I just prevailed in a design discussion with my boss. The result: I get to implement the feature.
… its own Reward
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Monthly Archives: July 2019
And Now We Wait
I have been working on a big project for the better part of a year now. It is a massive overhaul of the systems my department uses in their daily grind. Over time, those systems have become downright awful, and much of the awfulness was beyond our ability to address. A key part of the system was run by our IT department.
That system was never very good, but as our needs changed, the system… stayed the same. Any change would cost hundreds of thousands of funny-money dollars and take a year just to find out that it was going to be another year, and another bucket of funny-money. It’s budget-dollars, not real dollars, but spending on that system would take budget-dollars away from other projects.
This antique system left the rest of our tools making terrible compromises so that the missing functionality could be wedged in. It was time for a change, and I set out to replace that system we didn’t control with a better one that we did.
Hand in hand with that, is that my department’s servers are very, very old in server years. My employer, meanwhile, has created new services so departments like ours don’t need to maintain our own hardware. So this change became not just a massive software update, but a major infrastructure upgrade as well.
I underestimated just how much our applications had been warped to accommodate the crazy compromises. Unwarping them was worthwhile, but time-consuming, and none of these applications had been built with testing in mind. On top of that, the new infrastructure placed its own limits on the applications that required further refactoring.
The goal: to pull the tablecloth off the table without disturbing the dishes, then to slip in a new tablecloth.
For the first few months I worked alone, but as the Big Day approached (and receded), the rest of my team got increasingly involved. I managed to hand off the DNS and server config stuff to my boss just in the nick of time, before the complexity of that exploded in my face.
Not totally alone; I must amend. There were people in many other groups — the people creating the pretty dang awesome new infrastructure tools we are using, who went out of their way to accommodate me and help me along, even though my group is tiny in the scheme of things.
I mentioned the Big Day. That’s not quite accurate. Much like “Happy Hour from 3-7 p.m.”, the Big Day started three hours ago and lasts through the weekend. Right now a script is running, a complex bit of software I have devoted hundreds of hours to, that pulls the data out of the old databases, reconciles an incredible number of different ways the data can disagree, patches the Definitive Data together and houses them in their new, shiny home. When the script is done tomorrow morning, it will never be run again. It will be archived as a historical curiosity and that’s that.
So this evening my boss put all our systems on hold, and we began the migration. After the first giddy flurry of excitement as we all worked to make sure we were ready, I started my script. “And now we wait,” I wrote to the team.
Headstrong is Code
In my last episode I mentioned that he use of “headstrong” to describe a female character is almost as bad as calling her “beautiful”.
Headstrong. I suppose I should explain why I find that appellation awful, even as it is widely regarded as a strongly positive trait for female main characters. We can add to the list ‘rebellious’ and ‘independent’. In a man, the exact same traits would be spun positively as ‘confident’.
Why is confident considered a separating characteristic for women? Why is independence a trait worthy of a fantasy hero?
Independent and whatnot are all traits that, applied to a fictional role model, imply that she is somehow special. But hold on there, Sparky! None of those things should be regarded as special. “She a woman… but.. she’s also independent? MADNESS!” Let’s just stop right there.
All those descriptions are code for “hasn’t met the right man yet.”
Seriously, I wish I was wrong. While there are a couple of notable exceptions, there exists shit-tons of novels and series of novels based on the simple premise that an otherwise-powerful woman must somehow care about the merits of her multiple asshole suitors, and when she chooses the best asshole-suitor prosperity ensues. Each asshole is almost-perfect, and fans can form teams around the assholes. But that misses the point.
Our girl doesn’t need any of those assholes.
So let’s get to the real headstrong. She’s got her opinions, and she’s ready to defend them, but she will also listen gracefully and accept when she’s wrong. She’s strong that way. She loves hard, and when her best friend says, “that woman is using you,” she says, “hope you’re wrong,” because she’d not going to stop loving. She’s not one to let go easily.
But she’s headstrong, and change isn’t so easy. It’s a curse she lives with every day, the inability to let go of the little battles to win the war. Her lover whispers in her ear every night, little nothings that add up to something, but nothing will erase the big picture, even for a moment. You can never stop being a hero.
OF COURSE She’s Beautiful
I haven’t been getting much writing done lately, and an important way to break out of that slump is to make sure I spend more time reading. So this afternoon I was poking around the ol’ virtual bookstore looking for one of those free “first taste” novels intended to get one hooked on a series.
Today I found a book by Morgan Rice, the first of eight installments (and, presumably, counting.) That many installments in the story can be a red flag; the world does not need another Robert Jordan fumbling his way though an epic he knew how to start but not how to finish. As each book of Wheel of Time got longer, the amount that actually happened went down.
That notwithstanding, if each installment of the saga can show vestiges of a beginning, a middle, and an end, it could be a fun read.
There is one thing that annoyed me right off the bat, however. This is the first sentence of the blurb:
17 year old Ceres, a beautiful, poor girl in the Empire city of Delos, lives the harsh and unforgiving life of a commoner.
Beautiful. Not “resourceful”, not “paranoid schizophrenic”, not even “headstrong” (which is awful for different reasons). From that sentence, I am left to believe that her primary tool for escaping poverty will be her beauty. That’s the least-interesting tool imaginable.
And come on, she’s the hero in a pulp drama. There is no way anyone on this side of the blurb even considered the possibility that she might not be beautiful, or that the most worthwhile men she meets won’t also be beautiful. I get it; the beauty is part of a fantasy shared by the primary audience of this story. But the first high-impact word in the blurb — arguably the most import word in the whole description, the one word that will influence the success of the novel more than any other single word — is a throwaway.
She’s beautiful. Big fuckin’ deal.