21–30 of 187 posts
I never cease to be amazed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you removed the dates from this story, you'd be hard pressed to fix when this happened. (Except the static HTML idea is a bit of a give away, no web developer would ever dare suggest a static page in our brave new world of Web X.0)
If a static page is the right answer, why would you not say so? Scales effortlessly for one thing.
You had the job title "senior web engineer" when the web was 4 years old. That's pretty cool.
tl;dr
Ha! I think the people who downvotted this didn't realize that "mjd" is Mark Jason Dominus aka the guy who wrote the blog post.
I never cease to be amazed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you removed the dates from this story, you'd be hard pressed to fix when this happened. (Except the static HTML idea is a bit of a give away, no web developer would ever dare suggest a static page in our brave new world of Web X.0)
[0] http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
> These days I would handle this easily; after the first or second iteration I would explain the situation: I had based my estimate on certain expectations of how much work would be required; I had not expected to clean up dirty data in eight different formats; they had the choice of delivering clean data in the same format as before, renegotiating the fee, or finding someone else to do the project. Great advice for…
Although it's a fun read, it's a classic example of diving into coding without giving a project it's due diligence. There's nothing that's derailed my projects more consistently when I started out as not understanding the user's needs. They'll never tell you what they want, only what they don't want after you deliver something. I think that's the key difference to an experienced dev/BA. One who can actually sit with…
The real issue is sales...you make the sale because you have to. Then you stick the project on some poor PM/Ba/Dev who will fight with them forever over this stuff.
Maybe I'm just bitter about the situation that I continually get stuck in.
Fascinating! As somebody who is starting to do freelance work a story like this is not only an interesting read but provides insight on what to avoid and when to speak up as I start freelancing.
Higher Order Perl, is available for free download. If you read it you will see some amazing insights into programming techniques most people would have never heard of encountered in MegaCorp jobs. You will also grow a great appreciation for Perl in general and understand how it can be an amazing language of choice for a wide variety of problems.
> These days I would handle this easily; after the first or second iteration I would explain the situation: I had based my estimate on certain expectations of how much work would be required; I had not expected to clean up dirty data in eight different formats; they had the choice of delivering clean data in the same format as before, renegotiating the fee, or finding someone else to do the project. Great advice for…
Some executive rightly saw that paying you to render that useless would free them of that service and the need for the fee (which i bet was not turning a profit)
But, since big companies run on cargo cult... that happened.