The ghosts of yesteryear
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I'm proud of most of the work I've done, but sometimes...
A couple years ago, I was asked for a project I wasn't directly involved in, whether I knew a quick way to read incoming mails with data, decrypt the data with GPG, and then process it so it could be handled by a third party system. As they had only a few days before launch, I whipped up something quick in Perl, and told them to get a proper solution later.They asked me to do the reverse too (encrypt and send), that was another afternoon, they of course never replaced it but it worked.
So far, not too bad.
Then another project came along, and someone asked: hey, can't we resue those scripts to send information from one party to another? I wasn't too sure we should do that, but we did it anyway. And now the fun started.
This time, there were two government organisations involved, who hardly talked with each other, used a shared service center for IT that didn't talk to either of them and had no IT specialists themselves. So I went down a slippery slope, applying band-aids, until the end result was something horrible.
For instance, they couldn't (didn't want to) set up mail addresses for me, so in the end I used our own mail server. Then, when there was some problem with that server, I even used the mailserver of a sister company (of us). There was some problem with the SMTP server, so I ended up using Lotus Notes to send the mail. They didn't want to have Notes on the server (I couldn't blame them), so in the end the solution ran on a desktop PC, in a semi-public room where people would sometimes just turn off the PC after using it, so the whole thing didn't riun anymore.
We went from bad to worse, but we felt at that time we didn't have much of a choice - we HAD to finish the project (it was fixed price and we needed the money), so we just did it. Looking back, you see all the points where we should have taken better decisions... but we didn't.
And now, having just started a new job, I find out one of my new colleagues is actually trying to support that system. The only thing I could say to him was: "I'm sorry".
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@b-redeker said:
The only thing I could say to him was: "I'm sor-Ouch!OWOWOW!Stop!OW!OW!OW!".
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@b-redeker said:
There was some problem with the SMTP server, so I ended up using Lotus Notes to send the mail.
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@b-redeker said:
I'm proud of most of the work I've done, but sometimes...
If you are seeking absolution by posting here then you've come to completely the wrong place.
You are not going to get "five hail marys and forgiven" here - you are going to get bitchslapped silly and then beaten to death with old SCSI cables pour encourager les autres.
B
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@havokk said:
You are not going to get "five hail marys and forgiven" here - you are going to get bitchslapped silly and then beaten to death with old SCSI cables pour encourager les autres.
On the other hand of course, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
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@DOA said:
@havokk said:
(That is why this excellent OP has so few replies.)You are not going to get "five hail marys and forgiven" here - you are going to get bitchslapped silly and then beaten to death with old SCSI cables pour encourager les autres.
On the other hand of course, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
