The Dark Side of the Force is underrated

Note that having an application distributed across multiple machines does not intrinsically make it fault-tolerant. We have a whole bunch of machines dealing with ClearCase here. They’re not redundant; all they do is soak up workload. If a server goes down, everyone’s still hosed.

On the plus side, I finally put together a multi-machine juggling act that will automatically generate documentation from the source code every night. I can’t force people to write documentation, but I can certainly make it so easy that people should be embarrassed when I say “so why didn’t you document it?”

I think the whole Dark Side of the Force thing is underrated. You should always try the carrot first, but if you need the stick, go get the stick. Sometimes you just gotta rule through fear to get the job done.