7 Pathologies of a Software Automation Enthusiast

    This was written in 2015, seems to have held true

Tail Wags Dog

Tends to believe that all things in software development can be automated, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

ISOMORPHISM

Obsessed with teasing out the common elements to every two or more tasks, refactoring the code to automate the common elements.

TOOLING OVER LANGUAGE

Regards the maturity of tooling as dramatically more helpful than the sexiness of a language. Refactoring capabilities, IDEs, typeAhead tend to dominate all discussions where language is involved.

FEEDBACK SPEED

Will do almost anything to maintain a fast-fail environment. Even Continuous Delivery, unit testing, keystroke/muscleMemory, no measure is beyond considering to maintain immediate feedback.

PARANOID of SIZE

Imagines enemies in every form of the Big Ball of Mud Pattern. Willing to experiment with OSGi, linux containers, SOA, microservices, refactoring, just about anything to avoid binary hell or digging through log files for days to find a buried malfunction.

METRICS, TIMING, DRILLS

Can often quote how many seconds, minutes, or hours any given task takes with a specific maturity level. Prone to extrapolating budgets based on projected numbers, running drills to time against expectations, other foolish time-wasters.

TIME IN THE WILDERNESS

Strangely comfortable with a history of many failures, often in many disciplines, even outside of software development. Seems to lack common sense that would keep him/her out of trouble with others. May or may not live with handicaps such as Asbergers, a MeyersBriggs INTJ score, or other disabling conditions.

There is a cute vignette of this pathological archetype in the famous book "The Phoenix Project", in many different, colorful charachters.

Why be normal? You wouldn't ask me, I have no frame of reference to go by.