Philosophy
Customer Orientation
In my job I had the opportunity to work on some software projects on the client-side. The experience was — well — unfulfilling. There are developers suggesting to use the totally fancy, new and completely unreadable reporting format. Of course you cannot extract any information from that for use in other files. But that's easier for automatisation. Of course.
The problem is: I don't care! I'm the customer. I have a problem. I want it solved. I don't care whether something is easy to implement or not. Shifting the burden of complexity to the customer is not an option. I want the result to look like I specified! Not how some half-baked „solution“ of some vendor thinks the Right Way™ should look like.
„Bah! That's only a bad programmer at your company!“, you might say. But no, it is not only a bad programmer at my company. I saw this also at suppliers and even a guy from IBM was fully in line with my previous experiences.
Would you buy a car, which you have to start with crank while balancing gas and choke as the people did seventy years ago? I wouldn't. Yet everyone is happy with software which demands exactly that from its users.
Quality — Made in Germany
„Made in Germany“ once stood for quality. I try to live up to the old ideal when writing software. I try to test my software thoroughly as well as documenting everything. The time wasted at work due to undocumented «features» sums up to quite some amount.
But sometimes we have to live with reality. Bugs are such a case. They creep in, no matter what. Writing tests helps, but is no silver bullet. So Bugs are fixed thoroughly, as soon as they are discovered. There are no pet bugs.
