Alright, let’s talk about “lina la”. Man, that was a thing. I remember kicking off the work on “lina la” thinking, you know, this would be a neat little project. Something to actually help us out, maybe streamline a few things that were, frankly, a complete mess.
But you know how it goes. Some places, they just can’t leave well enough alone. Simple ideas? They have this amazing talent for making them impossibly complicated. So “lina la” started off as this one specific goal, and then, bam! Suddenly it needed to talk to this ancient piece of junk software, then it had to have features that nobody asked for but someone important thought sounded cool. It was classic scope creep, but on steroids.
My Attempt at Making “lina la” Happen
So, my “practice” with “lina la” wasn’t so much about writing perfect code. Oh no. It was more like trying to tiptoe through a minefield wearing clown shoes. My first step was always trying to get a clear picture of what “lina la” was even supposed to be that week. That usually involved a bunch of meetings where everyone had a different idea. Chaos, pure chaos.
I’d sit down, try to sketch out a plan for “lina la”. Then, next meeting, someone new would pop up. “Hey, great work, but ‘lina la’ absolutely must do X, Y, and Z too!” And X, Y, and Z often made no sense with the original idea. It was like they were playing buzzword bingo with the project.
Then there was the resource problem. Oh boy. “I need a couple of days from the backend team for ‘lina la’,” I’d say. The answer? “Sorry, they’re all tied up on Project Megacorp, the one that’s been ‘critical’ for six months and hasn’t moved an inch.” So “lina la” would just sit there, gathering dust while I tried to figure out how to do everyone else’s job too.
I actually spent a whole weekend once, cobbling together a small, working prototype of what “lina la” could be. Just something basic, to show the potential. I was pretty proud of it, thought it might finally get some traction. Showed it to my manager. He nodded, said, “Looks good, looks good. Now, can you make ‘lina la’ also process our TPS reports and integrate with that one system only Dave knows how to use, and Dave’s on leave for three weeks?” My soul just sort of deflated right there.
The so-called detailed process for “lina la” usually looked something like this:
- Get a new, urgent directive for “lina la” because someone important had a shower thought.
- Try to actually build that part of “lina la”. Immediately hit a roadblock because System A doesn’t talk to System B, or the data we needed was locked away.
- Spend days chasing people for permissions, information, or just a five-minute conversation about “lina la”. Often got passed from one department to another.
- By the time I got some answers, the priorities for “lina la” had shifted again. Back to square one.
It was exhausting. “lina la” wasn’t a tech problem. “lina la” was a people problem, a process problem, a everything-is-on-fire-all-the-time problem.
In the end, “lina la” just kind of… vanished. No big announcement, no formal cancellation. It just faded into the background, another half-finished idea in the graveyard of good intentions. The biggest thing I “achieved” with “lina la” was realizing that sometimes, you can’t fix a broken system with just one more project. Especially not when the system itself is what’s breaking everything. That was the real takeaway from the whole “lina la” experience for me. It wasn’t about code, it was about culture.