Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

From the description for Acts As Enterprisey:

Rails make life easy for us but– and it’s a big but– we don’t want it to look easy. acts_as_enterprisey is your friend. How does acts_as_enterprisey make webapp development look hard? Well, the only way your client can judge your app is by playing around with it. What better gives the feeling of heavy weights being lifted behind the scenes than slow response times? Exactly. That’s what acts_as_enterprisey does.

Simply insert acts_as_enterprisey in your ActiveRecord model [and set the delay to whatever value you want.] So while your client clicks, …waits…, and then gets the page, you can blather on heroically about wrestling with clustered indexes, cache expiration strategies, n log n seek times, etc ad nauseam.

Clients pay you to solve their technical problems. They want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Especially after you start submitting enterprisey invoices.
So make their wishes come true: it’s only fair. Ethical, even. Crank the delay up as the deadline approaches, make them sweat, display fortitude and perseverance, etc. And when they can’t take it (the app’s sluggishness, your bills, whatever) any more, [remove] acts_as_enterprisey from your models and book the flights to Vegas.

This is akin to the infamous “make_it_go_faster” flag. Yay.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Development, Office Adventures, Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.