The story of how I came to register “nogators.com” used to be on the site I maintained there, but since it’s now offline, I’ll reproduce it here for you:

Hey, Chet, what the hell do you mean about this No Gators stuff?

Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve got nothing against alligators, caymans, crocodiles, komodo dragons, iguanas, etc. (though it is true that I am vexed by the overwhelmingly lame nature of chameleon constitutions).

I’m a software and e-business consultant by trade. This means I routinely work with clients — typically representatives of great-big-huge companies — in creating the specifications, object models, & etc. that constitute the blueprint for large bespoke software systems (say, a million bucks and up).

This is not easy. The hardest part is often getting clients who are experts in their business areas to understand the core challenges of software development. Many of them still have the “just go build it; I’m sure it will be right” point of view — which is never a good idea.

This is not to say that these people aren’t smart. It’s just a recognition that lawyers make lousy physicians, and neither can usually find work as auto mechanics.

One tool we’ve used to educate clients is a list of things the software will and won’t do once the first phase is complete. Obviously, the list of “will not do” isn’t complete — think about it; it can’t be. A list of features NOT included with any system is by definition infinite. There is no formula for determining the area OUTSIDE a circle. If you find one, let me know.

So these lists are often points of contention. Ideally, the “is” list contains the features and functions we have hammered out over the course of discovery. The “is-not” list should be confined to stuff we’ve discussed, but eventually eschewed in the name of schedule, complexity, or cost savings.

Once (okay, more than once), we had a client who was unclear on this concept. The “is” list was hard to constrain on the grounds that “well, someday, we DO want it to do X.” That our list was intended to capture phase one development only was a notion that, so far as I know, continues to escape them. Even the creation of an explicit “not-now-but-later” list failed to keep them from trying to stack the “is” list with wildly out of scope concepts.

More troubling was their tendency to insist on the inclusion of all sorts of far-and-wide features and functions on the “is not” list. Finally, in a fit of frustration fueled by beer late one evening, I suggested to a colleague that we should explicitly disallow alligators, on the grounds that they would surely insist on their inclusion should we fail to head them off. For some reason, this was impossibly funny.

It still is, actually, unless you stop to consider that I could have been right.

Well, Agent Rhymes-With-Schloachim has pointed out that, well, it appears Google fell down a bit on some requirements gathering:

In a follow-up interview, Joe Kava, Google’s senior director of data center construction and operations, revealed a bit more about the South Carolina site, which sits just off U.S. Highway 52 between Goose Creek and Moncks Corner. Kava said the local data center is the only one in Google’s inventory that is experimenting with using a stormwater retention pond to help cool servers.

[…]

In addition to potentially keeping Google’s search and email programs from overheating, the pond also has become home to plenty of algae, which meant Google had to stock it with fish. And since this is the Lowcountry, the food chain didn’t stop there.

“So we now have a 4-foot alligator that has taken up residence in our pond as well,” Kava said, clearly amused.

If only I had been there!