Thank you.

there’s something similar I really REALLY want to say or have someone prominent say when they get threatened with retribution for some “anti-Muslim” thing they say or do:
“Bring it, [female-dogs]!!”

Way to turn a decisive victory into a defeat.

Seems to me they did the same thing in Viet Nam, many years ago.

After engineering and architectural plans were compared to the rubble, it was determined that the primary cause was an on-site decision made at the time of construction. According to the plans, a single support rod at each support point was supposed to hold all the levels of the concrete skywalk. Hardware, sort of like a big washer and fastener, would hold up each level at the proper height.

Instead, multiple rods were used, each one supported by the level above it. The problem was that the “washer” at each level had to support all the levels below it, not just one. The ceiling hardware was designed to do that–the skywalk levels weren’t. At the top level it failed under all the unplanned additional weight.

I don’t know of any better example of why planning, testing, and verification are orders of magnitude better than seat of the pants guesses. That particular night hundreds of people died or were injured because of such a guess. Pay attention to details and nobody notices. Overlook the details, and disaster can follow.

Its about will.

oh alleysavant

I was astonished by the amount of documentation a large project really required, and as a wet-behind-the-ears smartypants I used to talk about it with some of their senior people at lunch:

Their company was successful not because they were cheaper, but because they really, really, really paid attention to the details on the projects they were working on. They spent what a lot of firms would consider to be an inordinate amount of time studying the project before they even formally bid, and they had a team of people they’d send to accomplish that study beforehand, which took weeks in some cases. I helped type up and format thousands of pages of documentation comprising those notes and more formalized aspects of their projects and the sheer amount of labor involved was breathtaking.

But their buildings don’t fall down, their facilities work as they promised they would, and they are a very successful company because once the project is finished, it’s been pretty da*n well thought through.

Their network administrator, BTW, was so comprehensively paranoid and utterly competent that he wouldn’t even let me set foot in his work area. Nice guy, we joked about it at lunch a couple of times and I completely understood his point of view — he wasn’t about to let some temp. wreck his company. He was making about $150k per year back in 1994 and he was worth every penny.

Before anyone writes a line of code on a big project they should be forced to spend at least a two weeks walking around and talking, taking extensive notes — in longhand, on sheets of paper — about the problem they’re trying to help solve. Spending time with the people they’re trying to help with a computer program, and especially noticing the little details that cause things to go wrong. Even the simplest application can be undone with arrogance, and even the simplest application requires humility to write well.