Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Dear Software Developers...

Good morning Coders,

I hope your day has started off well? (Can you already tell this isn't going to end well? Heh heh...)

Hopefully, you've finished off your bag of Skittles, your third Mountain Dew or second can of Rock Star, and are looking forward to hitting your favorite X-men Edition Signature series ceramic bong at lunchtime. A good day so far.

I would like to make a few small suggestions on behalf of all IT minions around this big ball of dirt floating in space:

Please be consistent. Please use a common naming and version method for all of your products, components, files, folder names, services, processes, threads, interfaces, API modules, documentation, support files, registry keys, junctions and reparse points?

Is this really too much to ask?

So, you say "but Dave, we have 9,000 skittle-swilling bastards spewing code in 24 countries and 12 languages. How do you expect us to be that consistent?"

Write a memo. Send an email. Hold a meeting. I don't know and I don't care. McDonalds can do it, so can you. Or are you saying you cannot perform at the level of a McDonalds worker? Wow.

Pick a 3 or 4 character label that uniquely identifies your company and use it on everything you do. EVERYTHING!

Stop with the "Shitware 2011" and "Crapware 14.5" and "Doucheware 0.0.002.9a" versioning and pick ONE format for everything. Okay?!

Pick ONE standard for publishing updates. Zip,MSI, EXE, MSP, whatever, just pick ONE f-ing format and stick with it. Survey your customers (whoa! What a concept!) To see what works best for them.

Fill-out the property tags on all of your DLL and component files. Company, product, version. You know: all that painfully complicated stuff. I know it might cut into your bong-loading time, but it'll make a better product.

Mm-kaay??!

Jesus! Shitty coders piss me the f**k off.