quick and dirty...

I am currently a small drop of tasteless technical skill in the large ocean of strategic migrations. Among big waves of business process analysts, programme managers, solution architects, implementation managers and project managers, I exist as a tiny insignificant and expendable ripple that’s called a developer. By a random divine decree, which some people call fate and others coincidence, this tiny wave got a chance to whirl along with big waves and behold the glory with which they exist in this corporate valley.

Data cleansing is an important part of any migration exercise. It’s like letting go of the old and useless, and adapting to the new and useful. Migrating from an old technology to a new technology, from an old business model to a new business model always requires data cleansing to be performed on the source data.

Some of the data currently under the scope of migration needs to be migrated ASAP because it has intricate dependencies with timelines and budget. To clean and data-migrate this piece, a poor developer (not me) had come up with a ‘quick and dirty’ approach. As soon as projector projected the slide on the wall with ‘QUICK & DIRTY’ written on it, there was a burst of laughter among the members of the elite solution club. Visibly, everyone could comprehend the hidden vulgarity. For those of you who are naïve and unaware of the latent dilettante (which I hope will be very few) when someone says ‘quick & dirty’ in an American accent, it feels more like coming directly from the Sunny Leone’s or Sativa Rose’s mouth from an X rated movie. (WARNING: Please be careful if you get curious and start google-ing these names in your office systems.)

Dirty minds, if you ask me. Or may be naive big-shots who don't have knowledge of programming terms. Because according to Wikipedia, “Quick-and-dirty is a term used in reference to anything that is an easy way to implement a kludge. Its usage is popular among programmers, who use it to describe a crude solution or programming implementation that is imperfect, inelegant, or otherwise inadequate, but which solves or masks the problem at hand, and is generally faster and easier to put in place than a proper solution.”

Well, the poor person who made the slide had other intentions, in line with the wikipedia definitions. Intentions were to “quickly” set up the data even if that meant data was “not so clean” or “dirty”. Well, obviously he was misunderstood by the elite cabal. Idea was simple – given the data has no use for future processing, is static and drives no revenues or reports and needs to be set up one-off just for the reference in the database, there is no point spending time and money on cleaning the data to give it a correct & meaningful shape. After intermittent bursts of laughters and grins among all big waves, the plan is (still under review) to keep it quick and dirty, until ofcourse the management cabal comes up with some "calm and clean" ideas!