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Eric Wise

Business & .NET

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Silly rabbits, there are very few methods out there that you can point to and say "That's the one".

 

The wonderful thing about programming is that there are many ways to get to point B from point A.

The wonderful thing about blogs is that you can often find several ways to get to point B from point A.

The wonderful thing about a skilled developer is that they can parse through these ways, test them out, and figure out which one makes the most sense to them for the problem worked on at the time.

The wonderful thing about the community is that they can make you aware of caveats or new ways of doing things.

 

At the end of the day, when the end user comes a calling, the application better work.  In the end the average customer could care less whether you used only stored procedures or dynamic SQL, whether you used brand x object mapper or not.  Do your work the best you can, share the good stuff with the community, and always put your customers above the personal bias of the community and yourself.

The whole key to getting benefit from the community is to not blindly follow advice.  Apply and understand the examples you find.  Examine everything carefully.  To do otherwise would be like buying a house without looking inside it...


Published May 27 2005, 09:07 AM by Eric Wise
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Comments

David Neal said:

Very well put.
# May 27, 2005 9:37 AM

Leigh Kendall said:

Well put!!!

I think in our field there are some that get more enamored with the beauty of their tools and processes than with what they are being paid to do: provide value to the customer!
# May 27, 2005 11:14 AM

Sam said:

This has the vibe of a recent ASP.NET Forums post. I think it was best said by JayC202 there:

"I was trying to say that using an O/R Mapper versus a basically code generated/or hand-entered CRUD based DAL will help to achieve those goals which are preferable to your customer. So therefore it does matter."

I agree there's a danger in loosing sight of the customer, but I also think that using the wrong, or not most efficient tools for the job and pretending it has no impact on your customer is another form of NIH.
# May 27, 2005 11:39 AM

Eric Wise said:

Sam:

I agree, there are times when they customer does care. A big part of customer service is understanding your client's needs and using tools and techniques that are appropriate.

Take one of my current clients for example. They recently had a very bad experience with a consultant who instead of doing an iterative process, showing steady progress he was taking the approach of just releasing on massive build. Come to find out after many months of work the consultant had spread the work out so thin and written such convoluted code that most of the work he had done and had been paid for was rendered useless.

My team came in, used my domain pattern that we're all familiar with (codesmith templates and all) and we moved to a process with nightly builds focusing on one section at a time. In the three weeks we've been at work we've shown more progress than the consultant did in more than 4 months!

By understanding the client's needs I was able to judge that:

A) There was a lot of pressure to see real progress.

B) The code needed to be clean and maintainable because the client does use outside contractors.

C) I needed to be as cost sensitive as possible b/c they had lost a lot of money on the consultant, it was very important to succeed quickly and as cheaply as possible.
# May 27, 2005 12:17 PM

Jay Kimble said:

Much of what I'm going through right now is rejecting some of my "authorities" or at least one in particular... he may hold up under scrutiny in the future, but right now I have to try to do somethin different and make a few mistakes along the way.

Who makes my clients software? I do...
# May 27, 2005 1:42 PM

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