Never underestimate “hidden” values (or costs!). It always shows up in the end.

…or, “How I learned to stop worrying and love sick days.”

The story goes something like this: I didn’t used to get sick when I was a younger, strapping lad. I lamented the separation of sick days from general time-off (read “vacation”), because I rarely needed sick time.

Recently, I’ve gotten pretty nastily sick. Twice. And I was real pleased I got paid to get better (and not lose my job).

This past week was one of those times, and I was miserable on Monday. Until this year, I’ve never really considered sick days as a real benefit (I mean, yeah they’re a “Benefit” according to HR, but back then, I would have preferred more pay or vacation). It was definitely hidden from me.

As I reflect back on this past week, it made me thing about some other times that I’ve dove in head first and not fully looked at the costs and benefits of a something… and they always come to reward/bite me in the end. When I first thought about this post, I was considering talking about how pre-planning and design seem to create hidden benefits to most people, but I found myself going off on a rant about education of Software Engineers and good practices in software dev. Another time perhaps. :)

Despite my lack-of-rant, most of the hidden benefits/costs are things that can be discovered by doing pre-planning and looking a little deeper before diving in. At a previous employer, it was fairly commonplace to hear, “Well I started doing ABC, but forgot/didn’t know about XYZ feature and so re-invented the wheel/ran into a roadblock.” I’m guilty of it myself; I love what I do, and I usually can’t wait to dive into implementation. I know I could have avoided that.

My mind is drifting off topic some, and I feel like I’m rambling, so I’ll cut this short while my body continues to recover from last weekend. Ugh.

-sean

I’ve been working with the WPMU LDAP plugin recently, trying to configure it to make it work with WPMU 1.2.1 for our needs. It’s been a lesson in working with others’ code without coding guidelines. ;)

It more or less worked right out of the box, but there have been a lot of “weird” things I’ve found in the code, that really reflect the code’s legacy as a series of “Make it work for me” patches. Hard-coded user names, comments like “just guessing what this does as there is NO DOCUMENTATION”, and multi-hundred line functions make me roll my eyes and chuckle. :)

So I’ve been rolling up my sleeves and diving into the code, doing some refactoring, clarifying, and commenting. I hope I’ve got it right, but hopefully others that came before me will correct me if I’m wrong. I think I’m going to see about contacting the current steward of the code (of sorts) to see what can be done about managing this code… I know I’m not the only one that has an interest in using LDAP for WPMU logins.

-sean