David Anderson’s InfoQ talk on Kanban and software development is fascinating. In particular I liked the clarity of the numbers he produced to prove the successes of his methods. I also liked the photographs of the tracking boards that different groups were using, David’s analysis of them and the way they changed over time as groups came into contact with each other.
All in all, a thought provoking presentation that backs ideas up with concrete numbers.
I’ve been a fan of Ruby for a long, long time. If I had a real world problem to solve, and language was no barrier .. I’d probably choose Ruby, unless there was a solid reason not to.
Why then do I spend so few of my hacking hours poking at Ruby code?
I think it is because my hacking hours are spent twiddling with new shiny things or working through the same old exercises[1] in different ways, rather than trying to achieve something. As I mentioned a few days ago, I think it is irresponsible and unfair to release an app or library to the OS community unless you’re willing to support it, and I’m not, so I rarely build big projects. For the most part, how I solve the problem is more interesting to me than the problem.
I suppose it comes down to - I rarely use Ruby because I’m rarely trying to solve a problem as efficiently as I can.
[1] Uncle Bob Martin’s “Agile Software Development : Principles Patterns and Practices” contains an interesting little console programming problem that I’ve worked through in half a dozen different languages.
Does anyone remember the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth? It is the one where Blackadder attempts to avoid being send to certain death by pretending to be mad. He puts his pants on his head and sticks pencils up his nose because .. well, people who do that are obviously insane.
I think that Richard Stallman is trying to pull a similar trick with this posting. I appreciate everything the man has done for the software community, but he seems to have transcended reality at this point. Maybe he’s frightened that with the current economic downturn that wold war is inevitable and that he’s going to be conscripted - he’s smarter than us all, and he’s putting his insanity defence in place right now.
I went indoor-climbing last night for the first time in over a year. Right now my arms hurt so much that I’d rather not have them. It’s not like they’re doing me much good just now anyway - my hands are largely incapable of closing and the opposable thumb seems like a dim and distant dream.
I did learn a few lessons last night, about climbing and about the way my mind works. When I arrived at the centre and approached the first wall, I realised that I had no idea how the equipment worked. I couldn’t remember how to tie myself on, and I couldn’t remember how to set up the belay end of the rope. That information had completely fallen out of my head. I’ve done it a thousand time but … I still couldn’t quite recall how to do it.
The bit I found most surprising is that I was sure I knew how, I was sure I’d forgotten nothing at all; right up until the point when I tried to do it. There’s a lesson there for all software architects (me included) - if you don’t write software regularly you will forget things about the process. Not only that, but you won’t know what you’ve forgotten. If you forget enough about the process you’re no longer an asset to your company. You’re just a guy who’s telling people how to belay, and keep other people alive, who can’t actually belay. Don’t be that guy.
My second lesson is about trust. I climb with my wife and my best friend. These are people I trust implicitly. I’d also given my equipment a thorough check over before I went out, so I was sure it was working fine. Even with that, I was terrified on my first few assents. Now, I don’t like heights, I hate them in fact. In the dictionary, under acrophobia it has a picture of me .. screaming whilst standing on a shoe-box. But I’d got over it whilst climbing, a year ago I could climb freely without fear. Now I was sweating and panting and wearing out my arms clinging onto the wall for dear, sweet life. Why?
To me, it seems that there are things that come naturally to us, and things that don’t. For me, being off the ground is not natural. By working at it, I got to a point where I was no longer afraid, then I began to enjoy it. At the same time it was good exercise that was helping me get a little bit fitter each time I went. When I stopped going, my confidence and trust in what I had learned started to erode and my natural fears and distrust started to come to the surface again. When we don’t practice something, we not only loose our understanding of it, we can start to believe things that are actively not true. Yes, brother architect, I’m talking to you again. Ever wondered why so many companies are lumbered with crappy products that the group architect purchased? Because they were out of touch, and began to believe the easy lies of silver-bullet vendors. They believed in the things that appealed to their core nature rather than the hard-won truths they’d struggled so hard to find.
When we don’t keep our skills sharp, we forget things. When we don’t practice our craft, we believe things that aren’t true.
In this week’s episode of ‘Rob Shows His Ignorance’, I’ve a couple of questions regarding power consumption and computers.
1. If I’m watching a video at native resolution - so if the picture is 640×480 I have it consuming that many pixels on my screen, will that consume less power than if it has to transform it to a different size/resolution? I imagine that there’s extra processing required to map it onto a bigger image, but I don’t know if modern hardware is sensitive enough to this level of work for it to be a noticeable difference. Will the GPU be able to work at a lower level? Is my basic premise reasonable? Since most video is compressed in some way, is there in fact an extra step required to transpose the picture onto a higher resolution or is that all taken care of within the decompression process? I ask, because I always have the impression that my laptop battery doesn’t last as long when I watch video in full screen mode as it does if I watch it in a window.
