I'm a word lover. When I write an article or essay my largest hurdle is to pare it down to meet the requirements for the number of words. As a word lover I am addicted to sending email. I often send long didactic responses to simple questions. Recently my wife sent me an email asking about an adware program that was traversing the Internet. Did I have any experience with it? Why no (said I) I've never fought a battle against that particular adware. I did however have to remove x y and z and implement a b and c in order to fully inoculate myself from yada yada yada. I must have droned on for a couple of paragraphs. My wife, with her usual pithy response, wrote back with one word. "Oh..." she said. Ah to be so succinct.

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They call him the fireman. Oh sure, he probably has a title like "system's administrator" or "lead technician" or even lead developer, but his real job is putting out fires. Let's call him Bob. There's "Networking Bob" and "SysAdmin Bob" and "Developer Bob" etc. When the server goes down, call Networking Bob. The server needs an upgrade - "SysAdmin Bob's the guy. If a backup needs restoring, code needs tweaking, some work-around needs to be worked around, some proprietary Application is failing.... there's a Bob that can handle it. He'll come in with fire hose blazing and takes care of business. If a vendor needs placating.... ok... so call Sally, Bob's abrasive - but he does get the job done. The CIO thinks he worth 3 regular employees. Shouldn't everybody have a Bob? Well...

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I know I shouldn't feel good about this, and I dearly love Macromedia for providing me a splendid income, but it does my heart good to know that the best minds in the indistry don't think of everything (ha). I went to check my Click Report on the weblog site (weblogs.macromedia.com) and I was greeted with an error:

Application.queries.FeedResults is undefined

...or something like that. It was only there for a few moments I'm sure - but it was enough to bring a slight smile to my weary face. Yes, I know I know "Love does not delight in evil".

(Alex Y. posted a screen shot of the error on his blog.)

If it hasn't happened to you yet get ready - it will. Some client or potential client is going to ask you if you can do an "email blast". Now, they might mean that they want to send a newsletter or announcement to their own customers. Or they might mean they want you to contribute to the juggernaut of spam that is flooding the Internet. To you, spam is a battle - a titanic struggle between good and evil. To them, spam is minor annoyance, or (due to the fact that many clients are salesman turned businessman) a goldmine of nearly free marketing. Of course, they may not read 200 to 300 emails a day. In any case you will have to consider how to respond and what kind of advice to give your client. Here are a few important things to consider.

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I realize that you have a great coding style. I know you are sold on your personal framework, language and platform. I realize that when you look at your code you say to yourself "dang I'm good!". But I'm pleading with you, when you write an application, try to take pains to consider other developers. Here's 3 principles that you should keep in mind:

1. You will never anticipate all the eventual needs of the client - don't gamble on it.
2. You will not be the only one to work on this code. Other developers will see this code. You can count on it!
3. Your client trusts you - do what's right.

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I was reminded of this very humorous incident recently while chatting with some friends. A very good friend of mine who was a novice web programmer was just beginning to stretch his wings using Coldfuion and SQL. The site he was working on (which shall remain nameless) used an Interbase DB server. My friend Bob (let's call him Bob) was interested in tracking page views for some news stories and articles he was writing. He created a new table with a few columns and wrote to it with each request - logging the page id, news story and IP address. It seemed to work splendidly... at least for a while....

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