The "Works on My Machine" Certification Program

Joseph Cooney had a brilliant idea for a new application certification program. But Vista's bland white-on-gray badge, in my opinion, doesn't properly communicate the.. authoritative.. nature of said program. With the help of Jon Galloway, we zazzed things up a bit:


This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/the-works-on-my-machine-certification-program.html

Heh. There are days I wish I could hide behind such certifications with Subtext. When we get the most obscure error report. But alas, unless I’m hosting everybody’s blog on my machine, I don’t have that recourse.

Wait, now there’s an idea!

P.S. I didn’t see the Works On My Machine T-Shirt. Let me guess, works on your machine.

Does clicking the ‘X’ in the upper right hand corner of a WinForms or browser application count as a code path?

what about a “Cannot replicate user error” for Support Teams?

If I had a nickel…

@Jon: Thank you.

Can we get some stickers? This looks like it needs to be a monitor certificate.

Very cool, can’t count the number of times I’ve said that. Now I can just point at my shirt!

I was doing just great up to step 4 :frowning:

I think you guys need a less advanced certification.

Wait. It has to COMPILE?!

Oh man! You guys want the WORLD!!!

For an advanced certification, add a feature that overrides some default behaviour that changes for .01% of the customers. Run it against your same old test data and confirm that indeed, for this case, the overriding behaviour isn’t called. Job done!

Never add automated tests. Why waste time writing tests when you can be spending that time writing code? For bonus points, check in your changes if the test looks “good enough”, or if the test fails but you didn’t notice due to doing it two minutes before clocking off on a Friday afternoon.

Reminds me of the website http://www.chezmoicamarche.com (“Chez moi a marche”, meaning, of course, “works fine here”).

Fun post, I sense some frustration against fellow coders ? ^^

How about the T-Shirts. I would need a 100 of them for all the programmers etc in my company.

They sure would not like the idea of missing awards on programming.

On my knees … clutching hands and with des(exhas)paration: -
Pleeeeesee gimme those 100 T-Shirts. Mine is the first largest order!!

What’s the licensing on the logo?

What is it about this blog that I cannot simply select/highlight a section of it? It wigs out and selects half the page.

Can i use the logo on my site? what’s the license on it?

You’re aiming a bit high. I’d like an “Works OCCASIONALLY on my machine” Maybe with an added “Just after a reboot if i don’t touch anything else and I sprayed my immediate surroundings with voodoofied chickenblood and applied the correct raindance”

But maybe it would be a bit too long to put on a logo. Upside is that it would make the text very small and thus unreadable and more usable…

i’ve misread the red sign and read: “worms on my machine”.

and it sort of makes sense :slight_smile:

My professor taught me long ago the five proof forms:

  1. Proof by deduction
  2. Proof by induction
  3. Proof by contradiction
  4. Proof by waving of hands
  5. Proof by one good example

Two of these are used rather too often, including as evidence of complete code testing…

Your point is well taken, but I think you’re being a bit TOO harsh. There really are plenty of instances where the user’s machine, or something else in the environment, causes obscure differences that couldn’t be legitimately foreseen. It seems like every month or so around my work, we get a customer that can’t use our website properly because some non-standard router along the way is illegally breaking up packets or something. The lengths we have to go to account for oddities that are outside of the pale is remarkable.

Which isn’t to say that this can’t be used as a copout.