2. If I turn the volume up on my laptop, as I understand it, more power is being used to create bigger vibrations in the speaker. Now, I was watching a video (Bill Buxton’s Mix09 Keynote) and I noticed that there was a volume control on it. If I turn the volume up from within the flash application, I’d be surprised if it changed the amount of power running to my speaker so … it gets louder for the same amount of energy. Since even my twenty year old physics tells me that you can’t make energy for free .. this doesn’t seem right. What’s going on? Am I just deluded that my laptop controls volume by a variable resistor just like my great-grandfather’s crystal set?
It is at times like these, that I wish I had a background in EE so that I didn’t have to expose my vulnerable, underbelly of ignorance
After watching Dan Roam’s presentation, I decided to see what else looked good from Mix09. The day 1 keynote from Bill Buxton - available right now on the front page of the site gave me an insight into the mind of a designer that I didn’t have before.
Bill talks extensively about the history of industrial design and its rise during the great depression and that we can take the opportunities of the current financial crisis and use them to make usability design a priority.
I’m not sure if his logic, that crisis periods are inherently periods where design can prosper, is well founded but .. let’s hope it is. When you’re stuck in a financial hole, digging may not help but just sitting there doing nothing certainly won’t work. If innovative design and engineering can give us hope - let’s get to it.
Some of the ideas that Bill pushed strongly on were the notions that design has to be fast, has to be iterative and that only trying one approach to solving a problem leads to sub-optimal solutions. I’ve tried the first two of those ideas in development and they work like a charm. I wonder what it would be like to try to get several different solutions to the same problem in parallel? Perhaps that’s really what’s going on in the Java web framework world, or the .NET DI container world. Perhaps, rather than being frustrated by the problem of trying to learn and decide amongst multiple choices we should rejoice that we have options; we should be pleased that we get to choose the design that we believe in most.
The other big take-away that I got from Bill’s presentation was that in selling something you shouldn’t try to sell the item itself. You should sell the experience of using/owning the item. I can see this as a useful tool when trying to build software and also to make engineering decisions. Build software that will lead to a positive user experience and you’ll be a success. When considering two engineering alternatives, ask people to imagine the experience of living with that decision. Ask the technologist to put on his negative/remember-all-the-times-things-didn’t-work-the-way-they-should hat on and ask him to imagine what life would be like.
I’ve said it before, and I’l say it again. I love watching smart, passionate individuals talking passionately about their passions.
Mixing it up in Vegas: In this engrossing and entertaining presentation Dan Roam talks about his theories on sketches and how they unlock creativity and help communication and consensus gathering amongst groups.
I really enjoyed it, I’ll certainly try some of these ideas out, and I will probably buy the book. All those positives aside, three things do bother me about his presentation.
1. He starts off by saying that you don’t have to be able to draw at all to use his methods. That his ideas revolve around using simple shapes to communicate. Then he uses slide after slide filled with drawings that, whilst simple, are of a much higher standard than I could ever produce. (Yes I am that artistically challenged.) If simple diagrams are what you need to communicate .. why doesn’t he use any?
2. I’m willing to accept that using drawings as a means of communication engages parts of our brains that would otherwise lie dormant. What are the trade-offs? What are we sacrificing? Trading in my ability to logically critique something for my ability to create new ideas is something I’d want to do sometimes. When is it good, when is it not? Give me the down as well as the up.
3. I became suspicious when the Dan claimed that we can use pictures to solve any problem. That’s obviously nonsense. At best we might be able to describe any problem using pictures. Describing and solving are two different things. Don’t believe me? OK, well, all of my grandparents are dead. I love them, even those I never met. I’d like them back. Please provide me with the drawing that solves that problem.
Before I go any farther, I’d like to be clear that I’m a Black Pen Guy, When I talk, I like to stand in front of a white-board and scribble. I love to throw a marker to people and say, “show me what you mean”. Giving me a tool to make me better at design, communication and problem analysis is wonderful. That’s all you need to do to sell it to me.
Anyway, rants aside, this is a really interesting presentation with oodles of interesting ideas and anecdotes.
(Via Clarke Ching.)
I like the teams I run to use pair programming, because the end product is better. I’ve also heard lots of people say that they don’t want to do it.
I have a theory that pair programming is the brussels sprout of the technology world. Lots of people don’t eat them because, not because they think they’re bad for you, but just because they don’t like them
I have no children. When I do, they’ll eat brussels sprouts. I won’t do it because I want them to be sad, or to make those little sicky faces that children pull when they put something unfamiliar in their mouth. I’ll do it because I want them to be healthy, productive and to live a long time.
When I go to work I like to wear a suit. I also like to wear a tie. I like to wear thick, starched, stiff collared shirts with thick double cuffs. I like hard soled, thick leather shoes. I like to be aware of how I’m dressed, without being uncomfortable.
Why? It’s my war paint. In the same way that a Native American or a Massai tribesman or an ancient Celtic warrior put on face paint as a symbol that they were no longer at rest, they were now at war, and wholly committed to the task at hand. That’s how I want to feel when I go to work. I’m there, I want to get a job done. I’m committed. I’m not in the same frame of mind as when I’m at home with my wife watching TV.
