Wallace B. McClure

You really want to make your charity/foundation golf scramble a memorable experience.  You want people to come back year after year.  You want to expose your sponsors to people in more ways. You want your golfers to clear the golf course as quickly as possible.  Your golfers have lives.  Sure, they love talking a bit after golf, but they don't like waiting around 90 minutes for the scores to be tallied.  You and your staff of volunteers have been at the golf course since 6:30 am.  They are hot.  They are tired.  They want to go home.  The golf pro staff is human.  They make mistakes.  They have been at the course for many hours.  They are hot and tired as well.  They really don't want to then spend the next 90 minutes chasing down scorecards and then having to total them up.     And when there are ties, they aren't looking forward to going through the work of the USGA tie breaking system. 

We revamped our scoring for a golf stableford scoring system. The problem with Stableford is that it is in general hard to figure out during a round how your team is doing in relation to your quota. The scoreboard is fast and shows the scores as well as your position within the event relative to your quota. The performance is also lightening fast. check out the video. This shows the display of the scores over each hole per group and the scoring is updated per the USGA guidelines for tie breaking. I'm quite proud of this.

This past weekend, our golf course had it's Medal Play Championship.  It was a two round event (Saturday and Sunday June 2nd and 3rd, 2018).  The inclusion of our application gives the event a real high level experience not only for those that are playing, but for course members that are at home.  This is a first rate experience for everyone.

I've talked about how customers get so attached to failed code, trying to save some form of cost from a failed software project and unwilling to part with the disaster, that I've come up with a term for it.  I refer to it as the "Stockholm Syndrome of Software."  The basic idea is that customers get so attached to failed software projects, they will try to do anything to save the investment, including trying to sprinkle a new software project with failed pieces of software.

It is understandable.  On the surface, this makes sense.  Surely somewhere in this pile of code, there is something that it makes sense to keep. Or, another view of it is that we, the company, can just throw out the old developers, bring some newer/better developers in to solve our problems.  These new developers, all they need to do is to cut the head off of a live chicken, perform a voodoo dance around a keyboard, presto changeo, and we have a fully running system.

This is a nightmare.  The code failed for a reason.  If the previous set of developers didn't know what they were doing, why do you think the architecture that they started is worth a damn?  Why run on top of the old software?  Why would you want to infect good code with bad?

Sorry folks, software that doesn't work and never reached the level of being acceptable for use by being deployed is not really suitable for use.  Instead of spending good money on top of bad and trying to keep software on life support that should be shot, go ahead and admit that the software is a sunk cost.  Throw the non working code away.  Get a set of developers that are trustworthy and can deliver.  Don't micromanage them.  Don't tell them to just put a few tweaks on the non working code.  Don't cling to the old code, trust me, you will be better off.

I find that this problem is rampant.  Everyone thinks that they can save a few bucks by going the cheap route.  The cheap route doesn't tend to work.  The cheap route costs more with software that doesn't quite work.  It fails in weird places.  It craps out with 5 users.  It does all the wrong stuff at the wrong time.  Trust me, you are better off without cheap, crappy code.  Let it go, and do it right.

Do you want to add some sound into your Xamarin Forms apps? 

I wanted to tie together a few of my startup articles designed for developers and to put them into one place where I can access them.  Here are my articles from Visual Studio Magazine over the past few years.

I wanted to share my feeling at watching the scoreboards on Sunday February 18^th, 2018.  It is awesome to know that I’ve built a system that people can use and I don’t have to be around to see.  It’s hard when things start.  Your goal when you start is not to have everything perfect.  Your goal is to have something that people can use initially.  It’s not perfect.  It is a start.  Initially, it is called a Minimum Viable Product.  Minimum is the key.  You start with the minimum set of features that people can use.  Over time, you add features.  You improve the product.  That is called iteration.  And that is what I have done.  I have taken a product that I had to go to the golf course to run to now, the golf assistant procs can run the application with no interaction from me.  For the club games, we have things to the point where a golf pro just needs to: