TimShadel.com

Today:

• Release team took 3 hours to respond to the build request I spent all early-morning working on. That made it very late for the QA guy.
• When we sent an updated release, they asked for us to re-email something we had sent just 1 hour before.
• I can’t get a login to my dev machines without going through the generic HelpDesk ticket system. I can’t select the appropriate party to assign the ticket to. I’m stuck with no access.
• I can’t have more than 100 MB of email space. Today I had to dump all my archived mail to mbox for the 2nd time in one month.
• I can’t get access to the hardware load balancer configs without going through the generic HelpDesk ticket system either. I just guessed about where to assign it. It’s now lost in neverland.
• The release team doesn’t own the boxes they build on, so 90 minutes after my second request they were still trying to build but running out of disk space on some partition they had no rights to. They are now planning to build on another machine, and aren’t interested in my local automated build system’s binary output. (It’s all done and even automated on our side, but _they_ haven’t done it yet.)

Other days:

• I can’t connect via POP to pull mail from a common mailbox to streamline turning customer requests into JIRA issues.
• Virus scanners eat gigantic portions of my team’s CPU cycles, to do nothing useful, effectively reducing the speed of the CPU purchased by the company.
• They’re recently installed BlueCoat and have institutionalized the Man-In-The-Middle SSL attack for all outgoing SSL traffic.
• I must write English instructions of how to deploy my application, and then have them executed by a person that has access to the boxes, but very little knowledge of the application. I cannot run any automated commands to accomplish this process.

So today I’m grumbling because I have a different set of priorities that others in the company. That’s life, but today I’m grumbling.

For 2007, I’ve decided to make a few subtle changes to the way I blog and
podcast.

1. Less Java, more other stuff.
2. Less rigor, more direct.
3. More personal.

Less Java, more other stuff. I don’t find that Java captures my main set
of interests any more. I’m going to talk more broadly in both my blog and
the Zdot podcast.

Less rigor, more direct. Up to this point I’ve typically waited to post most substantial things until I’ve had some longer experience. Bloggers like Matt Raible and Ed Gibbs write more stream-of-conscious style. I like the feel it brings, so we’ll see if it fits me in 2007. So don’t be surprised to see posts that reflect my emotions in the moment.

More personal. I’ve avoided most discussion of the more personal sides of life. I’m gonna dabble with extending that a bit more.

While this may not mean big changes for you, I think it’ll free up a few constraints that I’ve put on myself. So out with the old, and in with the new. I’ll talk to you soon.

–Tim