Is it really necessary? Yes, for me it is. I like to make friends with the people I work with, the people I work for and the people that work for me. But friendship holds a trap. I’m not at work just to hang out and shoot-the-breeze. I’m there to create, to achieve and to add value. My war paint keeps me focussed.
I’ve just watched Zed Shaw’s THERE WILL BE PORN: 10 Dangerous Ideas Nobody Should Implement which thankfully contains neither porn, nor ten ideas. He sings, he plays music, he insults people he likes, he has some number of ideas that people should never implement which is less than ten that he talks about and he swears a great deal.
You know the old chestnut whereby both art and porn are hard to describe but “I’ll know it when I see it”. Well, this is neither. But for some reason I enjoyed watching it.
There’s a lot of history you have to have lived through to really understand it; you’ll know if you know. If you do, give his farewell speech a listen. If you don’t … he plays a mean guitar.
I’ve been working on my CV recently and finding it hard to quantify what I do and am. I’ve worked in almost every capacity in technology:
And a whole bunch of other roles that don’t even have good names. I’ve loved every one of these roles, I’m fascinated with every aspect of technology. Beyond that, I like to flatter myself that I’ve acquitted myself well in all of these roles. I love technology, I love managing people. I love guiding and participation of the creation of something out of nothing. Well, nothing more than sweat, tears, inspiration and a compiler.
I’ve always loved the idea of being a polymath, a renaissance man - but sadly my interests have always been restricted to one field. Luckily it is a pretty big field and there are few people that have become masters of it all. I’m not there. Not even close. But I’d like to be.
Everyone needs a goal in life. “Be the best you can be at the thing you love” works for me.
Here’s a rule of thumb I like to use.
Q. How do you know when a document is too long to be useful?
A. Print it out and try to slip it under the door of the person you wrote it for. If it doesn’t fit … it’s too big.
As a an addendum to my test; whilst you’re at the door, open it, go inside, and say hello. Nine times out of ten, that’ll do more good than the document.
In a post entitled, simply, Software, Rafael de F. Ferreira juxtaposes quotes from James Bach, Erik Meijer and an Alan Kay/Phil Windley amalgam to put together an intriguing argument that quality software doesn’t exist, people no longer care that quality software doesn’t exist, computing is in its infancy and we don’t know much yet, but we’re also not really learning so things aren’t getting better.
I’m not sure I buy it. In fact I’m sure it is bunk. I’ve said for a long time that The Software Crisis doesn’t exist. As an industry we create more, better software cheaper than ever before. WTF is the crisis?
Can we do better? Yes.
So why do people talk about a crisis? Because programming attracts smart, dedicated, attention-to-detail-oriented, meticulous, perfectionists who’re never going to be happy. People who’re always going to want to do better. For many people - including me - software is my art, my hobby, my career, my passion. I want it to be great. I won’t accept second best. I won’t accept shoddy or badly done or half-hearted. I want to build the best .. whatever the hell it is I’m working on.
Equally, I won’t accept people telling me what a bad job the software industry does any more. We don’t do a bad job, we do the best job of writing software that anyone ever has in the history of the world. Possibly the universe.
Can we do better? Yes. Can you beat me with the crisis stick? No, sir, you may not.
My good friend, Clarke Ching, today proposed that we reach out to universities and colleges to help them teach students the things we’d like them to know when they graduate. I’ve done some of this in the past working with universities and colleges in the US and the UK, it was very rewarding. I’d love to do more.
This trickle down from Reuters looks and sounds legit.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Mostly positive I think. Sun has been chasing the client-side dream for the last couple of years ( well forever really, but with renewed vigour of late ) with twaddle such as JavaFX. Personally, I’ve written mostly server side Java. That’s what I expect to continue to do. If I was going to write client side code, I wouldn’t use JavaFX. I can’t think of a single reason why I would choose JavaFX over Flash or Swing or GWT or SWT or … anything.
Sun, who’ve been financially constrained for a long time, have been focussing resources on client side development and that has led to stagnation and lack of drive on the core Java language. Take the complete failure to deliver on closures for example - Sun had other priorities, so nothing happened. IBM sells hardware, lots of back end hardware. They make money out of said hardware and want people to write as many apps as possible for them. I have hope that they can deliver on the sort of roadmap that will make me happy.
I had a conversation with the head of Sun’s R&D department about three years ago. We talked about their hardware platform and the fact that they were producing hardware with massive numbers of processors and cores, and that each of the cores were comparatively slow. This sort of architecture seems ideal for hosting PHP/RoR/CGI/share-nothing apps and kind of poor for hosting Java apps. I asked him if he felt that was true, and what they were planning to do about it. He said, yes their hardware and software sweet-spots had diverged and that they had some ideas about how to realign their offerings. As far as I can tell, things are still the same today.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Sun. They’ve given me lots of free stuff, for a long time, and in return I’ve given them … nothing. That’s not quite true, I’ve had Solaris boxes ripped out and replaced with IBM Blades running Linux. So, I’ve given them less than nothing. Sheesh, no wonder their stock price has gone down the drain.
