Internal borders [Computing]
12:26am GMT, 11 Mar 2010

I've had this idea in my head for some time that the way people run IT organisations is wrong: they're too fragmented into subject-specific areas. Then the DevOps guys came along and started trying to encourage developers to work with ops people, which is a start. But I'm not satisfied with dev-ops collaboration; I want ops-ops collaboration and I had a good old rant to the Build Doctor about it over an ale or two. Kris Buytaert followed up with a blog post describing some of the tensions he sees.

Splitting your operations people up into teams of DBAs, Systems Administrators, Network Engineers, Storage Engineers and all the other ops disciplines is probably causing you pain. You probably don't even know that it's sickness; you probably just think the symptoms are part of everyday life in IT: glacial progress on projects and issue resolution and a lack of interest in the business goals.

The first symptom is that to get some things done seems to require enormous willpower and dedication. These are simple things that require work by multiple teams. There's a delay while the task crosses the internal borders between each team and they try to understand the request. There are times when people forget what the process is and it doesn't get routed correctly to the next team in the chain. It's unlikely that any of the teams have the inclination or the understanding to test that what the customer wants has actually been done. What they test is that their tiny piece has been done.

It seems as if every time things cross internal borders between teams there's a latency cost while you wait for them to do their thing. There's also a cost of doing business with your colleagues, something familiar to anyone who has been asked to fill out numerous mandatory fields in a form to request that someone sitting within feet of you make a relatively insignificant change. The more team boundaries you cross, the more these delays and costs mount up.

The second symptom is that operational issues can take a long time to resolve. In my experience this is particularly true of performance problems. Maybe your users are complaining about some report taking minutes to complete and you pass the ticket onto your application support people and they say, no, there's nothing wrong with the application, maybe it's the database? So the problem baton is passed to the DBAs and they have a look at the database, declare that the database is OK and ask the network guys to have a look. The network guys mutter about 5% utilisation or something and say the network is fine and they pass it to the sys admins, who mutter something about 20% CPU usage and say everything is fine. And now, probably a day or two later, you have a bunch of technical people who have checked their personal fiefdoms are fine and a bunch of angry users who are still have reports that take too long to run.

Of course, all these experts could be right, but it doesn't matter, because optimising the network, the databases, the storage or the servers in isolation is absolutely useless. The report could be running slow because there's an extra few milliseconds of latency between the server and the database and the report does 10,000 database queries, which return a lot of data and the milliseconds add up to a long delay. Unless someone sits down and works out what is going on, while understanding the whole technology stack, your users are going to have to put up with it.

The third symptom is that none of your operations staff seem to actually care what the business wants to achieve. The human mind is odd. As soon as you put people in discipline-specific teams you seem to be sending them a subtle message that their job is not to meet business needs, but to look after some arbitrary technical resource. Don't, therefore, be surprised if the DBAs care more about databases than the business goals. By putting them into the "DBA team" you're telling them that their job is to look after databases. By implication, the business goals are secondary.

Putting people into a bunch of specialist teams doesn't seem to be the right way to do things. There has to be a better way.

Could I help save Portsmouth FC? [General]
07:02pm GMT, 4 Mar 2010

At least one person thinks so:

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:07:33 H0600
Subject: SOS [PORTSMOUTH FC}
To: website@darkskills.org.uk
From: James Cox 

Good Day,
         My name is James cox kennedy,the chairman of Cox enterprise & Cox
communications Incorporation.I was reading a news about a football club
in england {PORTSMOUTH FC} and to my understanding it seems the club is 
about to go into administration but i have made some enquiries about the 
club but it seems they are not ready to deal with americans but i am very 
interested in purchasing this  club i have the funds but im just looking 
for a  good british business man/woman that can be my frontperson on this
deal ,we will sign an agreement through our lawyers before i put my money
down on this and everything else will be taking care of,Please get back
to me as soon as possible if you are interested.
James Cox Kennedy.
Cox communications,
Chairman,
ww2.cox.com
speak2cox@gmail.com
+1-404-547-8736
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Kennedy

Dear absentee [General]
12:04am BST, 28 Aug 2009

Dear absentee,

Thank you for gracing me with an automated response giving me the awesome news that you are on holiday/sabbatical/raising your offspring/have left the company. I would like to reassure you that the experience was in no way diminished by the receipt of 23 similar messages from other people in reply to the same email.

I'd like to suggest some additional things that you might want to add to your away message next time you jet off to the Algarve/have a long posh-sounding holiday/get knocked up/resign/get sacked.

• If this automated away message raises any tickets in your ticketing system, then please close them. Then you might want to consider spending a fruitless time trying to work out how to filter out away messages from every email system currently known to man.
• If this away message happens to cause a mail loop, you might want to fix it before it generates, say, 500 emails.
• There's every chance, of course, that I am actually in the office and have forgotten to unset my away message. In which case, please feel free to ignore this message.
• If it's that bloody important, please phone.

This could be a problem with the server's configuration [Computing]
07:08pm BST, 19 Jul 2009

I just wanted to install the latest Firebug. Good to know that it happens to us all.

Address handling deficits [General]
12:21pm BST, 10 Apr 2009

Dear web developers and people who commission websites aimed at a UK audience,

It would make my life easier if everyone who created forms for entering postal addresses on websites spent some time thinking about where people actually live. Many of you seem to think that we all live in addresses that look this:

22 Acacia Avenue
Smalltown
Burbshire
XX9 9ZZ

This is simply not the case.

A few specific tips for people to consider:

• In common with most of the 7.5 million residents of London, I do not live in a county. Do not make county a mandatory field. Do not add "Greater London" to the selection of values. It isn't a county, it's a workaround for your broken assumptions about the way the UK is administered.
• Technically, the residents of Portsmouth, Southampton and other unitary authorities do not live in a county either and have not done since 1992. I repeat, do not make county a mandatory field.
• For much of my time in London, I have lived in houses converted into flats. These are typically distinguished by number or letter. Please have some facility for entering the flat number or letter. Please do not only have a field for house number and then validate that it only contains a single number and no letters. Living in the same building as someone does not imply that I would like to share my post with them.
• Postcodes are more complicated than you think. Do not write your own postcode validation rules. "EC1R 3ER" is a valid postcode. If you choose to use someone else's validation rules, please ensure that you have some way of finding out when the Royal Mail issues new postcodes which break the existing validation rules.
• If the postcode I enter is not in your database of postcodes, it might mean that it is a new postcode that hasn't made it into your database yet. You are updating your postcode database, right? Please allow me to enter a postcode that isn't in your database, after warning me.

In essence, please do not waste my time trying to validate that my address adheres to your fundamentally broken view of the way the UK works.

Update: Fixed a typo.