The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Beable:

Joel @8: Yeah, but it is so very easy to internalize the message, however "wrong" we know it to be.

I still remember my first "professional" sucky code - I had written an entire web system (a set of about 2 dozen webpages that were supposed to provide highly customizable querying and reporting of a specific set of data open to the public) at my current employer as a co-op student. This was during the downtime for the project for which the system was being written, and so there was no QA, no testing beyond what I was doing myself.

Three years later the software was used in production (still only having been tested by the expected clients as they did a mock run of the production process). A bug turned up, based on a coding assumption I had erroneously made based on my best information (including asking people) at the time it was written.

Despite a) not having used the coding environment in 3 years and b) not having the software for the coding environment available for me to set up on my computer (now being the unix sysadmin instead), I was trying to fix my code in the equivalent of notepad, and I was trying to do it in a mad rush on an evening where I had already been at work for 14 hours on an unrelated (planned) project. After I had been at it for about about two hours, the people who really were working on the project in question found a workaround to avoid my having to do last minute code changes.

But I felt so stupid, like I was the worst developer in the world for having made such a big screw up until one of the managers (perhaps not so coincidentally the only female manager in our mostly male developer shop - and someone who had been around for long enough to know what some of the personalities I was working with were like) suggested that as a perspective, my attitude in acknowledging my coding mistake was a lot better than several of the other people in the shop she could name (but I shant here) whom would have been acting high and dry like they never make mistakes, even in the face of some whoppers.

More importantly, she pointed out that for a system that never went through qa if this was the worst bug in the code, I had done ok, and that catching these things was why were were supposed to have qa. Once that bug was fixed, it did turn out that my code stood up well - the target clients using it found it useful enough that unlike in previous years in which they had hired analysts to do similar kind of reporting and analysis, most of them were able to do it in-house because of my tool.

But I did feel like I was just proving that I couldn't code (and - especially as the few female coders who were in the shop at the time were mostly considered to be lightweight/mediocre techies) and that I was just reinforcing the "women couldn't code" message with my failure, even though in hindsight I'm not sure anyone given a tricky (because it was so intrinsic to how that part of the code worked that even after the initial time panic was over they decided not to change it) bug to fix in a such a tight panicked deadline with no proper coding environment to test or debug could have fixed it properly.

Damned typos. That's meant to be a lonely phoenix. Though now I wonder whether an onely one would strut around, certain in it's unique place in the world.

O my Luve's like a fragrant, gibbous moon
That's newly waxed in June:
O my Luve's like the anemone,
The ferret foxed too soon.

As fair art thou, your bonie ass,
Fresh-baked in loaves are they;
And I will luve thou's ivory eggs,
That the onely phonenix lay.

But think of the possibilities if we did put Agatha in charge!

The RSS feed for the link CD posted in #21 also seems to be maintained more frequently than the other one - three updates versus one.

RSS feeds designed to appeal both to the folks who only want the bottom line and the worriers.

Even better, somebody has already added it to Livejournal for those of us who track the world through our friends page.

Lila #71: A friend of mind has a theory about this in the far future of the Babylon-5 'verse. He figures that the Vorlons honestly thought they were being transparent and clear when they were talking to the humans ...

One million years from now when humans are the new Vorlons:

Human (in an encounter suit): Ok, so, here's what you need to know. There will be a big battle. You will need to pick sides. We're the good guys, so we'll tell you everything you want to know. Go on, ask me anything.

New younger race: Darmok and Jalad at Tinagra?

Terry #45: Indeed an excellent book, but it looks here like the contest has long-since been solved.

Michelle @ 21 : If you look at the details - sure they are being offered $18.50 an hour to come here, but when they got here the company tried to drop them to $13.50.

Second - by forcing the workers to live in camp accomodations at $35 a day and not allowing them to leave to find their own options the companie gets that money back - in addition to whatever tax benefits they get for providing "daily accomodations".


Third for the money the workers are managing to get after all that I bet a huge portion goes to pay down the $15-20K each one paid for the privilege of being treated like this.

Fourth - they can't find a job elsewhere because of the visa limitations, so it's either pack up and go home (still owing the huge amounts of money) or suck it up.

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