I’m writing this post because a lot of my friends are dyed-in-the-wool Java and Ruby developers who believe that nothing good ever came out of Redmond. I’d like them to think again.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to podcasts that have come out of the .NET community: Elegant Code’s Code Cast, Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes and Herding Code and overall my reaction has been, “Wow, the Microsoft/.NET community is really starting to get to grips with Lean and Agile”. This wasn’t the case the last time I worked intensively with .NET about three years ago, back then it seemed that MS and .NET developers were living in the dark ages.
Listening to people working from within Microsoft talking about using Scrum and XP and Lean and how it is making their development better is heart-warming to someone who’s been pushing this message for the last ten years.
That Microsoft are dogfooding their own applications, and changing them to make them work better in support of Agile methods is fantastic news. Microsoft can do a lot of good if they support these ideas openly, and that seems to be their intention.
Microsoft isn’t just making strides in the process department though, the advances they’ve made in the CLR and the languages that run on it are really starting to pay dividends. As this post from Matthew Podwysocki shows, the generative effects of advancing the language and the platform.
That the .NET platform has been pulling ahead of Java in the feature department for a while now hasn’t been a secret. But now, for the first time, I’m starting to see people using these features and talking about these features to solve significant problems rather than brandishing them as ‘the new hotness’.
If only it wasn’t tied to Windows, I’d buy some.
Bob Martin has a presentation he gave at a JAOO conference up on InfoQ. The title of the presentation is Craftsmanship and Ethics, which is somewhat misleading since the presentation is basically on Software Craftsmanship prefixed with “we should be craftsmen, craftsmen should have ethics, it’d be unethical not to”. I was a little disappointed by that - I was interested in his thoughts on ethics and how they relate to the development.
Overall it is an entertaining presentation that will leave the Agile and SC groups nodding and leave those with a different mind-set shaking their heads as normal. I enjoy watching passionate people talking passionately about their passions… so this was fun; but I don’t think it changed any minds or taught anybody anything they didn’t know.
I’m assuming that the crowd at a JAOO event is composed of experienced professionals who care about and investigate their industry. To effect change it isn’t enough to speak passionately. It isn’t enough to tell experienced professionals what you think or feel - they have their own thoughts and feelings and there’s no reason they should supplant their own with yours. People need compelling reasons to change, they need people to provide compelling solutions to immediate problems, they need to believe that by changing they are shedding risk rather than increasing their risk profile. Passion isn’t enough.
Uncle Bob, and the other leading figures in our profession have the opportunity to speak directly to thousands, indeed millions of developers each year, and I don’t think that what they’re doing is working. The Tony Robbins style pitch is enough to get people fired up at the conference, it doesn’t carry enough momentum to provide a solid take-home.
I’m reminded of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing The Chasm: Agile, Lean, Craftsmanship, all these ideas have been sold to the innovators and perhaps even the early adopters, we need to cross the chasm to get to the next group of technologists - the early majority. Even this isn’t enough, though. We haven’t got the message through to project mangers, business analysts or customers, let alone C*O types. We can present compelling cases when we talk to people one-to-one, but the ideas haven’t taken root in these communities; in Chasm terms we still don’t have a hook in the innovators there.
If we advanced the management and technology communities in parallel we’d have a much better chance of improving the way software development is done.
How do we do it? Well, first off, I think we need to stop talking about quality, top talking about Agile and Lean and Craftsmanship and start talking about value. Value is what everyone wants. Developers want to create value, managers want value created, customers want to buy valuable software.
I firmly believe quality leads to value, but telling people they should want quality leads nowhere. Tell someone they want value and they retort, “Of course I do, how do I get it?”. NOW you can say, “Well, every industry in the world has come to accept that building in quality leads to higher value.” At this point, I’ve never heard anyone say, “Hmm, that sounds hokey. Go build me some shit. I’m sure that my best path to value is by heading through latrine-town.”
When technologists, managers and customers talk about value, they may not all understand it in the same terms. At least not at first. But until they agree on what value is, there’s no way to build successful products or relationships.
The idea that people might not have the same understanding of value is something that many technologists don’t get right off the bat. To explain it, I need to take back something I said a few lines ago. I don’t believe that quality always leads to value. This also brings me back to Uncle Bob’s talk.
I have worked in environments where financial opportunities would arise out of nowhere, last for a few days or a couple of weeks and disappear. In these cases, the opportunity to make millions of dollars a day can exist if you can(in abstract terms) get information in, process it and send it back out within a specified time period. Oh, and the countdown on how long you can do this for has already started. Every moment between now and shipping costs a non-trivial sum of money. In these cases, value comes from shipping. The software might have problems - if it crashes every fifteen minutes night and day, that’s OK .. we’ll run ten copies on ten machines and have ten interns sit and watch them clicking the icon every time it falls over. The software doesn’t have passwords or security, that’s OK we can hire a rent-a-cop with a gun to keep people away from the computers.
Overall, doing this makes money. Sure, over the first few days the team try to improve the quality so that half the interns can go home - but the software is going in the bin in a week .. improvements beyond basic stability are a drain on assets nothing more.
