Symbolic Violence Beats Lava Lamps All To Pieces

cdance writes "Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify your dev team that the build in your continuous integration system is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don't really fit into the culture of many modern development teams. There is now a solution. Retaliation is a new Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey."

Comments

The 90's called

[Anonymous Coward]

They want their dot.com bubble era development culture back.

Re:The 90's called

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you were born sometime after 1990, weren't you?

In the 1990s and the very early 2000s, this kind of behavior never happened at places making real profit. Why? Because developers at a place like that are too fucking busy making money. They are also talented enough to not fuck up constantly, and don't need goddamn build failure lights or co-workers hitting them in the genitals with foam sports equipment.

We only ever saw this nonsense at places made up of fools. You know, the sorts of places where they hired people with useless Sociology degrees to be programmers because they once turned on a Commodore 64 in their youth. When you put enough of these idiots together, especially doing work they have absolutely no clue how to do, and you end up with people throwing beach balls around the office rather than getting work done and making money. Oddly enough, these places end up going under! But the work environment was so much fun, the former employees would say. For the six months it lasted before the funding ran out, it was a great time!

The same thing is happening today. The Web 2.0 bubble is about to burst. We've got many Ruby on Rails "developers" and NoSQL "DBAs" all over the place working on unprofitable applications. They often waste time playing cubicle games instead of working. When the bubble bursts, they'll be out on their asses. Nobody will touch them, thanks to the terrible reputation that Rails and NoSQL are getting these days.

We have something similar

[Anonymous Coward]

My job uses approximately the same tactics, although instead of a python script we have Dave the Project Manager, and instead of a foam missile launcher, Dave has a baseball bat. You see, unlike traditional product managers who have a background in, well, project management, Dave has a background in being a large and terrifying individual. So, our code builds every damn time.

Re:If you have a giant build, it's not modular eno

[HarrySquatter]

If you have a giant build, your design is not modular enough.

That makes no sense. You can have a modular system and still make changes the require giant builds. For example, if your module is something in the base of your system it will usually require you to recompile most of the rest of the system. Being modular will not stop that because you need to make sure that what you did in that one module does not break the pieces that use it. Secondly, what you seem to be complaining about is rather that people might not be doing incremental builds using make or a make-like tool. So, yes, if you are always rebuilding the entire system for no purpose that is stupid.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:nope, didn't get any of that.

[Samantha Wright]

In larger software development environments, it is common for many contributing programmers to work on a single copy of the project's source code at the same time (typically through a mechanism called source control.) As a matter of etiquette, developers are expected to test their code before contributing it back to the master copy. If the master copy fails to compile, typically due to an error in coding, then it is said that the build has been broken, and that the developer who contributed the bad code broke the build.

An article posted on Slashdot in 2004 suggested that software teams keep a red lava lamp in their server room, and have it turn on whenever a broken build is discovered. The reason for picking a lava lamp in particular is because it can take several minutes for the wax to warm up enough for the bubbles to reach the top of the oil: the article's authors proposed using this delay as a period in which the build could be fixed without inspiring a greater breach of decorum, and hence invoking the ire of the rest of the development team.

This summary, by contrast, is a slashvertisement for a different solution to the same problem, wherein foam projectiles are launched at the offending developer. It attempts to conceal its absurd premises by referencing a past incident in which a similar idea was suggested, thereby hoping to capitalise on an in-joke as a means of creating something more acceptable as a cultural object of Slashdot's community; however, the submitter most likely just did a search for something he or she could exploit to provide padding.

That all being said, you should probably get used to being expected to read embedded links in order to garner a cohesive understanding of the relevant context for something written on the Web. Most people don't have the communication skills necessary to clearly and accurately introduce context in a compact space, and in lieu of this ability, it is highly preferable to have a reference to the original subject matter (or at least a more primary resource) than to be left with mere hearsay or no context whatsoever. This is one of the greatest ways the Internet has changed how people communicate, and while it has its annoying side effects at times (especially dead links) it does more good than harm.