Agile lessons learned #7 : Peek under the hood

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Mike came over to Dan’s house the other day. Mike had called him to give him a hand with a new secret project of his.
“What the hell is he up to” Olly thought to himself. Mike always had these crazy programming projects in mind.

“At least I might even learn a thing or two from the silly bastard” Mike whispered as he rang the bell to Mike’s house. He got no answer. Mike tried again and still no answer. He tried Dan’s cell phone and still no answer. Finally, as he left to go to his car he heard some loud music blasting from the garage.

“Well, I stand up next to a mountain. And I chop it down with the edge of my hand…” Mike recognized Jimmy Hendrix blasting through the old stereo.

“Dan !? DAAAAAAAN ! Are you there !?” Screamed Mike as he tried to be louder than the speakers.
“Yeah, I’m down here ”
“Man I’m turning down that radio or we’re both going deaf by the end of the hour.”
“What are you up to Dan ?”
“I’m disassembling my outboard”
“WHAT ? Why ?”
“It’s completely seized. Guess a piston is jammed. Gotta figure out why.”
“Oh, didn’t know you were so versed in the fine art of marine mechanics.”
“You’re making fun of me ?”
“Well no. But since you called me I though we were gonna discuss a new software project. Something built around that Jazzy new web framework you were talking about.”
“Django ? Nah man the only Django you’ll hear for the time being is on the radio.”
“Ok then, why are we here ? ”
“Aren’t you pleased that you are here and listening to Hendrix play the guitar ?”

“Actually right now all I hear now is both of us running our mouths. So what’s the deal Dan? ”
“Well actually, I called you up for a very important mecha..programming lesson.”
“Oh really. Which is ?”
“Well, you see most new programmers are afraid to dig up code.”
“It’s like they believe the code they did not write is some kind of not understandable piece of work written by mystical beings.”
“Well if you saw some of the code I’ve seen you’d know some code is so bad it’s like it came out pre-obfuscated…”
“That’s besides the point. The point I’m trying to make is this : How many times have you stopped in your track of understanding a library or piece of external code works because you were afraid to dig in ? ”
“Many times”
“How often do you see it at work ? ”
“All the time.”
“Do you think it slows down your progress”
“Definitely.”
“There you go, lessons learned my boy.”

“Now would you be so kind to roll up those sleeves of your and give me a hand removing the crank from this bad boy.”
“Ah man. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten myself into this.” grunted Mike as they lifted the crank.
“You see now Mike, a compression ring completely blew off one of the piston and got jammed in the cylinder.”
“You just saved me 400$ worth of mechanics right there.”

-Nicholas Lemay