Skip to main content

Belligerent users and anti change fiends

Now I am all for users. In fact I am a user myself. However every now and again you come across one or ten of those fiendish knaves that just completely refuse to play the game. I won't go into an exact story because there is no need. We all have faced them. Those ill favoured folk that call you and make outrageous claims that they can not see an "ok" button on the screen they are looking at.

Ugh, obviously you must be patient with such types. But my biggest problem is the infectious foolery they cause. When one person says they can not get something working or it is going "slow". The other demented parrots start shouting the same and demanding to know what is wrong. It seems to be a culture thing where people feel good about not understanding how to use a computer. This has gone on for a good while now but computers are so engrained now, to take this attitude is utterly ludicrous. What I find even worse are those beastly folk that purport to be IT professionals and still can not even complete the most simple of tasks such as creating an appointment in Outlook.

I worked on a school open evening (looking for prospective A Level Computer Science Students) and there was a young lad looking to start in September. His mum was behind him and before he could even say "I want to make computer games" his mum had interceded on his behalf just to tell me that she hates computers, she doesn't know anything about them and she thinks we'd all be better off without them. I make a point of avoiding such fools normally but as her son was looking to get on to the course I felt obliged to respond. I suggested that the entire economy is underpinned by computer technology and therefore they are fairly important. She dismissed this with a pah! (She clearly believes still that magic is the predominant force that makes the countries economy go round, mmm then again..)

Anyway... I created this simple diagram, please feel free to print it off and put round the office. It should help most people find what they are looking for on the computer.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creating star ratings in HTML and Javascript

I'd searched around a little for some shortcuts to help in doing this but I couldn't find anything satisfactory that included the ability to pull the rating off again for saving. I'd ended up coming up with this rather cheeky solution. Hopefully it helps you too! This is my first post in a while (I stopped blogging properly about 8 years ago!) It's strange coming back to it. Blogger feels very crusty and old by todays standards too.

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi

An instantiated object should be "ok"

I've been QA'ing quite a bit of work recently and one common theme I've noticed across both Java and C# projects I have been looking at is that we occasionally open ourselves up unessacarily to Exceptions by the way objects are being created. My general rule of thumb (which I have seen mentioned in a Pluralsight video recently but also always re-iterate in various Robust Software talks I have done) is that you shouldn't be able to create an object and then call a method or access a property that then throws an exception. At worst, it should return null (I'm not going to moan about that now). I've created an example below. We have two Dojos, one is good and one is bad. The bad dojo looks very familiar though. It's a little class written in the style that seems often encouraged. In fact, many classes start life as something like this. Then as years go on, you and other colleagues add more features to the class and it's instantiation becomes a second