be difficult to track down exactly which query is causing the problem.
Which brings us to this query, which TJ found while analyzing a performance problem.
select Min(the.moddate) "ModifiedDate"
From T_91CDDC57 what , T_91CDDC57 the , T_91CDDC57 f
where f.rdate > sysdate-1095;
First, let's just congratulate whoever named the table T_91CDDC57. I assume that's generated, and presumably so was this query. There's clearly a bug- there's no reason to have the same table in the FROM clause three times, when we just want to find the earliest moddate.
And that's the problem. T_91CDDC57 isn't a particularly large table. It's no pipsqueak- at 4.5M rows and 34M of data, it's certainly got some heft, but it's no giant, either. But that's 4.5M rows which have to be joined to 4.5M rows with no join condition, and then that gets joined to 4.5M rows again with no join condition.
Here's the explain plan of how this query executes:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id | Operation | Name | Rows | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 1 | 16 | 19P (1)|
| 1 | SORT AGGREGATE | | 1 | 16 | |
| 2 | MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN | | 18E| 15E| 19P (1)|
| 3 | MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN | | 4328G| 31T| 5321M (1)|
|* 4 | TABLE ACCESS FULL | T_91CDDC57 | 959K| 7499K| 18967 (2)|
| 5 | BUFFER SORT | | 4509K| | 5321M (1)|
| 6 | INDEX FAST FULL SCAN| T_91CDDC57_TYPE_INDEX | 4509K| | 5544 (1)|
| 7 | BUFFER SORT | | 4509K| 34M| 19P (1)|
| 8 | INDEX FAST FULL SCAN | T_91CDDC57_MODDATE_INDEX | 4509K| 34M| 4410 (1)|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few notable entries here. Line 4 does a TABLE ACCESS FULL. This is the f iteration of our table, and you can see that it pulls in just 959K rows thanks to our where clause. On line 8, you can see that it scans the T_91CDDC57_MODDATE_INDEX- it's using that index to sort so we can find the Min(the.moddate). You can also see that it touches 4509K rows. Line 6, also for 4509K rows, is our what access in the query.
Once we've accessed our three piles of data, we have to connect them. Since there's no ON or WHERE clause that links the tables, this connects each row from each table with each row in each other table. And you can see on line 3, where we join the first pair of tables, we suddenly have 4.3T rows, and a total of 31 terabytes of data. And when we join the third table it on line 2, that bloats to 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 rows and 15 exabytes of data.
TJ says:
Processing over 15 exabytes of information probably may have something to do with the performance…
Yeah, probably.
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I’m talking to a new client about documentation needs.
Client: I see you don’t have your last project in your portfolio. Why not?
Me: That’s because the information on it was proprietary, and I couldn’t take any copies as part of the conditions of my contract.
Client: Well, we’ll need to review it before we can hire you. Do you have backdoor access to the server so we could get it ourselves?
Me: No, because that would open me up to legal liability. Even if I did, I couldn’t share access with you without being sued and possibly prosecuted.
Client: Well, we can’t hire you unless we can view those documents, so send the backdoor access password as soon as you can.
Punchline: this was AFTER I had to sign a massive non-disclosure agreement just to get the interview, attesting that I’d never share or allow access to any of the client’s proprietary information under penalty of law.
The post What Part Of “Legal Liability” Did You Not Understand? appeared first on Clients From Hell.
Walnut is a white-naped crane that lives in a Virginia endangered species breeding facility. She’s 23 years-old, was raised by humans, and developed a reputation for murdering potential mates. But Walnut eventually found a good match in bird keeper Chris Crowe, a 42 year-old human who she has bonded with. Crowe, as part of his duties at the zoo, has embraced his role as Walnut’s mate in order to inseminate her with semen from a male crane.
That summer, however, Crowe noticed that Walnut seemed interested in, well, him. When Crowe stopped by her yard, she would bow her head and raise her wings — motions that Crowe now recognizes as the first moves of a mating dance. “At first, I thought that she was just excited to see me,” Crowe says. “But then I’d see the other pairs doing the same things, and it kind of dawned on me.” Crowe accepted Walnut’s invitation to dance. Though he felt a little silly, he bobbed his head when Walnut bobbed hers, and raised and lowered his arms like wings. The two circled each other, and sometimes Walnut would make a loud, trumpeting call — the beginning of the white-naped crane love duet. If no one was around, Crowe would try to do the male part of the song — making a Homer Simpson-like “woo-hoo” — but Walnut never found his efforts satisfactory.
As the weather cooled, so did Walnut’s ardor. But in the spring, Walnut began greeting her keeper with bows again. This gave Crowe an idea: If Walnut thought he was her mate, maybe Crowe could make that year’s artificial insemination less stressful for both of them. “If we could get her able to do it without catching her, there’s no stress, no risk of injury,” Crowe says. “It’s much better for us and for the crane.” Lynch agreed. “As far as we knew, it had never been done before, but it seemed like a good thing to try,” he recalls.
