Work went well today although I kind of wish that people would be doing something other than ringing up on a Sunday. I don’t know whether it is me but I’ve been banking with my bank for 18-19 years and in the whole time I have banked with them I’ve rung them up a grand total of three times – yes, three times. Call me a old fashioned but I tend not to ring up companies because I’m lonely or I’m incapable of living my life without having a team on constant standby to solve my problems. I sometimes wonder whether people use contact centres as a real life replacement for AI because god help people actually doing something for themselves. Sorry, I had to get that vent out of the way because it is kind of frustrating particularly when I’ve got Salesforce cases piling up that need to be seen to.
Once that day was out of the way I went for my walk tonight – 16.70 km which is three laps (from the top of my road to the end of the road then back is one lap which is around 5.8 km) and after arriving home I had a rest then jumped into the shower. As much as I moan about having to do some exercise each day I also know that afterwards I feel so much better knowing I got it out of the way. As much as people are feeling crappy about the economy in New Zealand I still see houses being built in my area and I do hope it continues because when there is an eventual turn around it’ll hopefully mean that we won’t see the return to crazy house price growth. On a side note of houses, I have to admit my pet peeve of mine is when people refer to their house as a nest egg – no, it isn’t a nest egg, it is a house to live in, it isn’t some magical pinata that you crack open at retirement.
As you’ve probably no doubt heard there is the whole PHP fiasco that has unfolded but what I think is a bigger problem are the number of websites that are running old and unsupported versions. When you write code the process of maintaining is a long term project that goes beyond just fixing up bugs – it also involves refactoring it, moving the code forward as the underlying technology changes. An example of this would be PHP and how over time the technology develops – old ways of doing things make way for new more efficient ways, customer demands change and thus the project has to meet those new demands. As part of that process of refactoring, depreciation and removal of legacy features, and refinement of what exists there is going to be a need to break compatibility at some point.
This is where the problem starts – the underlying technology is moving forward but for far too many organisations there aren’t the resources being allocated to ensuring that the website sitting on top of that technology stack is also moving forward. All too often we see Microsoft push Windows forward and even their own programmers within Microsoft aren’t moving their code forward. A good example of this is the Windows App SDK over on GitHub which shows a lot of promise but I don’t see a long term plan to transition the Windows shell and bundled applications that come standard with Windows over to the new platform. I can understand the need to keep legacy dlls so that third party legacy apps can keep working but it is difficult to make the case for third parties to adopt the Windows App SDK when you’re doing the bare minimum when it comes to adopting it.
