Keep It Simple (kiss) Revisited

I have a calendar from a vendor we use that has some of the classic coding and design principles - one for each month.  I was rubbing my chin staring at it this morning and I wanted to share what popped into my head...

While I am sure that the KISS principle has been written about (perhaps to death) I had another instance of this today as it applies to operations and infrastructure.

Quick background - I recently inherited an Operational group.  Operations is the clean up crew of development here.  While I understand the rationale of separating them, I think I like the idea of developers supporting their own code so that they better understand the impact of what they do.  What a great teaching tool - you want to not get up in the middle of the night - fix the code, do a better job in the first place, write a utility to help you out.  We have a bunch of applications that have been around for years and over time the developers who maintain many of these have moved on.  So today I asked the question of someone about two AD groups and what they are used for.  In both cases the answer was initially I don't know - and later the answer became these are not used anymore.

Part of keeping systems simple is getting rid of the things that are not used anymore.  We have all these extraneous moving parts that we don't need.  This just creates system bloat that should be easy to remove.

Granted you cannot get to everything - right now.  But this stuff has to get cleaned up over time.  Putting it into some sort of maintenance, wish list or Kaizen log seems like an easy thing to do.

All it takes is discipline.

Yiddish for IT Leaders

I have come to the conclusion that I need to know more yiddish.  Can I use it as a code to hide what I am really thinking?  Help bypass any email filters?  Just make me feel better.  Here is my arsenal.

bupkis - As in - you don't know bupkis.

chutzpah - There is always one team member with too much of this.

glitch - Things are late again?  It must be another glitch.

kibitz - What we should call reviews.

klutz - You don't want this and a programming to go together.

kvetch - What I do when I get home from work.

nudnik - In management speak these are the team members you manage out.

schmuck - What you call someone who changes something directly in production - first.

schtik - A little off topic, but I think of Benji Bronk on the radio on my way into work.

shpiel - My weekly team briefings have at least one of these.

yutz - Yiddish has lots of fun words for describing people that bum you out.