Walnut no longer needs to be inseminated to help save her species but since cranes mate for life, her relationship with Crowe continues.
Tags: Chris Crowe videoLike an old couple, Crowe and Walnut have fallen into a comfortable routine. After “mating” with Crowe, Walnut will often lay unfertilized eggs. Crowe replaces them with fake ones; the real ones would rot and get eaten by crows, which would prompt Walnut to lay more. The bird then spends long hours sitting on the dummy eggs, so Crowe helps her out whenever he gets the chance. “I go over and stand near the nest and I say, ‘You take a break.’ And she’ll wander off. She’ll go down into the creek and take a bath. Then she walks back after 15 or 20 minutes, and she’s ready to sit back on the nest again.”
Though he does his best to not be a deadbeat dad, Crowe knows he falls short of crane standards. These are creatures that, once paired up, rarely lose sight of their partner; Crowe, in contrast, disappears every weekend. But despite Crowe’s shortcomings, Walnut loves him unconditionally. In fact, this 12-pound bird’s capacity for boundless affection sets a standard that we all could learn from, Crowe says. “The ideal partner doesn’t exist. You have to accept certain things that people can’t change,” he explains. “I mean, she puts up with me even though I can’t dance or sing.”
So let’s say, for the sake of argument and against all scientific evidence to the contrary, the Earth was flat instead of being an oblate spheroid. What would life on a flat Earth be like? Well for one thing, gravity would present some challenges. From a 2018 piece by Doug Main at the Columbia Climate School:
People who believe in a flat Earth assume that gravity would pull straight down, but there’s no evidence to suggest it would work that way. What we know about gravity suggests it would pull toward the center of the disk. That means it would only pull straight down at one point on the center of the disk. As you got increasingly far from the center, gravity would tug more and more horizontally. This would have some strange impacts, like sucking all the water toward the center of the world, and making trees and plants grow diagonally, since they develop in the opposite direction of gravity’s pull.
And even more than that, gravity would tend to pull a flat disc shape back into a spheroid, so absent an intense spinning force (for which there is zero evidence) or some other completely unknown effect, a flat Earth couldn’t even exist:
For Earth to take the shape of a flat disk in the first place, gravity — as we know it — must be having no effect. If it did, it would soon pull the planet back into a spheroid.
A flat Earth would also likely not have a magnetic field (or at least one that is scientifically possible), meaning no atmosphere:
Deep below ground, the solid core of the Earth generates the planet’s magnetic field. But in a flat planet, that would have to be replaced by something else. Perhaps a flat sheet of liquid metal. That, however, wouldn’t rotate in a way that creates a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, charged particles from the sun would fry the planet. They could strip away the atmosphere, as they did after Mars lost its magnetic field, and the air and oceans would escape into space.
Oh and no tectonic plates, volcanos, mountains, etc. Or GPS. Or weather. Or satellites. Or different night skies in, say, South Africa and Denmark. Or the Sun behaving the way it does in respect to the Earth. Or air travel. Or plant and animal life as it exists presently. To suppose a flat Earth also supposes that physics doesn’t explain our observable universe the way in which it reliably and comprehensively does. The simplest, best evidence for a round Earth is that we’re here living on it in the manner in which we are living on it.
See also What If the Earth Suddenly Turned Flat?, Flat Earthers and the Double-Edged Sword of American Magical Thinking, and Flat Earthers Listening to Daft Punk.
Tags: Earth physics scienceMerijnThis is adorable
Client: Hey, we just looked at our website and it’s down. I know it’s after five but I was wondering if you could fix it for us ASAP?
Me: Of course, I have to leave in thirty minutes, but if I can’t solve it by then, I’ll be back at 7 pm to see to finish debugging the issue.
Client: I had my secretary look it up and she said it looks like an easy fix, something about it’s just a syntax error?
The post Taxing Syntax appeared first on Clients From Hell.
My son Adam is the light of my life. He recently turned eight and is obsessed with video games, much like I was at his age. Unlike me, who grew up with deeply religious parents who considered most entertainment to be a corrupting influence on a young impressionable mind, Adam lives in a house filled with electronics, on-demand video subscriptions, and every console from the current and previous generation. He’s taken to all of it like a kid in a candy store — and why shouldn’t he?
But I think I resent him for it.
Millennials as children tended to be the spark of progress in the household. My older brother convinced my parents to get him a cell phone with a handwritten letter of its benefits based around keeping tabs on us — he used it to talk to girls. I did the same with a speech on increased productivity with schoolwork to upgrade our internet service to broadband, which I then used to play Halo 2. But it seems like my generation never quit trying to convince others of what they should be doing.
