February 22, 2012 at 9:31 am
success has many fathers, failure is always an orphan.
February 22, 2012 at 10:00 am
Thanks, Steve, but you could have waited until after my DB server RAM upgrade and all of the reconfiguration accompanying it tonight...
Rich
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." -- Neils Bohr
(I may have grabbed this quote from someone here)
February 22, 2012 at 11:30 am
richj-826679 (2/22/2012)
Thanks, Steve, but you could have waited until after my DB server RAM upgrade and all of the reconfiguration accompanying it tonight...Rich
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." -- Neils Bohr
(I may have grabbed this quote from someone here)
Sending good karma your way. May all your chips be flawless and your configuration completed with no ill effects.
February 22, 2012 at 4:47 pm
I think failure shouldn't just be accepted, it should be embraced.
...failures should be learning opportunities, and should allow developers to improve their work.
I totally agree. That sounds like the Growth Mindset[/url].
February 22, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Accepting your own mistakes and failures in life is one of the hardest part of being a human. But that's life, sometimes we really need to experience failures to appreciate success.:)
February 22, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (2/22/2012)
Sending good karma your way. May all your chips be flawless and your configuration completed with no ill effects.
Karma received!
Old 48GB RAM + New 48GB RAM = Happy users (for now, until the 3rd-party product's silly inefficient programming once again override the bandaid that RAM provides, as the database grows)
Thanks!
Rich
"Failure is not an option" -- Nobody, but often attributed to Gene Kranz
June 3, 2016 at 12:28 am
Managers often put a lot of personal prestige into projects they sponsor. I think that's the main reason why they're so unwilling to accept failure.
June 3, 2016 at 12:51 am
I do not see how ANY person can work without failure. We are humans and however much we try to work without it, it will be there. Accept it. Someone once said: It is not about how many times you fall, but how many times you get up. We upgraded a system for a company a few years back and changed to a web based system which ran on an intranet in the company. We improved so many things in that system and made it better and quicker for users to work with. I thought I worked so hard to make sure there won't be bugs that it will just run smoothly. When the first bug bit I could not accept failure. My boss sat me down and said we can try our best but there will always be something that fails.
All we can do is just get up again!!!:-P:-P:-P:-P:-P:-P:-P:-P
Manie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I am happy because I choose to be happy.
I just love my job!!!
June 3, 2016 at 1:51 am
My experience of agile is exactly the reverse. In the last three years or so I have worked on about eight sites that use it and in all of them, there is a problem of a lack of documentation. There is also a lack of any longer term view than the next day or two, so the problem that Steve correctly highlights is exacerbated.
In the BI world I am reading blogs telling me that OLAP is a dead technology because we now have column store databases/indexes. This seems to be a part of the "Agile" approach that we have to write code in the first two weeks of any project - see http://www.agilemanifesto.org/. I think that this is merely a euphemism for "we don't like documentation, we just want to write code". Codd must turning in his grave.
June 3, 2016 at 7:01 am
Failure is always an option. Always.
I've had some big wins and some big losses, but one thing I've learned is you won't get anywhere if you don't take a risk. So i float the 'crazy' idea that might work, come at things from the angle no one wants to think about. Its made me an agile problem solver. I don't always know the answers, but i'm flexible enough to consider different alternatives. Some work, some don't.
Sometimes one saves the day and sometimes the day eats you alive and spits out the bones.
June 3, 2016 at 9:16 am
This is an example of why every developer and especially every project manager should be required to read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks, subtitled Essays On Software Engineering. Yes it is over 40 years old, but the wisdom and knowledge it offers is timeless. Chapter 11 is titled Plan to throw one away. It's available as a free pdf download now. Do your career and your project a favor, download it and read it this weekend.
June 3, 2016 at 10:54 am
A previous place that I worked at wanted to "get rid of the mainframe". That was the objective. Ignore the fact that it had 99% uptime and balanced to the penny, or they rapidly found out why it didn't balance, every month when they closed the books. A committee, which is a warning sign in and of itself, went shopping for a database-based ERP system. They had no experts in database technology in the group. They bought a system based on SQL Server. And everything it does is RBAR. Very bad schema design and indexing, and no stored procedures. They have to replace the server every other year while performance drops as the data set grows. If the system crashes, restore from backup and accept the data loss.
But they'll probably never get rid of it as that would mean accepting failure, plus they got rid of the people who understood how the org functioned, so it would be a truly herculean task to go to something else. Meanwhile, they also decided they didn't need a DBA: the vendor can do everything! Which means DBCCs didn't get checked, neither did backups, so when the SAN lost a drive one of their databases fell in to the bit bucket and they lost several months of unpaid billable information. And they're keeping the vendor.
Failure is ALWAYS an option, the question is what you do afterwards. Since they didn't want to listen to someone who knows how the technology works, in this case they'll have to live with it.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
June 3, 2016 at 11:38 am
Failure should always be an option.
Yes, failure is not a worst case scenario. There is nothing more wasteful than spinning your wheels until you have no more energy, financial resources, or supporters left to try something different.
Fail fast, learn, adapt, try again.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
June 3, 2016 at 2:44 pm
Ed Klein-385786 (6/3/2016)
This is an example of why every developer and especially every project manager should be required to read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks, subtitled Essays On Software Engineering. Yes it is over 40 years old, but the wisdom and knowledge it offers is timeless. Chapter 11 is titled Plan to throw one away. It's available as a free pdf download now. Do your career and your project a favor, download it and read it this weekend.
I wish someone on a large web project would update this book. It's a great book and required reading for software developers and managers.
June 3, 2016 at 2:50 pm
Ed Klein-385786 (6/3/2016)
This is an example of why every developer and especially every project manager should be required to read "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks, subtitled Essays On Software Engineering. Yes it is over 40 years old, but the wisdom and knowledge it offers is timeless. Chapter 11 is titled Plan to throw one away. It's available as a free pdf download now. Do your career and your project a favor, download it and read it this weekend.
have you a link to the free pdf download?
________________________________________________________________
you can lead a user to data....but you cannot make them think
and remember....every day is a school day
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