BBoM: Golden Hammer, Hammer-Nail Metaphor

The Golden Hammer and "When you have a big enough hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" are two metaphors that are related to the Big Ball of Mud pattern. A central part of BBoM is that developers (coders) stick to the tools and technologies that they know, independent of the actual problem at hand.

This kind of thinking is more common than you might believe. A while ago, I did some work assisting on an integration project that exported data from a RDBMS to an FTP server. As this was a typical ETL process, I recommended using DTS on one of the client's existing SQL Server 2000 servers. DTS is perfect for fetching data, transforming and writing it to files, and then transferring them using FTP.

One of the developers, however, was not familiar with DTS; but he knew how to write Windows services in VB6. And so he implemented his part of the ETL as a service - running on his PC (on his own, doing his "thing"). In addition, there is no 'deployment & configuration' documentation (also very typical for BBoM solutions). The 'truck factor' for his solution is one, and now he is gone/unavailable for six months; and there is a huge note on his PC: "DO NOT LOG OFF OR TURN OFF THIS COMPUTER. PRODUCTION CODE IS RUNNING HERE". Say no more . . .

Another of my favorite phrases is "Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups" (from the Steven Seagal movie Dark Territory). I apply it anytime a programmer coder tells me that something need not be tested/checked/verified.