Communication >= Code

Tonight's promotion of code to a production system illustrated why staffing your I/T dept. with good programmers who are likewise good communicators is wiser than staffing it with coding rock-stars.

Without going into too many details, we had a mis-fire in the normal promotions process, so the coder responsible for the database and code changes was never notified that he needed to commit his code changes to the source control repository. And I'm sorry to say that I missed that fact as well...until the database changes had been promoted, and there was nothing in the queue from the repository to promote. And sure enough, the application raised a JavaScript error when I checked it. And of course I'm the only one around, because we're intentionally promoting after business hours.

Fortunately, the programmer in question had left a comment in the source control package's revision logs that left no doubt whatsoever what needed to be merged, commited and promoted to the prime-time server. So I did, and buh-bye, JavaScript error! Thus, what should have been a thirty-second maintenance window was extended to perhaps three minutes. Granted, that's 500% longer than it should have been, but it could have been much, much worse. But it wasn't, simply because someone took a few seconds to plink out a mere sentence's worth of context.