Play Nice Now

The latest episode is in edit. "Play Nice Now" sees a downturn in the energy economy and some interesting organizational changes for Mark. I had a lot of fun writing this one because it's based on eight life events.

On Bondolo's urging, I added a "Buy Now" button in an obvious spot. I hope I get some conversions. I am glad blogspot has a generic HTML widget that let me cut and paste some CSS/ Javascript/ HTML. Getting the button image served up through blogspot was a bit of a kludge. I hope it doesn't break.

I uploaded the last two stories to Kobo, so they're now available. (I have no Kobo sales to date.)

Here is a snippet from the draft (that will find its way onto Reddit - I got gilded today - I am not sure what that is but I was happy.)

Mark calls a meeting of his development team. Todd starts with his complaint...

“I would like to mention that my part, the transaction subsystem, was working when I checked it in two weeks ago – but when I got the notice that the data validation tests were failing I updated my repository only to find out that Kenneth had gone in and rewritten parts of my code, and it is those changes that are failing. Mark, would you please ask Kenneth why he would be in the transaction code when his current task is reporting and printing?”

Kenneth piped up before I could be diplomatic.

“In an agile project every developer can modify the code base,” Kenneth said.

“This isn’t an Agile project, Kenneth,” Todd said emphatically. “Why are you touching my code?”

“Don’t be such a baby. Agile is the best way we can do this project,” Kenneth replied.

“Baby?! It took me a month to write that code and you arbitrarily go and change it? Even if we we’re following Agile, that we are not, you should have run the test cases to prove your changes didn’t fundamentally change the functionality! Agile is test driven development! You didn’t run the tests, and you didn’t bother to go back fix the god damn tests.”

“Agile is iterative and adaptive through cross functional teams,” Kenneth said even louder. “Your code was breaking my build so I fixed it.”

“You bloody well rewrote it!” Todd yelled.

“I had to fix my build and your code was broken,” Kenneth snarled.

“That’s because you didn’t do a full update from version control, Kenneth,” Todd fired back. “The code went through a full build and test. All you had to do was refresh-all and run the tests.”

“I shouldn’t have to waste my time on that,” Kenneth said even louder.

“Oh my god you are such an asshole!” Todd yelled. “Just because you talk louder and more often than anyone else doesn’t mean that you are right!”

“What do you even know about programming? My dog is a better programmer than you,” Kenneth shouted.

It was at that point that Todd stood up, grabbed his chair, and threw it across the table in Kenneth’s direction. Kenneth jumped up, but the chair slid by him, off the table, and into the wall taking out a fine chunk of alabaster.