This is why i like Dr. House

1 comments Published by easymovet on Monday, December 01, 2008 at 12:14

Being technically minded, people bring questions to me when they have a technical problem. This is great, it's my job and i usually have the answer; as it's my job to know. So why am i complaining?. Well the other day I get an IM from a client, the dreaded words: "does my new site support safari?" so i prepare to arm myself expecting that some huge functionality has proven to be incompatible with Safari and it's probably one of our biggest clients that needed the feature, "I don't really test much on safari, so some things may look different but it should work" as i write that IM i scramble to gather browser statistics and brainstorm on what elements are most likely to fail, i should have used jsLint.com more... no reply ... "why?" i finally ask. Reply: "oh, i got this message from someone: 'Safari can’t verify the identity of the website. The certificate for this website was signed by an unknown certifying authority. ..." . Ahh the actual error, an expired SSL, nothing to do with browsers, if only they said that in the first place.


In most cases the challenge lies not in solving the problem but in solving what the problem is. Non technically minded folks don't know what information is needed to diagnose a problem so they try to shape the information to either save face by hiding info, or they add superfluous info to show that they have been working on the problem before bothering me, which is nice as they do that out of respect for me, but really it just lowers the signal to noise ratio for me. There are also the folks who are just plain frustrated and don't care what i think so they simply show me the error and leave, i like these folks the best becasue by removing themselves it eliminates a barrier between me and the problem and then the solution.

So what i envision as a remedy is some sort of definable framework for collecting the nessesary information of an error, but thats another post. - Peace

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