Julian Doherty was kind enough to comment on my Trainee Myki Programmer post.  I felt it deserved a better reply than a quick reply to comment, so here it is.

I’m no fan of Myki, but it seems like you’re drawing some very shaky conclusions from just a few posts.  
So why are you saying that this dev is outside Australia? This dev’s profile says "Melbourne" (not sure if that’s been changed since this post went up though).  

Yes, it was changed sometime between 10 February and the 18 February.

(update, this might be why: New myki chief rushed in to rescue troubled smartcard rollout)

www.myki.com.au itself seems to be hosted in Sydney.  

There are two “Myki” sites.

www.myki.com.au which is the informational site, looks to be hosted out of Sydney.
www.mymyki.com.au which is the financial/accounts site, which you are directed to when you click login.  Looks to be hosted in Melbourne.

As for the posts, they really don’t tell you a lot – except the timing does seem too tight. If they’re still doing developer testing in Nov 09, and it’s launching in Dec 09, there are issues.  

The posts would lead me to think that the programmer is a junior programmer.  And yes, the timing is far too tight, for a system which was released on the 29th December.

The "100 users" number is fine. While the entire Myki system as a whole should handle 1,000,000 users in total (the ticket machines, not the website, and not all at once), that test looks like it’s checking that the site can handle 100 users hitting just the login page. That seems realistic.  

I’m not sure about that.  Sure, I don’t have access to the Google Analytics data that the Myki sites are collecting, but at peak times, there must be more than 100 people accessing the MyMyki secure site.

As for the newbie perl questions – yeah, not showing a lot of knowledge in how regex works, but not the end of the world. This to me looks more like a tester writing test scripts rather than a developer writing public facing production code.

Let’s hope it was a tester.  But wouldn’t you think you’d have an experienced tester for such a publically visible project?

Related posts:

Trainee Myki programmer – “test the website for 100 or more logins” Another day, another Myki failure A week with the Myki smartcard

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