Our system, like most, has a dizzying mountain of change requests just waiting for someone to do them. We have nearly 30 developers grinding away.

I was asked to perform a major structural change to the code and database, that will probably take me three months.

While I expect to keep it separate until it's ready to merge, I was told that after it's done, we'll need to keep it separate for at least 6 more months due another change (on which my change depends) that isn't scheduled to be migrated to production until then.

Wait a minute, I'm supposed to make a massive structural change to code and the DB, including tables, queries and stored procedures, and not merge it for nearly nine months? On a team with 30 developers making daily changes?

I told them I would agree to this ONLY if someone else agreed to do the merge - because there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions, and with my dyslexia, I'd likely miss a lot of stuff.

They agreed. In writing.

I don't know if I should plan to be away for two weeks after the merge, or if I should plan to be here to watch it hit the fan.

Wheee!

snoofle:

with my dyslexia, I'd likely miss a lot of stuff

I know a guy who is a construction engineer. At university they made him do a Java course, and he's not a natural programmer (which is why he opted to get into construction, meaning not into software development). The exam consisted of written questions, asking him to write small Java programs that do certain simple things, on paper, and he also suffers from dyslexia. Needless to say, he kept failing. To this day I'm proud of him that he managed to pass eventually.

 dude, dyslexia makes the best programmers

Howcome the two people here who have dyslexia also have excellent, flawless writing, with like the big words and stuff?

It's like those posts written by non-english speakers who at the end of their OP apologize for the crappy English and invariably write perfect, coherent English text?

dhromed:

 Howcome the two people here who have dyslexia also have excellent, flawless writing, with like the big words and stuff?

I don't have dyslexia, but my sentences sometimes my sentences make no don't make any sense.

snoofle:

They agreed. In writing.

 

The fact that they asked at all tells me that here they had no idea what they just agreed to.

Ben L.:

I don't have dyslexia, but my sentences sometimes my sentences make no don't make any sense.

 

That's just the wibbly wobbly wordy durdy grammatilly... stuff.

snoofle:

...

I told them I would agree to this ONLY if someone else agreed to do the merge - because there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions, and with my dyslexia, I'd likely miss a lot of stuff.

...

 

Do you even have dyslexia or was that just a clever excuse to not to do the merge?

You probably should merge from the main branch to your feature-branch every now and then during the development. Then the final merge would only be six months out of sync. Or someone could keep doing periodical merges for the six months but that sounds pretty silly.

 

dhromed:

snoofle:

They agreed. In writing.

 

The fact that they asked at all tells me that here they had no idea what they just agreed to.

Absolutely!

Also, I (mostly) use spell check, but I've also learned to proof read anything I write - backwards - as you don't have context so you can't mentally substitute the word you meant for the word you wrote when you read it back, so you catch more errors. It doesn't always work, but it does make my dyslexia a whole lot less obvious.

 

hetas:

snoofle:

...

I told them I would agree to this ONLY if someone else agreed to do the merge - because there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions, and with my dyslexia, I'd likely miss a lot of stuff.

...

 

Do you even have dyslexia or was that just a clever excuse to not to do the merge?

You probably should merge from the main branch to your feature-branch every now and then during the development. Then the final merge would only be six months out of sync. Or someone could keep doing periodical merges for the six months but that sounds pretty silly.

 

Yes, I really do have dyslexia. Yes, I will do periodic merges from the main branch, but when it gets structurally far enough apart, that starts failing...

 

At least you have something in writing :) Which is more than some of us have

snoofle:

Also, I (mostly) use spell check, but I've also learned to proof read anything I write - backwards

That was a proofreading trick I learned when I did a stint at a secretarial service.  Works really well.  (When one uses it . . .)

Helix:

dude, dyslexia makes the best programmers

I concur.

dhromed:

Howcome the two people here who have dyslexia also have excellent, flawless writing, with like the big words and stuff?

It's a continuum, not a binary on/off thing. Honestly, I'm always ok except for sequences of numbers and sometimes variable names. Programming isn't a big deal-- typing in a 25-digit Microsoft OEM code takes me 7 tries.

I mean, when I was in high school, I was able to write video games in C in an editor that didn't have color-coding or intellisense and they mostly worked-- or at least didn't bomb-out the no-memory-protection, no-process-separation, cooperative-multitasking OS I was using at the time. With modern IDE features, I don't really feel it at all.

I don't have dyslexia although my prosopagnosia and non-24 probably count for something. :/

blakeyrat:

Programming isn't a big deal-- typing in a 25-digit Microsoft OEM code takes me 7 tries.

Honest question here for both you and Snoofle . . . how much difficulty do you have with sites running captchas?

nonpartisan:

Honest question here for both you and Snoofle . . . how much difficulty do you have with sites running captchas?

I don't think any more than anybody else? Not sure how to answer that.

blakeyrat:

nonpartisan:

Honest question here for both you and Snoofle . . . how much difficulty do you have with sites running captchas?

I don't think any more than anybody else? Not sure how to answer that.

