Flutterby™! : magic monkey hour

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magic monkey hour

2010-01-05 11:21:35.955792+00 by meuon 2 comments

In a project that has been "relationship managed", the coders (1 in S. Africa, a .net wizard and me) were finally allowed to communicate directly on the interface. A simple one posting XML to create records. We've spent hours and hours in a storm of DTD specs like snowflakes, strange business logic tossed like snowballs, XML validation issues hitting like hail, all fueled by a person in the middle to whom XML is a religion (he co-authored a "definitive" work on XML). Everyone trying to pretend they are large companies with lots of process management and documentation flow.

the 3 company flow has been: Code-Monkey->IT Manager->Biz-Dev <-> Biz-Dev-MiddleMan <-> Biz-Dev <- Code Monkey

Finally in desperation, the code monkeys are allowed to play together. ala: Monkey<->Monkey. In about 1 hour.. specs are laughed at and tossed, redefined, both sides re-coded and tested, and magic happens. The best quote was from the biz-dev guy on the other side: "We didn't know it COULD work that way".

Worth getting up at 4am to play with the code monkey on the other side of the world for.. now I want a banana.

[ related topics: Religion Web development Content Management moron Work, productivity and environment Clowns ]

comments in descending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2010-01-05 23:08:57.667506+00 by: meuon

It's sometimes the only "value proposition" the biz-dev types have.

#Comment Re: made: 2010-01-05 18:01:36.997346+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

There's this notion I have bobbling about in my head that monetization requires keeping people from effectively doing what they really want. Money comes from crippling products and making people pay to do things that could be done easier at an overall lower cost, but since that makes it harder to fund the implementors we go the extra step to clamp down on use to give us a revenue stream.

I think sometimes biz dev guys forget that this friction in internal processes is bad.