About a decade and three employers ago, my team's intern signed his email with the slogan "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." I was reminded of the truth of that today, while being pleasantly surprised at how J. had consolidated a somewhat Rube Goldberg patchwork of code into an impressively streamlined VB.Net executable. "Pleasant," because it's good to see people take ownership, even of the under-appreciated scut-work. But also because it vastly simplifies the code I was planning to hang off that.
That being said, I couldn't resist asking for just one tweak: "You know what would be even more awesome?" asked I (rhetorically, of course), "if it fired off an email when it was done." "I don't think I've ever done that in VB.Net," temporized J. I was about to offer to do the Google legwork to work it out for him, when he mused aloud, "Can we just do that through the database?" Bingo. There was our answer. One stupid-simple INSERT statement, and a scheduled job (already in place) takes care of the heavy lifting.
Yeah, I'll probably be "fancy" in that I'll have the .BAT files prompt users for an alternate email address. But J.--who is about the age of the afore-mentioned intern--reminded me of the importance of intelligent laziness. That and the fact that neither of us would have come up with that solution on our own. Maybe I won't ever catch the Agile religion, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to be able to sing along with some of the hymns. (Anyone raised as a Methodist--like I was--knows what I'm talking about)
