{"id":17580,"date":"2020-10-08T18:40:31","date_gmt":"2020-10-08T18:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=17580"},"modified":"2020-10-09T20:17:01","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T20:17:01","slug":"foreign-policy-how-not-to-kill-people-with-spreadsheets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2020\/10\/08\/foreign-policy-how-not-to-kill-people-with-spreadsheets\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreign Policy: How Not to Kill People With Spreadsheets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember how I turned around a hot take on the Twitter Bitcoin scammer<\/a> in 24 hours? Well, James Palmer asked me for another!<\/p>\n

Commissioned Monday, delivered Tuesday, and up this evening \u2014 How Not to Kill People With Spreadsheets: The U.K. government\u2019s disastrous coronavirus error is another example of outsourcing gone wrong.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

No cryptos or blockchains, but you may enjoy it anyway. I can write other things!<\/p>\n

I was tremendously helped with this one by friends on Facebook, who all had Excel horror stories to tell. [Facebook<\/em><\/a>]<\/p>\n

Pass this story along to your favourite beleaguered bureaucrat \u2014 the secret takeaway is that Site Reliability Engineering is a whole new vocabulary for systematised backside-covering in the face of adversity. [Google<\/em><\/a>]<\/p>\n

One technical error slipped in during editing \u2014 LibreOffice doesn’t automatically<\/em> fix Excel errors, it has alternate correct formulae you can use instead of the broken Excel ones. (I’ve flagged it to the editor.)<\/p>\n

They also used a photo, and not the Heath Robinson picture I suggested. [Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/a>] Figure 1 (below): every business-critical Excel sheet, ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(I swear, DAGGER~1.XLS just slipped<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\"Become<\/a>

Your subscriptions keep this site going. Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pass this one to your favourite beleaguered bureaucrat \u2014 the secret takeaway is that Site Reliability Engineering is a whole new vocabulary for systematised backside-covering in the face of adversity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2012,1150,322],"class_list":["post-17580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-excel","tag-foreign-policy","tag-libreoffice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/William-Heath-Robinson-Inventions-Page-138-header.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17580"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17587,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17580\/revisions\/17587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}