A Relic

Posted by Kirsten Gibbs
Last updated 8th February 2022
reading time

  • Years ago, my dad, who was an IT director for a civil engineering firm, said he liked to keep a record of everything a project had tried, even if those things had failed.

    It meant that new projects could learn not just what had worked from previous ones, but also what hadn't.

    That didn't mean all previous experiments would be rejected - after all, technology changes and things that weren't possible before become possible now.  What it did mean was that nobody walked blindly into repeating the same mistakes.

    During my January tidy-up, I found this template for drawing out consistent shapes for computer flowcharts.  A relic of a bygone era of hand-drawn flowcharts and a National Computing Centre.

    I've never used it.  I preferred to think through my programming logic with words, and I'd never dream of using it to capture what a human should do.

    I'm trying to make work more human, not less.  I want people to be making the decisions in their dealings with other people.

    So I keep it.

    As a reminder of what I don't want to do.

    Hello 2022!

    A Relic Row 1 image
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