Headache Prevention
Lo and behold, wouldn’t you know, I get an email from W this evening that not only backtracks what we talked about in our conference call today, but apparently reverses a couple of decisions that have been in place since before the contract was signed!
But my biggest beef is that W thinks they can run the site on their laptop as they go around selling the service. Which means Apache, PHP, and MySQL. I told them this was not easy, but they were too excited about the potential. I told them that just carrying around screenshots was plenty, but they really wanted to show the full site.
This will not be pretty. This means many many hours of pre-configuration, plus probably dozens of support calls, most of which will be placed desperately as they are going into a meeting…or from the middle of it. This will be an enourmous headache for me, I guarantee it. So…I explained what they need to do, and this time, I dialed down my tech-to-english translation. Here’s what I said, in response to W’s request:
We had discussed loading the webserver directly on your laptop. This will require you to run the Apache server, PHP module, and MySQL server on your laptop. You will need to start the services for each of these components when you are ready to demonstrate. If you plan on demonstrating both sites from your laptop you will need to be able to edit the Apache config.ini file to alter the root web service directory during your meeting, and possibly alter the permissions in your MySQL configuration. I encourage you to look over the documentation for each of these services:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.1/
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/index.html
http://www.php.net/manual/en/
Also if you can go ahead and download the binaries for each of these that would enable me to install them during our next meeting. Remember to get the Win32 distribution instead of the Linux RPM, RISC, OS/2, or Irix versions. Also, make sure you get the latest stable release instead of one of the dailies.
Note that none of this is a lie, and none of this is an exaggeration. I just didn’t bother quite as much on the tech-to-english translation as I could have, to help convey the magnitude of what they were asking.
Because, frankly, these two hardly know how to navigate their own website. I think it’s a little much to expect them to run, maintain, and use Apache, PHP, and MySQL. I’ve been helping Travis with the same thing lately, and he’s got more server-savvy in his toenails than both of W has combined. (Note that they used the phrase “lap top” instead of the single word laptop…. And I was lucky it was W-b instead of W-a [remember there are two of them] that wrote the email, because all of W-a’s emails are typed with the caps lock key held down. Every one. I’m not kidding.)
I’m not too mean, am I? I don’t think so. I’m just protecting myself from some real headaches down the road. Not that I wouldn’t charge them for it, but these won’t be the “do it when you’ve got some time” headaches, these will be “I’m stressed, I’m at the client’s, and nothing is working! Help me now, dammit!” kind of headaches. I guarantee you, if it comes down to that, they’re getting double-rates for priority status.
February 28th, 2004 at 1:09 pm
That just cracks me up for no good reason. I don’t think you’re being too mean at all. I was thinking at first that it wouldn’t be that hard, but unfortunately, I tend to think that things I pick up on easily will be easy to other people but that’s definitely not the case…. and after reasing the “lets do them like A” post, I think Apache needs to stay off their computers
It would be tempting, if I were in your case, to charge a nominal fee for CAPS LOCKed emails. I HATE it when people do that. I don’t know why, but it just stresses me out to read an email in all caps.
If I’m not mistaken, you can have Apache run two config files in 2 separate processes, each on different ports. But that still might make their heads explode.
Hmm… I always thought that stuff under my toenails was just dirt, but I guess it WAS server savvy after all. I can’t clean them anymore.