Meet Joe Bloggs

Here I am, first day back at work and I'm ready with my New Year resolutions:

I will think better of my colleagues, particularly those in management. I should be forgiving of their occasional lapses in competence and judgement. Their annoying little habits should be respected as indications that each is a rounded and full human being.

I must resist gold-plating applications by including spurious functionality because it gives me a chance to play with some new toy. Playing with new frameworks, languages, tools and libraries is not justified in production code unless there are sound technical advantages. Staving off boredom is not justification enough.

I will not pick and chose which bugs to fix. Trivial things like labels misaligned by a pixel, or fonts being a point size out are just as important as things like time-outs not set correctly, calculations not working or major parts of functionality failing. Neither will I persecute those bastards who point out grammatical errors in help files. They're doing a great job in helping to deliver all-round quality.

I will be more graceful and accepting of management decisions on prioritisation changes. I'm a developer and they're the customer. What do I know of the business reasons for dropping projects, changing development teams or other arbitrary and unreasonable demands made upon us?

Finally, I will be a better person all round. Charitable, forgiving and an all-round good cove. And no more swearing. Not a single profane utterance will pass these lips this year.

Bugger it. Just had an email from that moronic bastard of a Boss who's decided, all on his lonesome and without consulting any of us on the development team, that we're ditching everything to focus on the sales pipe-line code of the CRM system that he bought at great cost last year and which doesn't work. The fuck-wit's finally realised that he's been sold a turkey and that his gonads will be stamped on hard by his Boss if the software doesn't deliver soon.

Bugger it.

Hold on... There's a Java binding I can use. We can switch over to Java 6 at the same time. Might as well use the new scripting functionality. Looks like there's going to be a scripting component to the sales pipe-line after all. Now, do I go the JRuby or the Jython route?