I’ve heard developers shout about this being a terrible, shoddy way to do software and insult the developers who build it. I may even have been one of them. That’s because I wasn’t thinking about generating value with my software, I was only thinking about software for the sake of software.
Now I think about value, I can understand why people build software like that. I can also understand that we can get that software out of the door faster by looking at what we build in each case and trying to pull together some pieces that they can glue together the next time an opportunity arises. Pieces that’ll let us be EVEN faster to market next time. That’s value.
My point, value isn’t a universal truth. Value is relative to the situation. If everyone talks about value at the start, and forms a common understanding we can fit everything else into the framework this gives us.
Uncle Bob, luminaries of the development world, talk about value. Please.
This morning I opened up a copy of Dave Hitz ‘How To Castrate A Bull’ and I’ve been totally blown away. I read it cover-to-cover without standing up. This was unfortunate because I was in the bath. I filled the tub over and over with hot water until I was done because I couldn’t bear to stop to dry myself until I had got to the end.
Dave (someone else I’m on first name terms with by dint of having read his writings) tells of his experiences as a founder of NetApp. The book is filled with amusing stories and side-bars, coupled with sage and hard-won advice, recounting of failures and successes with equal honesty, passing on of lessons learned from others and a thousand tiny observations each a gem in of itself.
I only wish Dave had a second, parallel company at the same time so he’d have a sequel.
Damien Katz, and his family, sold their house and lived off their savings so that he could write free software.
His honesty and his story left me, literally, in tears. But truly inspired.
Please watch it.
Trying to get CouchDB set up, I’ve had to install macports. Macports is a neat tool that makes a lot of apps and libraries available for the Mac. Many of these are old-school Unix libraries and it seems that it isn’t just the code that the Macport team wanted to bring to the Mac - they wanted to bring the Unix user experience too.
I downloaded the installer and ran it. It gave me a lovely progress bar that pottered from zero to about seventy percent in 2 mins or so. Then it just sat there. After about twenty five minutes I tried to stop it .. and it said “No, I’m not going to stop”. Before killing it I decided to see if it was doing anything. I opened a terminal and ran top. It seemed that there were multiple rsync processes consuming CPU. Digging around I found that the installer was actually doing something - downloading files from the mother-ship. I decided not to kill it and another 20 minutes later it finished.
Why do people do this sort of thing? If they’d written an installed that flashed up a message saying “This could take a while” I’d be content to wait. Giving me a progress bar that just stops for most of an hour is madness, the worst possible UI decision. Showing me nothing would have been better because then, at least, it wouldn’t have looked broken.
I’m now all stressed because I have code on my system written by people who thought that UI was a good idea. What other insanity do they have in store?
I’ve now watched all eight episodes of Erlang in Practice a series of screencasts by Kevin Smith[1] and it was money well spent.
Having watched a expert write in Erlang for six hours, I feel I have a much better understanding of the flow of Erlang development. It isn’t as good as sitting down with someone and pair-programming, but it is as close as I can get. Watching someone write code is a very different experience from reading a book on the subject: each has something unique to offer. A book can teach you syntax and tricks and libraries and all of the static parts of a language, it can’t show you the way an expert thinks. The way an expert gets from A to B, the mistakes they make, the paths they go down before refactoring; things that even experts can’t tell you, but they can show you.
The only thing I didn’t like about the ‘casts were that on a number of occasions Kevin ( I feel like we’re best buds after spending the day together ) would make a mistake that I spotted and, no matter how much I yelled at the screen, I couldn’t get him to fix it. It felt like I was at the theatre shouting “look behind you” and the actors stubbornly refused to comply. That’s a minor thing, though. Informative, entertaining and (if you’re geek enough) fun.
I hope he does more.
[1] Sadly not that Kevin Smith, seeing Erlang written by Silent Bob would be great.
My foray into the World of Erlang continues. I’m excited and energised by the new and interesting things I’m discovering. Learning to think in terms of messages passed between processes isn’t easy, or natural yet; but I’m getting there.
I do have some concerns though. Erlang has been around for a very long time ( in computer years ) and has a few people who date back to the beginning still involved. Many members of the Erlang community are, however, quite new to the language and are working at trying lots of different ideas - some of them new, some of them translations of ideas from other languages.
What this means, for me, is that when I look around for a library to perform a certain task I’ll find a bunch of different options, each with a different approach, none of them are stable and none of them have any strong hints about their future. It seems that Erlang is such a fertile place for experimentation, and the community is so young, that projects spring up, are used briefly and are abandoned before they reach their potential.
Take web-frameworks for example. I want a UI for an app I’m considering and a web-ui would be just-the-thing. I looked around and there are loads of different web frameworks and web servers. I don’t have any trust that any of them will be actively maintained three years from now. I can’t create a critical dependency between my work and a project that may or may not have a future.
