September 05, 2006

Building bridges

Just heard it in the news - they decided not to explode the remains of the flyover bridge collapsed yesterday, here, in the city where I live. Thank God they wouldn't. Because they haven't manage to build it in the first place. With all their industrial-grade materials and world-class technologies, the thing crashed two months before it was supposed to be opened. Can you imagine what happens if they use world-class explosives ? Stop doing what you know not how to do, will you ?

Same thing happens in software and it makes me sick. Guess what ? Technologies and products are worth nothing unless you actually know how to build stuff. You have to actually get to it and do it over and again before you know how to do it. If you decide to use explosives to bring a building down, you'd better be damn proficient in exactly that sort of things. If all you previously have done was paving the roads, but you occasionally have a pack of industrial-grade high explosives, your attempts to follow world-class procedures in demolition will likely go down in flames.

The worst mistake of all when you want to build quality stuff is that everything is simple. No damn it, it's not. It's damn hard. You have to know ins and outs and you have to learn by your own mistakes, and never assume that bying Oracle will solve all your application performance problems.

September 02, 2006

Experience is the name ...

About this quote by Oscar Wilde:
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes

I thought it had an interesting language twist to it. Although the apparent interpretation suggests that everyone is hiding their mistakes behind the word "experience", there is another way of looking at it:


Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes
so that it means that everyone finds a name for their mistakes, and that name becomes the experience. Thus by picking good or bad word for referring to their mistakes, everyone can totally change the way they perceive their experience.