 

That a wordjumble captcha might be to a dyslexic what the Bioshock 2 hacking is like to a colorblind person?

But as you said it's a lot more of a continuum than clear-cut color blindness.

Well as far as I know there's no standard scale of "captcha annoyance" that can be measured, is the issue. "Oh yes that captcha is a 7.9, but another person says it was only a 4.5!"

Compounded by the fact that the web has approximately 50,000 different captcha systems, which are all completely different. I really don't know how to answer the question.

snoofle:

Yes, I really do have dyslexia.

I too have sex daily.

 As far as I know, anagram errors are pretty much never a symptom of dyslexia.

blakeyrat:

I really don't know how to answer the question.

 

Yes, but can you still answer it?

dhromed:

Yes, but can you still answer it?

Broccoli. The answer is broccoli.

snoofle:

there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions

I've been told that this can't ever happen if you use Visual Source Safe in its default mode. Have you considered simply locking everything you touch for nine months?

blakeyrat:

typing in a 25-digit Microsoft OEM code takes me 7 tries.

That's not dyslexia. That's normal.

flabdablet:

snoofle:

there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions

I've been told that this can't ever happen if you use Visual Source Safe in its default mode. Have you considered simply locking everything you touch for nine months?

Stop it. Stop giving snoofleco ideas.

"There hasn't been a change to our mature codebase for eight months!"

snoofle:

They agreed. In writing.

 

 

"It's just a piece of paper."

 

dhromed:

blakeyrat:

nonpartisan:

Honest question here for both you and Snoofle . . . how much difficulty do you have with sites running captchas?

I don't think any more than anybody else? Not sure how to answer that.

 

That a wordjumble captcha might be to a dyslexic what the Bioshock 2 hacking is like to a colorblind person?

But as you said it's a lot more of a continuum than clear-cut color blindness.

This was exactly the intent of my question.  I interpreted what [Blakeyrat] said about Microsoft keys as being [Blakeyrat] can have problems trying to read sets of random characters.  Some captchas are words, some are combinations of a word-like construct and a separate number, some are random characters . . . I was wondering, if there's difficulty getting a Microsoft key correct, how much trouble is it to get right a captcha that is a set of random characters.  Maybe the two have nothing to do with each other.  But they appear to be somewhat similar, and it piqued my curiosity, so I asked.

 

nonpartisan:

This was exactly the intent of my question.  I interpreted what [Blakeyrat] said about Microsoft keys as being [Blakeyrat] can have problems trying to read sets of random characters.  Some captchas are words, some are combinations of a word-like construct and a separate number, some are random characters . . . I was wondering, if there's difficulty getting a Microsoft key correct, how much trouble is it to get right a captcha that is a set of random characters.  Maybe the two have nothing to do with each other.  But they appear to be somewhat similar, and it piqued my curiosity, so I asked.

Do you write for Hack a Day or something or is there some obscure language that encases people's names in square brackets and you're not used to not doing it for English?

MiffTheFox:

Do you write for Hack a Day or something or is there some obscure language that encases people's names in square brackets and you're not used to not doing it for English?

No.

snoofle:

I told them I would agree to this ONLY if someone else agreed to do the merge - because there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions, and with my dyslexia, I'd likely miss a lot of stuff.

They agreed. In writing.

 

Score!

snoofle:

I don't know if I should plan to be away for two weeks after the merge, or if I should plan to be here to watch it hit the fan.

I'd opt for the former - although the document says you no longer need to be involved, removing yourself from the site means you CANNOT get roped back in. You can then snicker about it when your calm holiday is interrupted by a panic-stricken call, and you can cite the document whilst taking a long cool sip of something coconut-flavoured and alcholol-infused.

 

Ben L.:

flabdablet:

snoofle:

there would likely be many, Many, MANY merge collisions

I've been told that this can't ever happen if you use Visual Source Safe in its default mode. Have you considered simply locking everything you touch for nine months?

Stop it. Stop giving snoofleco ideas.

"There hasn't been a change to our mature codebase for eight months!"

"Then what are we paying all these onsite developers for? More offshoring, that's what we need around here!"

snoofle:

I don't know if I should plan to be away for two weeks after the merge, or if I should plan to be here to watch it hit the fan.

Wheee!

 

Plan to be away and convienetly loose your phone and any other means of contact. Maybe tell them your doing a trip to antarctica or one of those survival trips.

The sad par tis that in the end you will suffer from this anyway, regardless of said document or not.

 

 

beginner_:

you will suffer from this anyway

 

No. His wallet will cushion the blow, amply.

blakeyrat:

typing in a 25-digit Microsoft OEM

Don't remind me of my "sysadmin" days. I had to upgrade two companies' computers (roughly 150 computers) to XP. I still remember the secret chant: BYCTY-64BK6-7CR8T-JTT8G-KBKXC.

configurator:

I still remember the secret chant: BYCTY-64BK6-7CR8T-JTT8G-KBKXC.

I remember a certain Windows 98 product key. And since it looks random enough, I use parts of it for certain passwords nowadays.