I’m not criticising people for their efforts (I will in a moment though) people are entitled to spend their time and efforts in whatever way they want. Erlang has drawn innovators, early adopters and those dissatisfied with the tools and options they had elsewhere. The relatively blank canvas is, I’m sure, what attracted many people to the language. There’s new ground to be broken, clean slates to be drawn on and blank sheets to be filled with ideas. All wonderful stuff.
The problem I have isn’t with innovation and creativity. The problem I have is with people who innovate, create, persuade other people to use what they are creating and then get bored and forget it. If you write up some code, dump it on git-hub and say “world, it is there if you want it” that’s one thing. If you create a project, put together a pretty project page telling people why it is cool and why they should use it then you’ve created a social contract you’re obliged to support your work. If you don’t want to make the commitment then don’t act like you are.
People who create, advertise and evangelise, then abandon open source projects are doing the world an active dis-service. Why?
Just to be clear here. I don’t have a problem with Open Source. I’ve used it for many years. I’ve spent some of the last few years providing technical support for Open Source applications and libraries. I’ve found good Open Source projects to be, without question, the equal of their commercial counterparts. I’ve watched innovation and change come from the Open Source community, positively affecting the entire industry. I like Open Source. I get annoyed by Open Source dilettantes and their here today/gone tomorrow behaviour.
I have an Open Source project of my own. I’m not going to point to it, because I don’t want you to use it. I made the code available for myself and a couple of other people. I have a disclaimer on it saying “there’s no good reason for you to use this” because it is treading old ground and I’m not going to maintain it. If someone finds it and uses it .. that’s fine, if nobody ever does that’s fine too. But nobody will ever believe that it is a project they can depend on.
So what’s my point?
The Erlang community right now has many smart people in it. They have lots of ideas and they want to try them out. There’s almost as many ideas as people, so there are mostly small communities and unstable projects. There’s certainly exceptions to this rule such as CouchDB and RabbitMQ, but in general I don’t see many significant communities building significant projects. For my benefit, and that of everyone else, I’d like that to change.
If you’re about to create a project or release some code you have as an Open Source project, please consider these question:
Whatever else people may tell you, Java has been a success because of the communities associated with it. In particular the Apache Jakarta community was instrumental in making Java the phenomenon that it became. They had rules, they had standards, they had ethics and lots of smart people talking and building great things. Companies and individuals would adopt projects because they were Apache products - it was a name you could trust. The name and the community had respect and trust. Smart individuals looking to work on interesting problems gravitated there. Those with interesting ideas would go there and find other like-minded people to help them.
Erlang doesn’t seem to have that community, not yet anyway. But it does have enough people to create that community. At the moment they’re consumed by experimentation, and there is no central place or group that seems to be a likely candidate. Some languages never coalesce around a community and are forever fragmented and experimental e.g. Smalltalk. This isn’t necessarily bad, things are what they are.
Right now, I’m enthusiastic and energised, but I’m also cautious and concerned. Erlang looks like it could be ideal for the problem I want to solve; I just don’t think I trust the basket enough to put all my eggs in it.
Looks like I jumped aboard the Erlang train just in time. If I’d waited any longer I might have missed the chance to be Munctional.
I’ve changed. I’m surprised how much. A couple of years ago when I was playing with Erlang I thought it was OK, it had some interesting features .. but nothing special. I don’t know what has changed since then, I think perhaps it is all the time I’ve spent with Clojure, but I have a new appreciation for the beauty of functional languages. I am excited.
I’ve spent a few hours bashing away with Erlang now, and things have certainly come a long way since 2007 when I last devoted any time to Erlang.
Actually, not everything has come a long way. The only platform that you can get binaries for on erlang.org is Windows. I was working on Windows the last time I poked at Erlang so I probably didn’t notice this last time round. Compiling from source isn’t a huge deal but … this is 2009, if you want people to try something, forcing them to compile from source before they can try it out doesn’t seem like the path of least resistance.
After compiling I looked around for an editor and many fingers pointed to Erlide. I must admit, I wasn’t expecting much - I haven’t been pleasantly surprised by Eclipse plugins for off-the-beaten-path languages in the pase. I must admit, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Erlide. It has all of the basic functionality I’d want and a little extra that I wasn’t expecting with some refactoring functionality that was released today. The one piece that doesn’t seem to be there is a code formatter, which surprises me as that’s normally one of the first things to get done. There may even be one in there somewhere and I just haven’t found out the incantation to get it going.
So, I have Erlang installed, and I have an editor/IDE. Next stop, some educational materials. I have Joe Armstrong’s book Programming Erlang which is a pretty good text, but I’d like to warm up with some shorter pieces, whet my appetite going and get me back into the flow of things. The main Erlang site has some pretty good tutorials here.
After getting back up to speed on language basics I need look through the libraries that are available. In 2007 there wasn’t much beyond the OTP stuff that ships as part of the Erlang distribution. That’s changed, there is now a plethora of libraries and frameworks, in various stages of maturity, that I’ll need to look into before I really have any sort of handle on Erlang development.
I watched The Watchmen on Friday, and it was truly splendid. I was going to write more but … I think I’ve covered it.