My son was much more into mobile games before I intervened and introduced him to the New Super Mario Bros. games on Nintendo 3DS. I mean, mobile games are fine and they have their audience, but I thought to myself, “My son will know what god-tier game design is.” And I wasn’t wrong. Mario is his favorite character and game series now — or at least it was. Adam has tried several of the older 3D Mario games and bounced right off of them. The reason he’d give me for not going back was that he got stuck. He’d rather watch full playthroughs of those games than play through them himself.
He was backing down from the inherent challenge of the medium. One of the most unique aspects of video games is that many make you earn their completion. It didn’t hit me until trying some of the New Super Mario Bros. titles myself that they are much easier than the 2D Mario games I grew up with. I’ve had Adam try Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and Yoshi’s Island, but he’s yet to finish or ask to go back to any of them.
If given the choice, he’d play Roblox — a game filled with player-made content of varying quality, more than often stuffed with microtransaction pop-up screens that can result in “accidental” purchases. But what I found most distressing was that he’d just hang out in virtual playgrounds using his avatar to fall down mountainsides, dress up in costumes, or run around aimlessly in superhero-inspired worlds. I banned the play of Roblox in the house. I saw it increasing my son’s sense of apathy towards meeting challenge or adversity head on — qualities I desperately hope to instill in him.
He’s since taken more heavily to Minecraft, a game that helps the imaginative side of his brain but still doesn’t push back at all, at least not in its creative mode where he exclusively spends his time. But he recently begged me to let him try out Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PlayStation 4. Miles is his favorite superhero. He dressed up as Miles for Halloween last year and wore the suit for several days after. I loved the idea — here’s a game starring a character he loves more than Mario, where the gameplay would definitely push back but be exciting enough for him to want to keep trying.
I let him start things off in Friendly Neighborhood difficulty, which prevents Miles from dying. I explained that once he got more used to the game that I was going to bump it up to Friendly, where the difficulty remains the same but death is a factor. I was so impressed with how he was able to pick up the RPG elements of upgrading his skills, how he would play with changing the suits and their visual effects like the comic pop-ups or the “Into the Spider-Verse” frame rate. He wasn’t half bad at combat either — I’d occasionally remind him that he could web guys onto the floor or swing-kick them off roofs, but he was completely hooked.
He’d gone just about a third of the way into the story, 28% progress on the save, so I told him, “I think you’re good enough to deal with some real stakes now.” In the early stages of the “Curtain Call” quest, Miles needs to find and interact with four generators on rooftops all guarded by the techno-baddies called the Underground. Adam held his own. I had to remind him of the healing mechanic as he hadn’t needed to use it before, but he picked it up well. He’d cheese the web attack, hitting triangle over and over to safely farm his venom meter, then duck out of combat to heal up. He died a number of times, but he ultimately finished the mission. I was so proud.
I asked him, “Doesn’t that feel better? You still beat it even though you could die?” He agreed. I left the room to grab something from the kitchen. It felt earned. I’d helped my son experience the sensation of triumph in a game; I suspected he’d remember this moment for the rest of his life. I came back into the room to witness Adam hit the delete option on the save file. I couldn’t help but raise my voice. “Why did you do that!?” I was so confused. He told me that he wanted to start from the beginning, and my curiosity piqued. I asked if he intended to start from the beginning on the higher difficulty. He did not. He set it back to Friendly Neighborhood where there would be no threat of death and started his playthrough over from the beginning. He didn’t have to; you’re free to change the difficulty at will at any time — he watched me do it when I bumped it up.
I can only assume that my son hated that I put him through that challenge. It soured the enjoyment of his leisurely web swinging and cool no-stakes action scenes so much that he needed to wipe the slate clean and start over. He didn’t mean to break my heart, but here we are.
I’m fully aware that there are all kinds of gamers out in the world, including those who like casual experiences and play games to relax rather than claim supreme victory. It was a genuine shock to learn that my own son rejects an aspect of games that have largely defined my great love for the medium. But I suppose it’s just a reminder that our children are not us, Adam is growing up to be his own man, and I still love him, even if he is a filthy casual.
Vaccination reduces risk of long Covid, even when people are infected, U.K. study indicates. [statnews.com]
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MerijnI think this Kurzgesagt video broke my brain. The final size comparison of all possible black hole sizes is just absolutely mond-boggling.
Black holes are the largest single objects in the universe, many times larger than even the biggest stars, and have no upper limit to their size. But practically, how big is the biggest, heaviest black hole in the universe? (A: More massive than the entire Milky Way.)
The largest things in the universe are black holes. In contrast to things like planets or stars they have no physical size limit, and can literally grow endlessly. Although in reality specific things need to happen to create different kinds of black holes, from really tiny ones to the largest single things in the universe. So how do black holes grow and how large is the largest of them all?
