Listening to the Customer

So one evening my son decided he wanted to program, too. This comes up occasionally, but today he was more insistent than usual. I had heard about StarLogo and that it was a language used for learning programming, so I installed it, fired it up, and stared blankly at the various panels that were waiting patiently for my input.

- but I want to program, I want to program now!!

- hold on, I'm just figuring this out

- but I want to program, why don't you let me program

- I haven't a clue how this works, will you give me a minute

And so on, until I had a wonderful insight. I fired up a text editor, maxed the font, and handed him the computer. Whereupon he merrily whacked the keyboard randomly for the next ten minutes or so.

And the moral of the story: never forget to find out what your customer wants before starting work on the solution ...