StackingIT

Protection by Planned Assassination

2009-10-16T14:34:00.001+02:00

As companies get larger the need to address softer issues become more and more important – like inter department communication etc – and if you work in one of these companies the chances are you have or will be pulled of into a working group or committee or forum at some point.

Sadly words like - working group; committee or forum – tend to drain the life out of most people – despite the fact that they may indeed be inspired by the intent of the group.. and why?

Well as I see it, the stigma associated with things like this is they tend to just waffle on in hypothetical discussions or just plain neon-blue sky thinking, and in the end can be ineffectual – and in many cases they are exactly that.

How do you protect the integrity of the group ?

My suggestion is this. Up front, set in stone – a manifesto if you will - all the criteria for terminating the group. In fact I would suggest the purpose of the group be phrased in the context of a reason to terminate the group should it fail.

While it may seem like negative thinking to be effectively setting up assassins for your group at the outset – it is one of the best ways to protect the integrity and set the standard early for the rest of the members.

Make sure everyone buys into the termination of the group if it is not showing the value it ought to.

Set up key point to formally assess the group by whoever the stakeholder will be – and get them to answer concrete questions –not just the fluffy are we helping ? Don’t forget like you they may also be taken in by the interesting ideas and discussions “that may come out of it – but when the rubber hits the road – the ideas are a distant memory.

Then, even if you are loving the group and the rich discussion that it may be generating – have the courage to be the first to call the group out if it is failing to meet its objectives.

The Result

A culture where adhoc groups or committees are respected for the self culling attitude.

Now the people who were afraid to join for fear of being sucked into endless slew of “chatty” meetings – you know, the people who would actually add the real value to the group – will then likely join knowing they are free to terminate appropriately.

Abstractions Create Complexity

2009-09-22T22:41:00.001+02:00

The observation

Isn’t it amazing sometimes how the things that we try to do to solve complexity actually add to the complexity – well at least when it come to the effect on the learning curve.

My son has asked me to write him a packman game where it is possible to control one of the ghosts ( basically he wants a 2 player version so I can be one of the ghosts and chase him – you gotta love children! ) – so I thought that this would be a good opportunity to learn some flash.

I came across PushButton Engine which is a flash game development framework that goes some way to making the effort in developing a game constrained to the game domain and not the mechanics of the flash.

An Example

Now using PushButton as an example of what I am talking about, they have the concepts of components - which are reusable behaviours that you can apply to any of your sprites ( which they call entities ).

Now it is not hard to see that any meaningfully sized game will have many many entities and components with relationships between them – which in the end would leave you with lots and lots of repeated boilerplate code to create and relate the entities and components.

To address this they developed an XML format that allows them to define entities and all the components that they use without having to write a line of “code”. ( aside: I maintain that xml or any other configurations like this is indeed code just not the compiled type ).

This sounds like a great idea – and is .. but interestingly it makes it somewhat harder to learn.

If you compare a worked example of a simple PB game which manually creates everything via code to the one that uses the XML, you find the pure code much easier to follow.

Why – simply because in the pure code case, everything that you need to unravel the black magic is right in front of you. In the XML case you have to context switch between the AS code and XML to try and understand a single new concept.

So the technologies put in place to simplify development is in fact they very thing increasing the gradient of the learning curve.

The picture I have in my head when I think about this is to imagine that you have some core technology and think of it as a sphere with a surface area of core API.

Now when you start to build on this technology you start to add new facades and interfaces which wrap your original core sphere. With each of these layers over time you are making your sphere’s surface area larger and larger – and clearly the growing surface area is the required domain knowledge now for your technology.

So what is the lesson ?

Well actually I am not sure - it is just something interesting – but I guess one lesson might be that you should always give new people access to the simple core that you have and then expose them to the cool technologies you have to make thing easier later.

That might be harder than you imagine – given how close you are to your product and how likely it is that you see the wrapper technologies as the real ‘selling points” of your technology.

What does this observation teach you ?

Start a Blog at Work

2009-09-09T22:02:00.001+02:00

If you are reading this blog, then it is likely that you already subscribe to the view that blogs can add value.

But have you ever thought about starting your own blog at work.. with the only readership being the people in your company ?

The power of this is that it frees you up to talk about proprietary things that you would never be able to in the public domain – but more importantly it is a powerful way to share knowledge.

I have written before about how different types of mediums change the way that you write and what people expect from what they read.

Blogging is typically a very free form style, and as such is given the latitude to not cover all the bases, but rather to express the spirit of an idea, or just expose enough to get people interested in finding out more. Given this freedom from formal documentation you will be surprised how much more willing people ( you ) will be to share the scraps of knowledge they have.

Not everyone loves to blog – but many still love to read – you could be the catalyst that starts a knowledge/moral revolution in your place of work. You don’t need to be the domain expert – just keen to see people learn more. If it takes off the experts will follow and correct you!

I have been doing it at the company I work for a while now, and have seen great results… give it a go and let me know if it is working for you.

Language Choice is Similar to Choosing a Musical Instrument

2009-08-19T00:28:00.001+02:00

Following on from my post Software Development is like Painting I will take the opportunity to make another analogy, this time at a lower level looking at the choice of language in software development.

Is this going to be a blatantly obvious post ?