Videos about space are where Kurzgesagt really shines. I’ve seen all their videos about black holes and related objects, and I always pick up something I never knew whenever a new one comes out. This time around, it was quasistars and the surprisingly small mass of supermassive black holes located at galactic centers compared to the galaxies themselves.
Tags: astronomy black holes Kurzgesagt physics science space videoA client shows me an eCommerce site they want to be built.
Me: What you want is about a $20,000 website.
They later tell me:
Client: We found a guy who lives in a cabin who just needs money. He’s gonna do the whole site for $1,000.
He didn’t work out.
Another “you get what you pay for” moment, from the Clients From Hell archives.
The post Cabins In The Woods Never End Well appeared first on Clients From Hell.
Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario has covered Afghanistan for the past 20 years. In the Atlantic, she writes about the effect of the return to power of the oppressive Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban will have on the country’s citizens, particularly women and girls. Here she describes life under the Taliban in 2000 and 2001:
Perhaps the silence of life under the Taliban sits with me more than anything. There were very few cars, no music, no television, no telephones, and no idle conversation on the sidewalks. The dusty streets were crowded with widows who had lost their husbands in the protracted war; banned from working, their only means of survival was to beg. People were scared, indoors and out. Those who were brave enough to venture out spoke in hushed voices, for fear of provoking a Taliban beating for anything as simple as not having a long-enough beard (for a man) or a long-enough burka (for a woman), or sometimes for nothing at all. Shiny brown cassette tape fluttered from the trees and wires and signs and poles everywhere-a warning to those who dared to play music in private. Matches in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium had been replaced with public executions on Fridays after prayer. Taliban officials used bulldozers or tanks to topple walls onto men accused of being gay. People who stole had their hand sliced off; accused adulterers were stoned to death.
After the Taliban fell in 2001, Addario observed women returning to public life:
I photographed the defeat of the Taliban in Kandahar in late 2001, and returned to the country with my camera at least a dozen times in the subsequent two decades. From Kabul to Kandahar to Herat to Badakhshan, I photographed women attending schools, graduating from universities, training as surgeons, delivering babies, working as midwives, running for Parliament and serving in government, driving, training to be police officers, acting in films, working — as journalists, translators, television presenters, for international organizations. Many of them were dealing with the impossible balancing act of working outside the home while raising children; of being a wife, a mother, a sister, or a daughter in a place where women were cracking glass ceilings daily, and often at great peril.
Now those women, especially those involved in politics or activism, are in danger now that the Taliban have seized power in Afghanistan again.
Tags: Afghanistan Lynsey Addario photography religion sexismI work for a part of a state government agency that does highly technical, scientific work. The agency pays for licenses for every employee, from managers down to entry-level, to use a sophisticated Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that includes developer tools, with which most of the agency’s various record-keeping software apps have been developed over the past 25 years. The majority of those apps have been developed by “citizen developers,” IT’s term for non-IT personnel.
A few years ago, a crucial app used by my group was corrupted and became unusable. As a “computer guy” (I had some experience with Access and MySQL), I was assigned to learn the software and attempt to repair the app and make it usable “in my spare time.”
Since the software had gone through several updates over the years and the version in which the original app was created would no longer run on updated computers, I decided to recreate the app in the current version, which I did. The new version worked better than the original, and everyone from the Manager on down started asking for new features. Another six months went by, and the scope of the project ballooned and I dutifully expanded the capabilities of the app as requested.
When we were about to go live (app had been tested, training materials created, etc), the IT department got wind of it and refused to let us upload the app to the server. Their reasoning?
IT Department: You’re not a developer. Only IT develops apps.
We lobbied for two years while every function of the app had to continue to be done on paper, which for a highly technical workplace that collects a lot of data, was a nightmare. Eventually, after much lobbying by my manager, IT relented and decided that we could use the original version of the app (which would not run on the current version of the software) if it were repaired, but using the “new” version was still forbidden.
In a meeting where I, my manager, a high-level administrator, and a representative from IT were all present, I outlined the scope of the app, what it was used for, and why it was critical for productivity. The IT rep (an extremely arrogant person who had been blocking all progress on our project from day 1) outlined the process for getting the app up and running: My group would outline the requirements, it would go through an approval process with management, then IT would prioritize it along with their other projects, and then they would build it from scratch without any input from technical staff.
Me: “We have a fully built, operational, tested app. We don’t need you to build it from scratch.”
IT Rep: “You’re not a developer. Only IT develops apps.”
When we asked about the timeline for the development of the app, he replied, straight-faced:
IT Rep: “We might be able to start on it in about two years.”
My manager was skeptical of my reports about interactions with this person, but the meeting opened his eyes. He had a private meeting with the agency director and suddenly we were cleared to upload the app to the server.
That was 14 years ago and the app has been through several upgrades and with many added features, and has probably saved taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity.
The post You’re not a developer. appeared first on Clients From Hell.