If you don't succeed...
...try and try again.
You heard this saying, don't lie. And if you don't think about it too much, it sounds ok. Obviously you shouldn't give up at the first problem and if something goes bad, it is just a matter of trying again. But after a while, you should stop a bit and ask yourself if you're doing the right thing.
I mean, there is a limit for everything. After you've tried something for a thousand times and it still doesn't work, maybe is time to look at it from a different angle. Are you doing the right thing? Peraphs there is another easier or better way, peraphs it's time to change strategy. Or try something else. Or otherwise, fuck it, maybe that thing is really too difficult for you and you'd better do something else, something you have a reasonable chance of success.
It's like the japanese cartoon, where the alien invasion army arrives and toss a giant robot at the planet, and some goofy guy with a really bad hairdo show up with an even bigger robot and blow the alien to smithereen. So the alien send ANOTHER giant robot... and then another one... and then...
I don't know, after a month of so, one of the high-rank generals should clear his throat and say "well... Maybe it's just me but... What if, instead of just one giant robot we send more? Like a thousands of them? We have a lot of them after all... Just for the novelty. Otherwise, how about those million of vat-grown soldiers we've been baking during the trip? How about sending them down? All together! We send the soldiers all over the planet and a bunch of robots to the house of this jackass and let's see how he deals with that. Wait! I got a better idea! This ship, that is as big as half of the planet, why don't we park it between the planet and the sun? Let's turn off the sun for a dozen years and let's see how they deal with that. Or even better! I know we've been travelling in the darkness of the galaxy (that ain't so dark after all) for ages, but... What if we travel a bit more? After all, it's a galaxy, there are thousands of systems, how about we found one that doesn't have an asshole with a giant robot? Don't know eh..."
But NO! Everybody shrugs and they keep sending ONE ROBOT AT A TIME... Or doing the very same thing over and over in the hope that "this time is different"...
And now we talk about $shockandawe, a marketing company that marketed stuff. Those peoples specialized in building web site and, for some odd reason, they always had some trouble.
Our road (mine and theirs) crossed when a CL phones that something wasn't working in one of their pages, I pointed out that "something that doesn't work in one of their pages" sounds a lot like something they, or their developers, should be able to fix, but the idea of "fixing it" sounded way too similar to "work" so they were tring to avoid it like a vampire avoid the sun.
Me - So what are we supposed to do?
CL - Well, we have this page http://.../something/something/somethingelse that doesn't work as it should do, so we want you to add a redirection in the load balancer to http://...//yadayada/somethingelese/something/more
Me - Hummm... And why don't you copy the content of one into the other?
...Silcence for about 2 minutes...
CL - This is temporary, we should fix the page.
Now, "temporary" changes in production are not a good thing, anyhow, after some discussion, the ticket is created and 30 seconds later the redirection is added.
Fast forward to a few days later. When we receive the order to remove the redirect. And a couple of hours later they discover that the page works even worse than before if possible, so another ticket is created to put the redirect back. Follows a dozen of changes on configuration files, several restart of services, hot fixes, hot fixes on hot fixes, updates and patches, bug fixes that add more bugs and so on. All done directly on production of course because testing is for pussies.
Fast forward of some more days, when we, again, receive the instruction to remove the redirect. And for a bit nothing happens. Weird. Only around the end of the day somebody realize that the new page doesn't give any error, simply because it doesn't give any result at all. Wonderful. We put the redirect back in.
Another few days later (do you see a trend here?) and again we got the same request. At this point I thin they had a stamp to do the request, so I went over and made a script to add or remove the redirect, just for fun.
Fast-forwad a few weeks, during which that script is used several times, when we recieve a phone call around 8 Am, and since I'm the only jackass that still think that "office time from 8 to 5" means that you should be in the office at 8 and leave at 5 and not "you should be in the vicinity of the office at 9.45 and out the door at 4.10", I pick up.
CL - I am CL of $shockandawe
Me - I'm not.
CL - Do you remember that redirect?
Me - The one that you asked us to add to the load balancer because you didn't wanted to fix your page and you liked another page instead? The one that was supposed to be temporary, the one that was removed and then re-added 2 days later? And then again 2 days later? And then we removed and re-added about 20 times and the next 3 weeks?
CL - Hemmm.. Yeah, that one.
Me - No, I don't remember it. Why?
CL is quiet for a bit...
CL - Well, can you remove it?
Me - Sure... (run script) done.
CL - Oh... already?
Me - Yep.
CL - Ah, ok.
At this point I relax, stir my coffee and wait. And don't have to wait too much either.
CL - Hemmm... can you re-add that redirect?
Me - (sigh) May I know what is the problem now?
CL - Well... the page now seems working but all the link to the rest don't seem to work very well...
Me - You didn't thought about TESTING that page before putting it live?
CL - We did tested it.
Me - Oh? And nobody noticed that the links were broken? How did you tested it exactly?
CL - We have automated testing.
Me - Those automated testing don't look like their are working too well.
CL - The links works, but they are pointing to pages that are in the wrong languages.
Me - In this case is obvious that the tests are not testing what you should test and shoudn't be used.
CL - But we've always done like this...
Me - Yep... And you keep doing it, even when it's clearly demonstrated that is the wrong way of doing it.
CL - ... so the redirect?
Me - It's on.
CL - Thanks, we'll call later for
Me - Yes I know, to take it off!
They. Never. Learn. FUCK!
Davide
02/09/2018 12:39
