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Embrace Admiral Ackbar To Identify Traps in Software Development
Is the invisible traps that catch you
Developers set traps for themselves, warn themselves and then get surprised when they step into the trap
When I hear the words “it’s a trap” which is not enough for my liking, I hear those words spoken in the fishy twang of Admiral Ackbar from Star wars — return on the Jedi
When creating software, you need a mini Admiral Ackbar sitting on your shoulder to stop you walking into a trap.
The easiest traps to walk into our the traps we set for ourselves (underestimating, over promising, opening our mouths when they should be shut, writing code when we don’t need code or writing the wrong code).
If all developers were more like Admiral Ackbar, software development would be full of developers with massive fish heads who would help the team avoid invisible shields.
Admiral Ackbar and Star Wars
Admiral Ackbar is famous for being the first person to yell it’s a trap. This is exactly the type of developer you want on your development team. Unless he says everything is a trap all the time, which would get annoying.
The internet loves Ackbar, he has many memes, despite only have 14 lines in Return of the Jedi.
It’s a normal day for Ackbar in the rebel alliance, they have a pathetically small number of spaceships and are going to attack a huge planet size space station (Death Star) because they believe the shields will be taken down and the Death Star will be vulnerable.
I have worked on some tricky projects but when you are told you are going to attack the Death Star, you would fire up LinkedIn to read some of the tempting job offers in your inbox in case.
Whilst they are about to attack the Death Star (think pre-project meeting) someone called Lando chirps up to…
