Friday, March 24, 2017

Find the knobs and turn them

"What happened at work?" is a discussion I get to have daily. And yesterday, I was geeking out on installing and configuring a Windows Server as a domain controller, just so that I would have one more route to put things on a list that our product was supposed to manage.

Instead of talking about the actual contents, the discussion quickly moved to meta through pointing out that a lot of my stories of what I do for work include finding this button, lever or a knob, and twisting, pushing, pulling even intentionally isolating it. I find things that give me access to things others don't pay attention.

"I'm sure a developer did not take two hours to set the server up just for this test", I exclaimed. And continued with "while I was setting this up, I found four other routes to tweak that list." It was clear to me that if there was anything interesting learned from the 1st route I was now working on, the four others would soon follow.

Think about it: this is what we do. We find the knobs of the software (and build those knobs to be available in the system around our software) just so that we see, in a timely fashion, what happens when they are turned.

It turns out you may find some cool bugs thinking like this.