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GeneralRe: How often do you take the initiative in your company? Pin
Richard MacCutchan19-Dec-13 6:07
mveRichard MacCutchan19-Dec-13 6:07 
GeneralRe: How often do you take the initiative in your company? Pin
Eddy Vluggen19-Dec-13 9:06
professionalEddy Vluggen19-Dec-13 9:06 
GeneralI hate the program I am working on... Pin
glennPattonWork318-Dec-13 23:48
professionalglennPattonWork318-Dec-13 23:48 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
V.18-Dec-13 23:59
professionalV.18-Dec-13 23:59 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
glennPattonWork319-Dec-13 0:14
professionalglennPattonWork319-Dec-13 0:14 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
Oshtri Deka19-Dec-13 0:50
professionalOshtri Deka19-Dec-13 0:50 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
glennPattonWork319-Dec-13 1:38
professionalglennPattonWork319-Dec-13 1:38 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
Marc Clifton19-Dec-13 2:25
mvaMarc Clifton19-Dec-13 2:25 
glennPattonWork wrote:
How can a piece of software that runs by luck be considered robust, you fart near it, it falls flat on its face!


A couple weeks ago I told a client I'm off the project. Along the lines of some article I read about contracting was the wisdom "Learn to say no even to money." The application, a crowdfunding website, is based on the open source project "catarse" (Ruby on Rails), and my fork of it (July 2013 or so) was what I was working with. Let's see:

The code is insane - it look like different people worked on it with different technology stacks

It's unstable - for example, emails are incorrectly sent to me for some projects, but not others, and I have no idea why.

It's overly complex - the use of events when straight forward code would have worked, layers of weird code between "do A" and "I'm doing A".

Ridiculous uses of technology - a one-off no-sql database being used to store a single value, once in the code, that is referenced somewhere else only once, but requires a completely separate daemon process to be running to support this critical path code.

Incomprehensible behavior - the whole behavior around what happens when a project expires is crazy, depending on a separate daemon task to update state and still remains a complete mystery as to how some states are transitioned.

It was too much!!! I couldn't separate out the hatred I started developing for the thing. But besides learning some actually cool stuff, I also learned something important about time and money. As long as there is some standard of efficiency to my time, then there's an equivalence to $'s. When the efficiency of the time utilization starts to nose dive, the "value" of the $'s being earned for that time diminishes rapidly. Why? Because I also want to be doing other things. And of course, because the $'s didn't increase for the same unit of time, the time-value per $ ratio started to get seriously out of whack. And that's what led me to saying "NO!"

Marc
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
glennPattonWork319-Dec-13 2:39
professionalglennPattonWork319-Dec-13 2:39 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
S Houghtelin19-Dec-13 2:52
professionalS Houghtelin19-Dec-13 2:52 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
glennPattonWork319-Dec-13 3:05
professionalglennPattonWork319-Dec-13 3:05 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
mikepwilson19-Dec-13 3:09
mikepwilson19-Dec-13 3:09 
GeneralRe: I hate the program I am working on... Pin
glennPattonWork319-Dec-13 3:14
professionalglennPattonWork319-Dec-13 3:14 
GeneralRequirement for down time? Pin
Marcus_218-Dec-13 22:53
Marcus_218-Dec-13 22:53 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
Nagy Vilmos18-Dec-13 22:58
professionalNagy Vilmos18-Dec-13 22:58 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
OriginalGriff18-Dec-13 23:00
mveOriginalGriff18-Dec-13 23:00 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
Nagy Vilmos18-Dec-13 23:12
professionalNagy Vilmos18-Dec-13 23:12 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
glennPattonWork319-Dec-13 2:40
professionalglennPattonWork319-Dec-13 2:40 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
OriginalGriff18-Dec-13 23:00
mveOriginalGriff18-Dec-13 23:00 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
HobbyProggy18-Dec-13 23:03
professionalHobbyProggy18-Dec-13 23:03 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter18-Dec-13 23:23
professionalKornfeld Eliyahu Peter18-Dec-13 23:23 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
devenv.exe18-Dec-13 23:45
professionaldevenv.exe18-Dec-13 23:45 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
RugbyLeague19-Dec-13 0:09
RugbyLeague19-Dec-13 0:09 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
Tomaž Štih19-Dec-13 0:11
Tomaž Štih19-Dec-13 0:11 
GeneralRe: Requirement for down time? Pin
OriginalGriff19-Dec-13 0:30
mveOriginalGriff19-Dec-13 0:30 

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