test.ical.ly | getting the web by the balls

Jul/12

27

SPOF – How a brilliant developer doesn’t make a good product

4 Comments · Posted by Christian in The real job

One of my many colleagues within the company I’m working for once built a very cool an powerful service some years ago. So powerful and architecturally elegant that most of our websites use it and are heavily dependent on it. I wouldn’t know to point out a single flaw in this technology.

Other than available maintenance ressources.

The service I’m talking about does scale quite a bit and is in a redundant setup. So with single point of failure I do not refer to the service alone. It does stutter sometimes but runs ok in general.

However when something breaks it’s the same genius mind over and over again that fixes it. Just the one. There is no backup. And he moved on within the organisation taking on other responsibilities and so forth.

Now he’s going to stay off work on maternity leave. Who could blame him? But who will replace him in the meantime?

Who will replace him when he’s calling in sick or when he decides to seek employment elsewhere?

A product like this service simply isn’t ready for production only when it’s implemented. It needs to be run, maintained and developed further and for that you need to spread the knowledge to more than one pair of shoulders. If you can not or are not willing to spend some ressources on running a product you should not build it yourself in the first place.



  • Nils Langner

    German saying “Gib jemandem einen Fisch und du ernährst ihn für einen Tag, lehre die Person zu fischen und du ernährst ihn ein Leben lang”. 

  • caefer

    @a712d50acb5ea6257e5143467b3ef592:disqus exactly! it exists in English as well: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

  • http://twitter.com/mkdotam mikayel ghazarian

    This is in general difference between nouns and verbs, compare “fish” vs “to fish” :D

  • Georg S.

    How right you are. And no need to say how disappointed I am that there is no proxy person for  the time being. Those who call themselves the persons with responsibility need to make their own experience over and over again. 
    If the software fails, DO PANIC and try to find a person who can spell the programming language that the software has been written with. If this person cannot help, blame the operators because they haven’t anticipated the case. And blame the developer because the documentation was not good enough to prevent the problem.

<<

>>

Find it!

Theme Design by devolux.nh2.me
To top