“I’m lazy, not stupid”

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This is what my fellow colleague used to say when someone was trying to explain Things to him.

Being lazy is actually a good thing. It's just that some people mix laziness with sloppiness which creates a negative perception of the former.

Need examples? Here we go! I work with computers so here goes a perfectly good example from my own field:

There's a daily process to load a file from an external provider to our datawarehoue. The file is called blah-blah-blah_{datestamp}.csv, where the {datestamp} is in the format of YYYYMMDD. The EDW (datawarehouse) is expecting a particular datestamp everyday - there's a table driving the process and there's an ancient SQL logic that updates the expected {datestamp} of the next file once the current one is successfully loaded.

However...

There's bank holidays and the (ancient) SQL logic is not aware of them. Ergo, every BH causes an issue requiring a manual intervention. The intervention is to update the next expected {datestamp} to be a day after the BH. Then a manual run of the loading process. Then a quick prayer to whatever Invisible Man you pray to (my favourite is the Allmighty Arkleseizure unless it's Wednesday of course). Is usually loads ok and I can go back to watching funny cats on Youtube - but I know that the next BH will cause the same. And again, and again.

So, because I'm lazy, I gave it a go and updated the (ancient!) SQL date logic to look at the corporate calendar table and take BHs into account.

Result?

Well.

The external provider is from another country. Their bank holidays are similar to ours but not 100% matched. Whenever there's a mismatch (i.e. they miss a file we're expecting) we still need a manual intervention. But this only happens 2-3 times a year.

I could fix that one, too, but I decided to write this blog entry instead.

'cause, ya know, I'm lazy.

https://xpil.eu/fuMWu 📋