Checklist Of Items: Fill & Download for Free

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of noise surrounding the parenting.Beginning with the 48-item checklist of items to bring to a hospital for delivery day. And ending with Petit Bateau rain booties for a baby. Because he’s likely to be left in the rain, in the puddles.Most important thing to remember is: All your baby really needs is YOU. Looking at your face. (Upclose, because he’s nearly blind). Feeling the warmth of your skin. Being called silly little names: a cookie, a monkey, a little prince…Just be there for your baby. And that’s enough.Image: Petit Bateau Baby Rain Booties

In my case it was a gradual devolving of a rather nice benefit to something pretty lame. When I first started answering technical support calls, managers would listen to your calls occasionally and evaluate you against a checklist of items that you were supposed to do or say during the call. If you scored 100% you would get a bonus - initially $250, but each quarter in a row that you scored 100% it would increase another $250 up to a max of $1000. It was a great incentive to perform well.After some time, the bonus was then just capped at $100 each time you scored 100%. Still a nice bit of change at the time, but you could also earn an extra $100 by working a few hours of overtime, so it wasn’t quite the incentive it once was, but still fairly effective.The final iteration of the 100% Club though, was just an insult after having the previous two. Each employee was given a card with a spot for 5 gold stars on it. You got a gold star for scoring 100% on a call, and once you got 5 you could turn that card in for a $25 gift certificate to Chili’s or Applebee’s. Anybody who was a new hire during that time thought it was a cute little perk, but those of us that had been around for the $1000 era just rolled our eyes.

I once worked on developing the software to drive a system that performed sequences of industrial chemical processes. The thick programming manual was full of warnings about how you must “never send the following byte sequence” to the machine, or horrible toxic chemicals would be released, and would damage people and property. Warning after warning after even-more-dire warning. And they weren’t just hyperbole. They were real concerns. To better understand what I was working with, I did the research on the chemicals involved, and on the way the machine operated. Those warnings really needed to be there.In addition to the software to drive the functions of the machine, and its communication protocols with other systems in the facility, I ended up developing a “safety layer” that would prevent those byte sequences from ever reaching the machine, just in case a bug was ever introduced into the upper application layer of the code. I also put in several runtime checks to make sure the safety layer was in place and working before anything was sent to the machine. I wanted to make sure that anyone who worked on that software, then or in the future, would have that layer in place by default, so that nothing horrible would happen. I carefully documented the software (both in the design documentation and in the source code itself), making it crystal clear what was at stake.This proprietary code was kept under tight security, and once it was up and running, all further changes to the code had to be carefully reviewed before being checked in, including going through a checklist of items relating to the safety layer remaining in place and operational. After all, the health/lives of employees and the property of the company could be at risk without this layer.Do I think there exists code that is too dangerous to be open sourced? Yes. Yes I do. This is just one example.[Granted, the system should have had its own internal safety layer in place to prevent the disasters warned about in the manual. But alas, it did not, so I put the safety layer in the software that drove the system. And granted, one could argue that to actually be “dangerous,” the user of the software would need to have the expensive system it is designed to control.]