I got involved in a discussion a few days ago in the Scala mailing list. I made a statement based on an experience that was related to me, rather than something I’d tested for myself. Alexis Richardson disagreed with me and the commends I’d made about Erlang and RabbitMQ strongly, and said so.
None of the above is noteworthy, people disagree about things all the time. What is noteworthy is that Alexis remained calm, measured, polite and considered all through the discussion. This is such a pleasant change from the usual mailing list pattern that I thought it was worth mentioning.
As a tribute/thankyou to Mr Richardson and his well-mannered ways, I’ve decided that I’m going to give Erlang - a language that wasn’t on my list - a second chance, and try it for the personal project I mentioned a few days ago.
I gave Jeff Atwood some stick last week when he wrote something I thought was ridiculous, so I thought it was only fair to throw him a ‘good job’ when he wrote something I found really interesting: File Compression in the Multi-Core Era.
Learn, Share, Grow: “I am sitting here at the opening of ALT.NET Seattle. I look around and see the words ‘Learn, Share, Grow’ on a poster…
What it means is that we recognize the value of the sum total of our experiences. We recognize that we all have something to give, and to take. Benefitting, doesn’t come for free, but the cost is a worthy investment.
(Via CodeBetter.Com - Stuff you need to Code Better!.)
Sometimes the tech community makes me very proud.
I’m a language junkie, I admit it. I love learning new programming languages. I’ve got a few projects I’d like to work on and I’m trying to decide which language to use. There’s a lot of languages that I could use; they all have advantages and disadvantages, they all have sweet spots where they have some benefit. I believe that programming languages are important, choosing the right language does make a difference. But I also don’t believe that you can evaluate a language without using it on a real project and then maintaining that project over time.
Here’re my candidates:
Clojure has a lot of interesting features: functional approach with first class functions, software transactional memory, immutable data structures, macros, lazy execution. After a few months working with clojure, I’ve even got used to and then began to like the Lisp derived syntax.
There are things that I dislike about Clojure. A big deal is made about integration with the JVM, but it isn’t perfect - there’s currently no support for annotations which are an increasingly important part of the modern Java platform.
The community also seems to have a grudge against the Java community: as an example, there was recently a big debate about how to re-implement the mod function because the Java version wasn’t the same as the Common Lisp version. Having two different, incompatible, implementations of such a core function is madness.
The other thing that irritates me is the inconsistency in naming. Calling Java functions you use camel case naming. Most native Clojure functions use dashes as separators, but then other functions just mash words together without any separator or case separators. There’s also lots of abbreviations in core functions in the name of brevity. These abbreviated words make the code ugly and obfuscated.
Inconsistent and cryptic are two of my least favourite things in a language. But even balancing these negative aspects, I still think it has a great deal going for it.
Scala leaves me emotionally confused. Code I’ve written in Scala is remarkably compact. The syntax is powerful and flexible. But I always feel that I’m wrestling with the code, it feels like I’m having to beat my code into submission. Maybe that’d go away over time, that’s why it interests me. Or maybe I’d just spend several months feeling battered and bruised from constant wars fought in my text editor.
Scala has great interop with the JVM and other Java libraries. The only black-spot is the lack of useable reflection. Reflection isn’t vital, you can work round it, but it does sometimes limit your options.
I don’t really have anything against Scala, I’m prepared to be convinced, I’m just not there yet.
I’ve been a fan of Groovy since its earliest days. I’ve always been a little bit disappointed that the optional static typing isn’t actually as static as it could be, but other than that I’ve really got no complaints about it. I’ve never used Groovy for anything significant, and I haven’t really used it at all since before the 1.5 release. There’s been a lot of changes. I’d like to catch up and try it on something a little larger.
It has been three years since I did any .NET development. The platform has moved on. Linq, anonymous delegates/closures and other new features in C# 3.0 look cool. F#, a functional language for the .NET platform is also interesting. At the moment I’m Mac only, so if I’m to dig into these languages I have to go with the Mono platform, which sounds like a pain in the ass. I want to build things, I don’t want to spend all my time wrestling with a flaky platform. Mono might be rock solid on Linux but I have my doubts about OSX.
The applications I have in mind are web-apps, so Objective J being limited to that field isn’t a problem. I’ve spent a few hours over the course of the last couple of days beavering away with Objective J and Cappuccino and I’ve found myself both pleasantly surprised and feeling slightly nauseous.
The work the Cappuccino team have done on both the language and the framework is amazing. The framework is a translation of the Cocoa API, and to make this happen the team felt the need to implement an Objective C like language that ‘compiles’ down to Javascript to run in the browser.
The UI looks great. The Objective J language is quite pleasant, not that I have a problem with Javascript. The only bit that bothers me is that the Cappuccino developers felt the need to produce a literal port of the Cocoa API - an API with many years of accumulated baggage. Bringing this baggage seems odd - it certainly makes the documentation the provide close to incomprehensible.
It might be worth the pain.
