[BALUG-Talk] [BALUG-Admin] balug.org DNS review

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Todd Hawley (celticdm@gmail.com):

> Or you have programming teams on tight deadlines who aren't allowed
> time to fix a fundamental problem. Instead, they're told to find a
> patch for a bug and then "when time allows," they'll go back and fix
> the fundamental problem. Which of course never happens. Or they say,
> "that's not a bug, that's a new feature." :p

Here's a very funny rant about that, for you, almost too true for humour::
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Excerpt:

  All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people

  Imagine joining an engineering team.  You’re excited and full of ideas,
  probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs,
  awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and
  strength.  You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a
  major metropolitan area.  Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get
  through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had
  his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again.  Fred only works
  with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed
  to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a
  200-foot drop over rapids.  Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to
  handle the walkways.  What walkways?  Well Fred made a good case for
  walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal.  Of course,
  they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no
  railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer.  Nobody’s sure
  what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with
  upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they
  just let Phil do what he wants.  Sara, meanwhile, has found several
  hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge
  design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge
  progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety
  concerns.  Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have
  an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and
  it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.”
  This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things
  together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their
  way through the day with whatever parts were handy.  Also, the bridge was
  designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a
  suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added
  extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the
  suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the
  bridge.  Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re
  important parts.  After the introductions are made, you are invited to
  come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a
  propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.

  Would you drive across this bridge?  No.  If it somehow got built,
  everybody involved would be executed.  Yet some version of this dynamic
  wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software,
  websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect
  information on the Internet but didn’t.

Wall of text is in the original.  (The copy-editor in me keeps wanting
to trisect that paragraph.)