2 small things

It’s been a busy month or so, so I’m behind on the blog.

For now, I’ll just toss 2 small things.

First is an observation about life in IT:

“You don’t have to run faster than the mountain lion. You just need to run faster that the person next to you.”

That actually happened this week. My group was on a project with a silly-tight deadline. This was one of those things where the management had promised a target date a year ago, then sat on the project. In February, they started to hammer out the requirements.  On the last week of August, they produced a one-page requirements doc (no, really!) with hand-drawn scribbles all over it, since it had been changed just a few minutes before the IT handover. It necessitated the change of almost every software system my group controls. We were given 4 weeks – less 2 weeks testing time.

This week, one of the other teams got eaten by the mountain lion and admitted they couldn’t make the date. We implemented nothing, but look like heroes.

The 2^nd thing is a link to an article I thought was interesting. The OP-ED author ventures his opinion that it’s time to drop Java. His reasons are actually somewhat compelling, I think, although I’m not sure I totally agree with the conclusion and suspect there are other options. At least, I thought the piece was worth a read. Note that he’s specifically talking about Java on the clients, not on the servers.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/261843/time_to_give_java_the_boot.html

Thanks for playing.

--kevin