I had my first HoMO!

It was so totally awesome that I can hardly speak, or at least now speak in a octave or two higher than normal. It just took my breath away.

So to recap, HoMo or the Hank Orthogonal Modus Operandi is the process we use to make sure what gets pushed into production is super cool, scalable and the Ops guys will not shoot you for it. If you do what you are told its a rubber stamp, try and be creative and Dave (our Chief Architect) and the Ops team come after you.

So I have been working on "Mega Enterprise". Its going to be pretty sweet. My feature for this is to ensure that whatever device you use, IE6, a Blackberry 62xx etc. allows you to log on, go through the authorization process and then drop a targeted Ad. Its super sweet, it means that we will totally get a bunch of money from Advertisers falling over themselves to be the first thing our target users will see. We aim to be the destination site for 17-34 year olds, something that Facebook can only be dreaming of.

The architecture was pretty sweet, I designed it to deal with 10M impression a minute, since that's Dave's design goal for the site. He was saying that if we don't get that visitor rate then "Its not worth getting out of bed for". I totally get that. So I used a Spring container, with lazy consistency a bit like CouchDB or Amazon Dynamo. I wrapped that up in the implementation so I don't scare everybody, but its fast and will scale horizontally on commodity hardware, non of that proprietary Sun hardware .

So I got my rubber from my HoMo. I'm very happy.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 178 lbs

Beam me up scotty!

Its been an exciting week. I finally got my code out of development and into the hands of QA. The HaHa gave me some serious re-work to make sure that Ops would sign off on the design. I was also super lucky that Dave did not make me go through the new HoMo process, but I'm looking forward to my first one of those.

So basic sanity testing is done, mocked up all the backend external interfaces so that QA can inject the bad and the good. Provided a front end mock for the Applications teams so they can build without the need for having the whole software stack. All looking sweet. All very test driven development, all very agile.

Next step was to get Engineering Services to deploy to a QA environment in the lab. Mother-of-Jesus what an episode that turned out to be and we are still not finished.

Here's what I had to do. A few months ago I had to submit an email which Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir approved. This then got translated onto a cocktail napkin (I'm not joking). This was then pinned to the wall in some sort of timeline sequence, an agile planning wall so to speak. I'm not sure what happens when they reach the end of the wall, they must wrap around or go back to the beginning or something.

Then, I had to attend another daily standup with what's left of PMO. Each day I had to say the following, "Yes, I'm on track and still need the environment". It would have been easier to tell them when I was not on track, but they guy who runs the team wants to "look you in the eye".

Then it came to the day-of-deployment. This basically meant hanging around all day with the services guys. The head guy, known as Beam-Me-Up banged away at his ASUS all day, swearing a lot and then shouting for another Diet Dr. Pepper. I did not like to ask what was going on, but basically if I attempted to get up he said "Leave and I fucking nuke this environment". I mean dude, chill out!

That was three days ago. I'm still at his desk, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is pissed, he thinks he could have deployed in seconds. I mean that guys is the bomb, I'm sure he could have done it in at least 30 minutes. Its been whack-a-mole, fix one thing and it breaks another. Beam-Me-Up says this is normal.

If I don't get the environment I may loose my QA team and miss the release window. If that happens, then I may not get to deliver this side of Memorial Day, the schedule is backed up with American City Bank work. F**k me, this shit is hard!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 184 lbs

HaHA gets renamed HoMo!

Did not mention that we have a new corporate architect, Dave. He's been pretty quite since he started in October. He turns up at meetings, design reviews etc. and says nothing. He then goes back to his desk, pulls a diet 7 Up and then writes more Twiki pages (we are so old school, we don't even use Media Wiki).

This week, he presented at the Tech-Sess. The presentation was called "Why we are changing from HaHa to HoMo and make more millions". HaHa is our review process, the Hank Architecture Holistic Assessment.

It certainly drew a big audience, even Lucy from recruiting was there. Dave's big idea was that the HaHA needs to be less democratic, we need to basically rubber stamp patterns that Ops feel they can deploy + support and stop engineers f**king up with some new crazy architecture or deployment requirement, like reliable messaging. The first step on this long process is to rename HaHa to HoMo, or the Hank Orthogonal Modus Operandi.

Like what gives dude? I get the principal, but do you really think that just changing the name is going to make that huge a difference? I know that Henry always had a master plan for the naming of the company and that Hank Commerce was the final destination after visiting MyScrewdriver and TARDIS Corp. Apparently we have been in a law suite for years with the BBC over that last name.

So HoMo is the name, the process is new and the outcomes will be different, so says Dave. I'm looking forward to my first HoMo.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (down 4 from last week)
Shots : 20 (up 4 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs