Oh, Sheets ...

Today is a happy day. All of the following remains contained in just ONE spreadsheet.

An initiative I've been pursuing at work is to get the daily DUTIES of our 100+ staff listed and tracked in a RELATIONAL database. We want to clearly bag duties and tag them under ROLES, with explicit SOLID LINE and DOTTED LINE reporting relationships to other roles, criss-crossing the organisation. Any STAFF can be tagged to one PRIMARY and multiple AUXILIARY roles.

Today we released v3 of this tool, and its reporting VIEW which instantly visualises all the relationships above for any staff. This greatly advances our shifting of cognitive stress from people to computers, allowing us to model and track operation with more agility and accuracy. Modern life is so complicated - I can't imagine why people would try to do it without assistance from machines.

The upcoming v4 will enhance the basic datastructure, where each role has prerequisite TESTS, and associated COMPENSATION data. Roles will also be tagged to performance management BENCHMARKS, with annual and project-wise CALENDARS, among other dimensions.

We're a small company: implementing this using an unconventional medium has been challenging, and it provides us with some hope that we can do enterprise quality work at minimal cost. 

My Religious Life as a Malaysian

Since the usage of 'Allah' in Malaysia, and its judicial review are trending, I guess I'd better stick up my talking points for (a) representation, and (b) so that I don't just make shit up when engaging in casual conversations about this subject - better to be sure about what I'm saying, if one is likely to be unpopular anyway, right?

The Constitution of Malaysia addresses freedom of religion for Malaysians, however it surely gets stuck at its absence of a further definition of what religion is. This is a trite but often forgotten element which is fundamental to the discussion of constitutional rights of religion, and the role of religion in the Federation.

A conservative view might be that 'religion' refers only to 'well known religions' - in fact the Federal registration agency of Malaysia recognises only a handful of  options for citizens.

However a more balanced view might be that 'religion' until otherwise  defined has a rather broad set of referents. There is ample literature on this, so I won't dig in here.

I have strange beliefs, and I'm generally happy to discuss them. Mostly I study people, and I have views on how people are structured. I used to carry 'party cards' which designated my role as 'cyberpunk prophet' or something like that - I mean, hello, who else but me is the voice of my beliefs? (It could have been 'cynical' not 'cyberpunk' - but I'll have to go see if I can find old documents. :P )

Oh well, that was back in 2005 or 2006 ... I ended up rarely going to parties, the ones I knew of around town were pretty boring, and I focused a lot more on my professional development and skilling. That too has been a core component of my religion. 

Annals of the Freelance

The message arrived in my WhatsApp inbox at nine minutes past midnight. I was driving, and would not reply to it until 33 minutes later. A founder for whom I had made a widget (type: financial) was writing to ask about modifying the qualifies of the widget, due to downstream feedback on the widget's use. 

I did not remember the full details of this widget's development, so I volunteered to first review our earlier engagement documents free of charge. One is not typically paid to remember work once work is delivered, yet one tries to be helpful when it is possible.

In my review, I included screen-caps and links to snippets of conversations from a month ago. The qualities of the widget which needed change were already flagged as problematic during development ... and conversations held during development clearly stated that there was a long, and expensive way to fix the widget, and alternatively a quick and dirty yet conventionally acceptable way to do so. To-date, neither fix had been adopted by the founder.

The founder expressed loneliness in not being able to spare any staff or other resources to address the issue. I had to return to my ongoing work for the day, and was unable to offer further assistance. I felt sad, but that is but a reflection of the harshness of the business environment - those who do not prepare, are often caught off-guard.

This episode, including this documentation, would distract me from work until 0133 hours. That was a cost I assumed, and this is my record of that expense.