• Great list! Sent the link around the office.

    There's a commandment missing from this, though it's somewhat related to the Aye Aye Capt'n Bligh Commandment:

    We are not the business; we are the expiditers. We don't make the rules and we don't need to provide perfect solutions, we translate their needs to automation and convenience while preserving cost and sanity.

    AKA: Don't overengineer the solution, or over-emphasize the problem.

    Far too often I've seen people try to convince business of what they want, instead of talking with them and trying to provide them what they need.

    IE: "I'd really like to not have to copy and paste this website page into excel and then reformat it heavily to get the totals for the salespeople on a particular day."

    Wrong answer: "Well, then what you want is us to code that up in SSRS, write up this and that and then you'll have to go over here in THIS system..."

    Right (first) question: "What do you have to reformat? Depending on what it is we could probably just make the page display the way you need or give you an alternate display."

    2: "Audit needs us to archive this information that we use from this webpage for determining the rates we applied to that month's mortgages."

    Wrong Answer: "Oh, wow, well we'll have to hook up to them and see if they have an RSS feed or we can apply an OCR scraper..."

    Right (first) question: "How often, and would a screenshot repository work or do you need something more complex?"

    I purposely took these out of the T-SQL arena simply because sometimes we're too close to our tools to see the overkill we occassionally try to provide. Even when we're aware of it, we still do it if we don't step back and go... Waaaaiiit just a second. Constant vigilance is required, though. I know damned well not to do this and I still catch myself a few dozen miles down the road when asked to put a sign just outside the village.


    - Craig Farrell

    Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.

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