Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Program all the things!

I'm going to walk you through a scenario that's played out over the past couple months after I setup a Tomcat environment for a developer at our company. It's gonna be condensed and go fast, so
brace yourself. Here we go.

Developer: Something broken. Our deploy aren't working.
Me: Let me take a look. Have you made any changes recently?
Developer: We reinstall java, that all.
*I wind up rebuilding the entire environment and reinstalling everything*
Developer: I made environment variable change before everything broke. You change it back! Why? It no broke anything.
Me: *Face palm*

Developer: Everything broken again! We can't deploy stuff.
Me: Did you make any changes?
Developer: They add extra processor to our VM.
*I spend a week trouble shooting*
Developer: We also delete and re-create folder inside Tomcat. But folder name is same. Shouldn't break anything.
Me: *Face palm*

Developer: Our application no start! Tomcat broken!
Me: Everything looks fine. How do you normally start this application?
Developer: I run script.
Me: Well....that's written in linux shell. We're in Windows now, so you'll need to re-write that to a windows command file.
Developer: Why?

The first two scenarious are really the point I'm trying to make, the third one was just frustrating and I'm venting. Here's my point:

If you break something, and then go to another developer to fix it, don't partially answer their questions. If you're going to that person for help, you're already admitting they have more expertise in the area than you. Half-answering their questions won't help you save face, it will only frustrate them.

P.S. Also, I'm ready to take away this guy's admin privileges. At this point, he's just doing this:


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