Tuesday 27 March 2007

The Legend of Bruce Lee.

"Don't think. FEEL. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."

The man's a legend. And he epitomises the Expert. How many time have you sensed something and you were wrong? Indeed, how many times have you looked at a solution and said, there's something not quite right.

I worked on a project last year. The domain model was incredibly complex, and the calculations to derive payments to customers were extremely convoluted (based on geographical areas and the nature of borders on those areas). The business processing layer was well in excess of 100,000 lines of code. Every now and then, we'd come across a payment anomaly. A tiny amount, fractions of a penny in thousands of payments. We called it "The Bagel" because we didn't know what else to call it.

When I left it was still there, the bready, doughy ring of triggers, views and stored procedures. Its grew into such a complex mystical thing, almost always spitting out the right results. But it 'felt' bad. You just looked at it , printed out on a big bit of paper, and you knew it was bad. But you don't exactly what's wrong with it. And you know one day, it would bite you in the ass.

I just checked. Its still there. And people still feel bad about it.

That's what comes with being an expert, these things get emotional. And you don't know why.

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