daniel winata’s weblog

Lately I have quite unexpected experience with a client. I’m developing sms application using GSM modem that connected through USB. The concept is more likely about voting system for an election and of course there are some features that client’d requested before.

I’ve spent around 6 weeks to developed this application. After doing some checkings, debugging and through some quality assurance stuffs, I’m ready to deliver the application to the client.

For about 2 weeks I feel as if I was in vacation until a telephone ringed blast if off. “Hello, Mr. Winata. We have a situation here !!” That was a sudden wake up for me. The client complained that the application couldn’t work at all.

I went to client’s office, check the application. Everything’s perfect, the application running smoothly. For a moment or two, I have no idea where the problem is. I took a deep breath, try to relax and try to think of the other way out, try to think of another solution, try different approach. Yeah, whatever theory you’ve read before about crisis management or something similar.

I’m about to leave client’s office and give an honest reason that I don’t know where the problem is, since everything works just fine and I’ll be back later with a new sophisticated solution until one colleagues installed the application in his laptop and try to connect using client’s GSM modem and it failed all the way.

Hey, it never crossed my mind before. My colleagues grinned at me and gotcha … we got situation under control here. I told it to my client and they replace the gsm modem right away. Soon after that, the application ran smoothly and everyone’s happy.

The moral from my story is …. sometimes unexpected things happen in our life. Sometimes we’ve planned everything accordingly but still it goes the wrong way. Or maybe we’ve planned everything perfectly but still there are some cracks here and there. I guess it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose but we must put our best effort to live our life to the fullest.

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Years ago, I asked God to give me a spouse, “You don’t own because you didn’t ask” God said. Not only I asked for a spouse but also explained what kind of spouse I wanted. I want a nice, tender, forgiving, passionate, honest, peaceful, generous, understanding, pleasant, warm, intelligent, humorous, attentive, compassionate and truthful. I even mentioned the physical characteristics I dreamt about. As time went by I added the required list of my wanted spouse. One night, in my prayer, God talked to my heart: “My servant, I cannot give you what you want.”

I asked, “Why God?” and God said “Because I am God and I am fair. God is the truth and all I do are true and right.”

I asked “God, I don’t understand why I cannot have what I ask from you?”

God answered, “I will explain. It is not fair and right for Me to fulfill your demand because I cannot give something that is not your own self. It is not fair to give someone who is full of love to you if sometimes you are still hostile, or to give you someone generous but sometimes you can be cruel, or someone forgiving; however, you still hide revenge, someone sensitive; however, you are very insensitive….”

He then said to me: “It is better for Me to give you someone who I know could grow to have all qualities you are searching rather than to make you waste your time to find someone who already have the qualities you want. Your spouse would be bone from your bone and flesh from your flesh and you will see yourself in her and both of you will be one. Marriage is like a school. It is a life-long span education. It is where you and your partner make adjustment and aim not merely to please each other, but to be better human beings and to make a solid teamwork. I do not give you a perfect partner, because you are not perfect either. I give you a partner with whom you would grow together”

This is for all: the recently married, the ones who have been married, the soon to get married, and the ones who are still looking.

*taken from michaelnsync blog (http://michaelsync.net) since I thought this was GREAT

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“One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.” This is the excerpt from : “Addison Wesley, Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer - From Journeyman To Master, 1999″.

Mayor Guiliani got it right in New York with his application of the “Broken Window Theory.” This theory is described as :

The Broken Window Theory is a social theory that says that small problems are important and need attention; unheeded, they will lead to larger problems.

The original analysis dealt with urban decay. The theory postulates that urban decay starts with small damage that goes unrepaired (the broken window). If the damage is unrepaired for a long time, local residents see it and feel somewhat threatened and vulnerable. They begin to withdraw and will be less likely to intervene in neighborhood affairs. Troublemakers see the

small decay and start to move in on the neighborhood. This frightens the residents into more reclusion. Ultimately crime increases and the neighborhood decays. (Kelling & Wilson, 1982)

Mayor Rudolph Guiliani used this theory to cut crime in New York City. By focusing on jay walking, graffiti, and other “small” crimes, he changed the culture of the city and major crimes dropped. (Leo, 2002)

In an interview published in the Post-Tribune, the creator of the theory explains the origin of the name: “We didn’t pick the name ‘Broken Windows’ out of the sky,” said the study’s author, George Kelling. “It’s a metaphor - if you’ve got broken windows, you’ve got to fix them pretty quickly. Otherwise, it’s a sign nobody cares and a sign that leads to more discord as a broken window is left untended. It leads to more petty crime, then serious crime and, finally, urban decay. The theory behind it is that the small things matter - often more than big things.” (Patterson, 2003)”

In terms of programming or IT world, it is necessary to take notice of small bugs during development and fix it as soon as possible. If we failed to handle and do nothing about it, soon it will cracked on us and we’ll realize it’s (maybe) too late to fix it up. Then our financial manager would complaint something about “high cost” or some sort of financial jargons that we might never imagined it was existed before.

The important point here is to form a good habit of always taking care of small problems. Imagine we’re working on project with some dudes who’s rightfully since the beginning let some bugs left to fix later or we realize that actually it was a small problems and won’t affects whole development process. But then after deadline is coming ahead within a day or two, we realized that some features weren’t working correctly and we need to do some revision, and revision and revision until there’s none of original code left. Finally the facts is like someone throwing a brick at us to realize that we’ve already re-make the project right from beginning till end.

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Finally, after failed to managed several blogs everywhere now I’m using wordpress as my new weblog. Hopefully I’ll constantly update the contents and also I’ll post most of my activities, thoughts, ideas and opinions and everything that makes me should write it down here.

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