The only acronym that really counts

It's been another grinding week, as Enterprise Application Brand X lurches out and Enterprise Application Brand Y slouches towards Bethlehem. 

I choose that allusion deliberately; sad to say, the execs really do treat this like the Second Coming, while the hamsters wonder why this wheel is… even… harder to turn… than the last…

So C and I took a look at the UI the hamsters are going to have to use for data entry next month. Auditing their training is the closest we are apparently going to get to having a good look at the schema we'll be manipulating in the New Order. 

Sigh. When we left the training room, C remarked "that would be best thing ever, if this was 20 years ago and it was written in dBase II."  

And yes, friends, the mid-frame DB2 app that is being installed (and coded!) right now does look almost exactly like the dBase II app in the Peter Coffee article to which I've just linked.

At this tired and dispirited moment I want to pause in my code-heavy and technique-oriented postings of late. I want to pay tribute to an important concept closely aligned to something I've mentioned before on the subject of developer productivity  as the right tool for the job.

LBJ took the IRT
Down to 4th Street USA
When he got there
What did he see?
The youth of America on LSD
LBJ IRT USA LSD LSD LBJ FBI CIA FBI CIA LSD LBJ …

Sometimes I think back to the 60s musical Hair and I realize nobody would even think this song sounded odd these days. The song's name is "Initials", BTW.  We didn't even talk about "acronyms" then. We're drowning in a sea of them now.

Alphabet soup comes out of a can

I'm a RAD/JAD programmer by inclination.  I care deeply about SQL and even more deeply about OOP. I love REST and SOAP almost equally, I work with XML, XSLT, and probably a hundred other standards known only by their letters. Whether communicating on-line or in a technical meeting, I can use abbreviations with a facility rarely seen in individuals over the age of 14 and not wielding a mobile phone.

But, no matter how fervently one espouses this methodology or technology or that, no matter how eloquently one can sling their competing acronyms around… there is only one acronym that matters in the end.

GSD: the last word is Done.

… that's the one.  That's the acronym that makes projects succeed.

I thank my good friend Andy Griebel for making sure I added this one vital acronym to my arsenal, quite a while back.

I mentally raise this glass, and brandish this keyboard, in Andy's direction as I pass the same sage advice to you.

Res ipsa loquitur.