{"id":167,"date":"2008-08-15T07:19:40","date_gmt":"2008-08-15T15:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=167"},"modified":"2008-08-15T07:19:40","modified_gmt":"2008-08-15T15:19:40","slug":"bike-sheds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/2008\/08\/15\/bike-sheds\/","title":{"rendered":"bike sheds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, for once, this isn&#8217;t actually a post about bicycles. Although if that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re looking for, here&#8217;s our garage this morning. I think that&#8217;s 11 bicycles, although at least three of them are not ridable at the time of this photo, more are slightly not ridable if you&#8217;re tall folk.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/btmspox\/2764737941\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"float: left;\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3120\/2764737941_2c8d50d2e7.jpg\" alt=\"many bikes in garage\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This came across my IRC window recently, and I much appreciate Ry for the random link:<br \/>\n<code>15:38 <@Ry> http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Color_of_the_bikeshed<\/code><\/p>\n<p>I hadn&#8217;t heard of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Color_of_the_bikeshed\">Parkinson&#8217;s Law of Triviality<\/a> before, I just bought <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Parkinsons-Law-Cyril-Northcote-Parkinson\/dp\/1568490151\/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&#038;s=books&#038;qid=1218813082&#038;sr=8-1\">the book<\/a>. The associated <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freebsd.org\/cgi\/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+\/usr\/local\/www\/db\/text\/1999\/freebsd-hackers\/19991003.freebsd-hackers\">FreeBSD list post<\/a> is great and a must read. Especially the ASCII popups.<\/p>\n<p>The most interesting part is thinking about how much I care about what other people do. Which isn&#8217;t a lot. Unless I have to deal with the consequences of it, I really tend to keep my opinions to myself unless asked for them. There are some exceptions; I&#8217;m an evangelist for things like puppet, deb packages, and open source as a whole. <\/p>\n<p>A few months ago we bought a piece of software at work for tracking projects. It&#8217;s not Microsoft Project. Really, we went from one unknown piece of software to another, because we hired a PM who had used the latter. Of course, nobody talked to IT when they bought it, so they bought the version that uses a file on a network share rather than a database for storage. I&#8217;ve kept my mouth shut about the stupidity of this choice, because it doesn&#8217;t matter. I feel like others would cause a stir in the aftermath. I have complained about it a lot in department, but that amounts to my buddy Eric, and occasionally our lead software dev\/chief architect Pete. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not my software. When Eric came on full time he asked where we keep track of our time (he was a consultant and had to bill us). I think he was a little surprised that we don&#8217;t. When he saw this project management software, where people keep track of their time, I think he was glad that we don&#8217;t. It&#8217;s icky. But it&#8217;s not our problem, well, most of the time. When it breaks, it&#8217;s our problem. That&#8217;s still rare enough for me to not get upset about being expected to support software I had no opportunity to voice my opinion of in the purchasing process. Partly, that&#8217;s my fault. I make an effort to not be seen, because I don&#8217;t want to go to meetings. Why don&#8217;t I want to go to meetings? I&#8217;ve never had a very concise list of reasons, I&#8217;ve always felt they were a waste of time. But the bike shed argument is spot on.<\/p>\n<p>I only care about other people projects that affect me. If they&#8217;re looking for my opinion, they&#8217;re welcome to ask me. Otherwise, I have no business mucking around arguing about the color of their bike shed. Whatever works for them, is just fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, for once, this isn&#8217;t actually a post about bicycles. Although if that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re looking for, here&#8217;s our garage this morning. I think that&#8217;s 11 bicycles, although at least three of them are not ridable at the time of this photo, more are slightly not ridable if you&#8217;re tall folk. This came across my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}