I’m not sure what Ioke is yet. Highly dynamic, homoiconic, message oriented rather than object oriented, powerful macros. Ioke isn’t much more than a glimmer in Ola Bini’s eye right now. I’m not sure there is even enough there for it even to be viable as an option right now. But one day it might be. The thing I find most interesting, is that chance that the strongly message oriented structure might make it a good candidate for Erlang style message passing concurrency whilst maintaining a regular development model.
I don’t know yet. I wrote this partly to help focus my mind. I’m going to make a decision tomorrow.
Last week I said that I’m using the time I have free to catch up on my reading - getting to all those books I’ve been meaning to get through.
First on my list was Eli Goldratt’s latest book The Choice. It’d been a while since I read his other works, so I decided to re-read them first. In the last few days I’ve re-read The Goal, Necessary But Not Sufficient, Critical Chain and It’s Not Luck. Every time I read these books, I get something new out of them. If you’ve not read Goldratt’s work, I heartily recommend it.
I said that I was re-reading Goldratt’s earlier works in preparation for reading his latest book. I haven’t got to that yet, that’s next on my list. I got distracted when a friend tried to explain something to me by referencing Seth Godin’s Purple Cow theory and, since I haven’t read the book, I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I read ordered a copy from Amazon and read that last-night and this morning.
This is the first book I’ve read that just focusses on the ‘getting the message out’ end of marketing. I’m surprised that I got as much out of it as I did. In retrospect, this is a field I should have spent more time reading about. I need to work to fill in my knowledge here. Anyone with pointers towards the ‘right’ reading material feel free to drop me a line.
For the last couple of days, I’ve been chewing over an experience I had about a decade ago. I’m trying to understand the underlying thought processes that led a problem.
About a decade ago, I worked for a project manager that I’ll call Mr D. He was (and probably still is) intelligent, wise, kind and dedicated. A genuinely decent human being. I learned a great deal by working under him.
I worked for Mr D at a company that was having some problems, Mr D was brought in to try to fix things. One of the problems we had was a slavish dedication to a development process that didn’t work. Mr D saw this, and took my recommendation to bring in an Agile coach and migrate from RUP with all the trimmings to XP. We worked through this process change and things picked up, they got a lot better in fact. But not better enough.
At the time, I was too inexperienced to see all the other mistakes we were making as an organisation. In the end, it didn’t really matter what we did, by the time we started making changes the project was years behind schedule and the writing was on the wall.
Here’s the incident that has bothered me for the last decade.
Our team was following a classic XP process, we were pair-programming most of the time and we decided right at the start to estimate in ‘pair-hours’ rather than in hours to keep things simple. Our velocity fluctuated wildly over the first few iterations and eventually settled to a consistent level. Our estimation unit was hours - that was what we started with, but over time we had come to think of them as arbitrary units, we could have changed the name to ‘arbitrary work units’ but it didn’t seem important. Everyone was working hard all day, distractions had been minimised and people were feeling good about our progress. We knew we could be better, we knew we could improve and we were. Every week were getting a little better.
Mr D, who I realise in retrospect must have been protecting our team from tremendous outside pressure, came in one day and announced that he was changing things again. It was his call, I don’t have a problem with that. It is his reasoning that bothers me. He had totalled up the estimates of work accomplished for the last few weeks, totalled up the available man hours and calculated that we were only fifty percent efficient. He wasn’t even complaining about the pair-programming, he was calculating things in pair-hours rather than hours. When people tried to point out the basis for our estimates wasn’t hours, he became enraged.
In summary:
He knew the basis for our estimates wasn’t hours.
He worked in the same room as everyone else, so he could see with his own eyes that people were working hard all day every day.
But still he came to the conclusion that an efficiency calculation he’d used in the past was telling him something was wrong and that he had to make a change.
Why, despite the evidence of his own eyes, did he come to this conclusion? He didn’t need an excuse to make a change, it was his house and his rules. It don’t even think that he was trying to justify his decision to the team: nobody agreed that his justification made sense, but he kept insisting that we were, at best, only fifty percent efficient.
Was it pressure and panic that made him turn to something he knew, even if he knew it didn’t make sense?
Was it a rejection of the methods we were using, trying to turn the team towards a structure he knew and had more faith in?
Did he really believe that we were only fifty-percent efficient?
I wish I knew.
Over the years, there have been many times that people have made decisions I didn’t agree with, but at least I understood their reasoning. In this case, I don’t disagree with the decisions Mr D made, I just wish I could understand his reasoning. Deep down, the fact that I don’t understand scares me. How can I stop this happening again, if I don’t understand what happened the first time?
I saw Aliens at a local cinema last night. No I didn’t fall through a hole in time/space. No, I don’t just live so far into the ass-end of nowhere that 80’s cinema is just getting to us.
I’m not sure why they did a special showing, but they did, and I’m very glad. Aliens is a film that is ageing very well; much better than I expected in fact. I think that it passes the test of time because, whilst it is sci-fi, it is a plot driven piece with memorable and distinctive characters.
I don’t know how the economics of the movie industry work, but it seems to me that the simple expediency of having a plot is giving Aliens the ability to sell out a cinema 23 years after it was made. That must be good business.
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