Some email correspondence over the weekend made this blog inevitable.
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Agent OE: As you can see, you’ve been my class for some time now, Team DLSI. It seems that you’ve been living…two lives. In one life, you are NJIT students, computer science majors at a respectable university. You have a student ID number, you pay your tuition, and you…help the janitors carry out their garbage.
The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias ‘Neo’ and are guilty of missing virtually every deadline we have a milestone for.
One of these lives has a future. And one of them does not.
I’m going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Team DLSI: you’re here because we need your help. We know that you’ve been contacted by a certain…individual. A man who calls himself Bieber. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by…many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive.
Your sponsors believe that I’m wasting my time with you, but I believe you wish to do the right thing. Now, we’re willing to wipe the slate clean—give you a fresh start. And all that we’re asking in return is your cooperation in bringing your senior project to completion.
Team DLSI: Yeah. Wow, that sounds like a really good deal. But I think I’ve got a better one. How about, I give you my source code…
Agent OE: Hm.
Team DLSI: …and you give me my diploma.
Agent OE: Team DLSI, you disappoint me…
Team DLSI: You can’t scare me with this evaluation crap. I know my GPA. I want my commencement.
Agent OE: Tell me, Team DLSI. What good is commencement, if you are unable…to graduate?
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(By the way, if you’re looking for a good Matrix screen saver in celebration of the 5/15 release, these guys have it).
From experience: in the “Real World”, nobody hits deadlines. Try as they might, most projects get planed without taking into account that someone will place a quotation mark in the Matrix somewhere that will cause something wierd to happen… perhaps a glitch… perhaps… Deja Vu?
We actually managed to get an extension on our project. Well, I call it an extension, but it’s really more holding the NJIT faculty to their promise. Last day of class is was going to be next Tuesday, but, because of snow days, the class schedules were restructured so this Thursday is the last day of class—basically shortening our development timeline by a week. I made some noise about it, though and got the extension bumped to 5/7.
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From experience: in the “Real World”, nobody hits deadlines.
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if you say so.
In my 5 years of programming for my current employer i’ve (nor my team on the occassions that i’ve had to work with one) have never missed one.
Meeting a deadline in the ‘real world’ isn’t a hard thing to do. there are 24 hours in a day. most projects have at least 2 weeks before they are due. thats 14×24=336 hours of time to research+design+hack. Average hack time for me is about 60hours per 3000 lines of code. that can be done in 4 days (you actually need to sleep between coding and debugging your code
).
most 2 week projects are about (at least for me) 1500 lines of code. So i get about 10/11 days of research and design time. which is more than enough for most projects (given a 11 hour work day).
btw: good luck on the project Ken …
Altp.
I’ve never been on a project so short, so I guess you may be right. Most projects I’ve been on are monsters- 8 – 12 month projects, with many changes deadlines.
By the way, Altp, iI noticed that on your site you have a “find magic cards” search engine. If you play the online version of MTG, I’d sell you my colection (if you’re interested), or (even easier) my MTGO account – which is rather extensive (I get obsessed with stuff, and this was one thing I got obsessed with and decided one day just to give it up and find the universe outside the screen again). It’s something like 1200 cards with the good stuff- COA, Squirell decks, bird decks, timmy decks, nightmare decks… I tried to forget them all…
hehe… table top only
… more often than not its “we want web app X done by the end fo the month” and web app X is something simular to Y that I did the previous week.
As for project length, i have a bunch of non-techs dictating when things will be done. I may go into work tomorrow to find an email that says “we want something like ebay by the end of the week” … so, there would have to be something like ebay developed by the end of the week
Altp.
“…and web app X is something simular to Y that I did the previous week.”
So, rather than several tiny projects, your work is more like one, long, drawn out assignment that never ends.
something like that.
I’m in the process of doing 2 things:
1) writing “Mike’s Perl Modules” to make my life easier.
2) learning Python to port everything to that
Its actually not as simple as one long drawn out project that never ends. But, that analogy works i guess.
Altp.
Yes, what is this Python thing I keep hearing about?
Apparently, it’s one of Mark Pilgrim’s favorite languages, and it was used to create one of my favorite apps: Plucker.
I just re-read this entry K… This is pehaps the best blog entry ever written, sheerly by its parodical style and its acurate manner of getting the point across. Bravo, Kneo!
“A plus, plus, plus, plus…” Ralphie’s teacher