r-wos.org

Lessons learned this week:

• The pain of writing a Perl script to properly migrate some data from one DB layout to another may be great. But it is never, never, as great as the pain of doing that migration by hand.
  • this holds also true for PHP scripts
  • and even for MySQL scripts. Yes, text manipulation is possible in MySQL, it’s just freakishly hard to do. But it’s never as hard, and as boring, and as brain damaging as …see above.
• The Hacker News frontpage may be a pretty good compensation for boring manual labour. But even that combination sucks a thousand times more than simply doing interesting stuff.
• There are people who like boring manual labour.
• There are people who don’t like boring manual labour, but think it was inevitable.
• There are people who don’t like boring manual labour, and don’t think it was inevitable, but can’t do anything about it.
• There are people who don’t understand the words “XXX this is only a quick HACK, we should build something better”
  • These people get paid a lot more then I do.
    • There are people who get paid for their work.
    • There are people who get paid for basically no work.
      • There are people who get paid.
• Quality is a relative thing.
• Only very few web developers have heard of Dennis Ritchie.
• No web developer has ever heard of Rob Pike (yes, small sample size, but still).
• Equally, no web developer has ever heard of John McCarthy.
• “HTML training course” is an oxymoron.