Human duct tape

Apart from an only half-successful visit with the bees this afternoon, today has largely been a two-part exercise in software integration. The first half was trying to make UNIX-based programs and Windows-based programs to "play nice" together (i.e. make Apache's web server and the PHP programming language work on Windows and talk to Microsoft's SQL Server database system--I'm currently 1 for 2 on that). The second half was the (seemingly) never-ending saga of translating a "legacy" subsystem at work over to its shiny new incarnation...despite the fact that they're not so much apples-and-oranges as apples-and-bananas.

To be honest, the first part was muuuuuch more fun, mainly in the kid-in-a-candy-store sense. (Free code on the internet seems to do that for programmers.) The second part? Meh, not so much. But I realized that there's a certain comfort (in this job market, anyway) in the fact there will always be work for the integrators--a.k.a. human duct tape. The simple reason being that people in general--and geeks in particular--are very tribal by nature. The neutral parties--i.e. those who don't have any proverbial skin in the game--who can also become reasonably bi-lingual are, in my experience, anyway, comparatively rare.

That's not to say that the job of being duct tape is entirely layoff-proof; it depends on whom you know in addition to what you know. Or, at least, who's being kept in the proverbial loop. Just like everything else at the office.