Seven years ago Thomas Armour, colleague and friend, passed away of brain cancer. Once upon a time he signed his emails "Armourer" — alluding, perhaps, to his job managing the development of computer tools for better analysis of complex data. He built armor to protect against mental mistakes.

Armour once was a featured speaker at an information technology offsite meeting. Instead of a normal briefing with boring vugraphs, he sat in a chair in the middle of the room and discussed the need for software developers to respect their Users — even, or especially, when the Users don't write code, can't accurately describe their needs, and are scarcely computer-literate. The Users are smart people, trying to do something hard, maybe something that IT weenies don't properly understand. "Talk to them!" Tom said.

Sometimes Armour also called himself "Factotum". It's a great word, and according to today's Wikipedia definition:

A factotum is a general servant or a person having many diverse activities or responsibilities. The word derives from the Latin command (imperative construction) fac totem ("do/make everything").

(cf. Speak for the Users (2013-09-24), ...) - ^z - 2014-04-18