I had cause to have another rant at work today. A pro­ject my team have been work­ing on, and in which I haven’t been involved for a few weeks, was released last week for pre­lim­in­ary testing.

It was released with the full know­ledge that not all of it worked. It was a “Let’s get these two sys­tems together and see if they will talk to each other” kind of thing. An attempt to find out whether there were core incom­pat­ib­il­it­ies. OK so far. I don’t have a prob­lem with that.

But today I dis­covered that at least one part of the sys­tem doesn’t even com­pile! Now, as a pro­fes­sional developer I find that to be inex­cus­able. I know that on the first pass not everything will func­tion cor­rectly, par­tic­u­larly with a pro­ject as com­plex as this one; but to release a file which doesn’t even com­pile! I was staggered. I prac­tic­ally saw red.

A little back­ground inform­a­tion may also help to under­stand my anger:
We, as a com­pany, inher­ited this code from another com­pany who were, quite frankly, not very good at this kind of pro­ject (they have since aban­doned Java/JSP pro­jects to return to their core busi­ness — which they do very well). Moreover they were espe­cially bad at man­aging the code. Because of this there was an aura of dis­trust eman­at­ing from the cli­ent which we inher­ited. This made it very dif­fi­cult to intro­duce new ideas, sug­ges­tions, and par­tic­u­larly new processes.

For the past 18 months I have been try­ing to build our repu­ta­tion as pro­fes­sion­als who can deliver what the cli­ent wants, without any of the code man­age­ment based prob­lems the last lot had. This has taken a long time. Almost exactly 12 months ago we had a set back when I delivered a release which didn’t com­pile, this at a time when we were doing daily releases to try to meet a dead­line. It made me look and feel like an ass. It set back the company’s repu­ta­tion with the cli­ent some­what, par­tic­u­larly the cli­ents IT depart­ment who mostly come across as olde worlde main­frame stal­warts who can’t be doing with this “new fangled java stuff”, and could be heard mut­ter­ing “this lot are as bad as the last lot.”

So I changed our pro­cess and since then I have never released code which doesn’t com­pile. And I’ve done more than 80 releases since that day. Oh sure there have been bugs, stuff that didn’t work, etc. But you have always been able to actu­ally run the code to test it.

On the back of this con­fid­ence build­ing, I have been able to get the client’s IT guys to agree to changes to the sys­tem, to con­fig­ur­a­tion, etc. which we knew were for the best, but which in the past have been strongly res­isted, often with no tech­nical reason, other than an implied (some­times expli­cit) “we don’t trust you”.

And now this! Boy! I was angry! Any­way, I went for a smoke to calm down, then returned to vent my spleen at great length! I’m still sim­mer­ing now, as I write this.

I’m sure some people would regard this as “over the top”. Per­haps think me a little too obsessed. After all “it’s just a job”. But fun­nily enough, it isn’t. Just a job. It isn’t over the top.

I enjoy my job. I con­sider myself extremely lucky, blessed even, to get paid for doing my job. If I had an inde­pend­ent income, I would still do this job. Maybe not for the same com­pany, but I would still code.

Irre­spect­ive of that, what ever I do, pro­fes­sion­ally or per­son­ally, I try to do the best that I can. I really do.

I care. I care about try­ing my best. I care about tak­ing the time to fig­ure out how to do things prop­erly. I get pas­sion­ate about attempt­ing to do the right thing to the best of my abil­ity. Rather than mak­ing do, or pro­du­cing some­thing that is good enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a per­fec­tion­ist. I’ve been in this busi­ness long enough to know that real­it­ies of budgets and dead­lines mean that one can never attempt per­fec­tion. At work and away from work, I don’t expect everything to be per­fect, or expect that I will do some­thing right the first time. But whether for cli­ents or fam­ily I will always try my best.

And you know what? At work when I’m amongst my col­leagues I expect the same from them. I expect that whilst they are in the office, get­ting paid to do the job they do, they will also try their best. I expect that, like me, they will wish to learn from their own and other’s mis­takes. I expect that they would want to improve them­selves, so that they can do the next pro­ject better.

And every day I am disappointed.

Per­haps I’m a fool.

Ho hum…