





Dear Santa,

I’ve beeen a fairly good boy this year. Please give me at least one of the following:

Enough goddamn tablespace on the goddamn database schema so that it doesn’t run out every five goddamn minutes.

tablespace on the database schema so that it doesn’t run out every five minutes. An environment where there’s less than 3 homegrown libraries that have different implementations of the same functionality.

Good will and peace on Earth…in other words, a calm, rational discussion about systemd that doesn’t involve remarks about physical assaults of family members or accusations about genital size.

An obedient monkey of my size who can wear a suit and quietly attend meetings in my place. (Trust me, they won’t be able to tell the difference, as long as he throws any poop at the trashcan instead of the other attendees. My aim is normally perfect.)

A development platform that was chosen because it makes sense, not because a slick salesman bought dinner for one of the company suits.

An Etch-A-Sketch for each stakeholder, since they’re so fond of drawing up vague specification requests and then erasing them quickly with a flash.

Less irony in the workplace (like when a new project is more complicated and expensive than the legacy system that it was intended to replace).

A fellow developer who doesn’t interpret ‘add more wrappers’ to mean that he should add more Wendy’s and McDonald’s wrappers to the existing layer on his desk.

Not hearing another unimaginative technical interview that starts with “So, you have a list of numbers that you have to sort…”

An intelligent workplace Internet filter that blocks porn sites and allows access to StackOverflow, not vice versa.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.