It does not take a rocket scientist to guess where I am going with this analogy – different tools have different strengths and weaknesses and you must pick the most appropriate one.. See that was easy – all done.

Just kidding… so if that is not really the point, what is the post of this post – well simply that the musical instrument analogy has an interesting aspect to this.

So what makes this analogy interesting ?

Now, while we know that every mature ( and many immature ) developers appreciate that the different languages have their strengths and weaknesses – these same people somehow manage to get into a “holy war” when the rubber hits the road and discussions start about which language is better.

What is interesting to me is that I have never heard the same “holy war” or “curly brace war” when it comes to musical instruments. People tend not to fight about the fact that a guitar is much better than a piano.

However, there is very much a “curly brace war” when it comes to different musical styles.

So if you are following this highly skilled progression of logic, you will see that, for some reason, many developers, despite their maturity in many cases, still see language as a musical style and not as an instrument.

So What ?

Well if we could find out why this distinction is not clear, then in theory we could find ways to make it clearer and stop these ridiculous wars, and get on with the job of making great software products ( the music ) – which then should be appropriately debated and fought over.

My Theory…

Perhaps it is simply because, in many cases the line between instrument and music are blurred simply because we tend to have a 1 technology solution for an application – so from the developers perspective that instrument basically is the music.

Now I am sure there are many exceptions to this, but the point is that it is not easy for a developer to seamlessly slip from one language to another, and so makes the barrier to entry much higher for whatever the other language is.

Now imagine a world where is a single file – lets call it TheProgramme.code which had a slew of mixed code.

So there is one method for sending mail that simply uses C# and .net to manage sending the mail, but directly underneath that is a method for parsing some text and well that method is written in Perl for the natural regex. Then there is some bit unpacking which obviously would be done with Erlang a bit lower down etc…

This programme is compiled by a single tool ( which would just link in all the appropriate compilers at the right time – lets just pretend that is not hard ).

In a world like this, I wonder if people would not more clearly see that language is simply an instrument, and that the application is the music.

Random Idea Time..

2009-08-04T23:26:00.001+02:00

The Problem

There I was the other day using someone else’s thumb drive – so I felt compelled to remove it safely by doing the whole formal approach – which reminded me why I stopped doing it a long time ago ( apart from the fact that I would keep forgetting about the need for it )

It just annoys me how long winded the process is and even when I do do it, I don’t really have a clue what is going on or which one to stop since there are normally a myriad of them at the time

So typically with my own thumb drives I just rip it out and hope for the best.. so far so good… one day I will regret it I am sure.

My Cunning Solution

Why not lets put a button on the thumb drives that will notify whatever needs to know that I am about to take my thumb drive out.

Chances are, if I had that I would ( read as might ) actually use it and save myself the misery that I am doomed for.

Why would it work ?

Good old locus of attention.. when I want to pull it out I am reaching for the thumb drive.. at that point I may notice the button and remember.

Also the devices knows who it is, so there is no annoying guess the right USB device pop quiz you have to get right.

Software Development is like Painting

2009-07-28T00:07:00.003+02:00

Okay so the analogy is a weird one, but you will sympathise when you understand that for the last couple of nights ( and the next few to come ) I have/will be painting internal walls.

There has been lots of talk recently in blogs and co-incidentally in a conversations I was having with a friend Suven, about the creative nature of software development – how, as hard as we may try to turn our profession into a science.. it is simply not.

Now, many people have just claimed that it is because our industry is so immature, and it is still building and understanding its self – but I just don’t buy that.

Yes I agree that we will grow as a profession, and develop more mature practices that will help define the profession.. but we will never be a science with repeatability as a cornerstone.

Umm, your title…. painting ?

Ahhh yes.. so how did I get to this stunning conclusion ( apart from just having a gut feel about it, and trying to make it true by proof of repetition ) – I was thinking as I was painting with my power roller :

Many years ago there were probably hard working painters who only had brushes, and had I introduced them to the concept of a roller, they would have thought that the bulk of their manual labour would now be over.
And the insecure amongst them, would be thinking that their days as a painter would be numbered – since the new technology has put quality painting in reach of all.

Then it occurred to me, no matter what technology is introduced to remove some of the grunt work, there is always going to be a element of creativity involved – and element of skill involved, and element of professionalism that I will just never attain only doing some painting every now and then.

Umm, … I am still not getting your point ?

I know it is not exactly a crystal clear analogy.. but lets look a bit closer.

The key thing that struck me, was that while the roller was a great technology to allow me to paint a large wall insanely quickly, and smoothly to boot – there are always those edges that needed to be tidied up that the roller could not do.

At the end of the day all quality work needs the attention to detail that will never be technology-ed out.

Our Industry Operates on that edge.

Software development is interesting in that it is almost exclusive operated on that edge. Even the simplest things we do, require acute attention to detail ( else we get hacked, bring down an entire system, or burn huge sums of money very second it is broken).

Now as much as our tools get better, and our resources expand to cater for many of these finer details for us, there will always be the interface to that abstraction that need to be thought about and used very carefully.

In fact for us, the more tools we have, the more abstractions we have the greater the size of our industry edge becomes – making us less and less of a science and more and more of a creative art.

Summary

The edge work on my wall is average to say the best, and our industry is very much firmly placed in the creative field.

It will never be automated out, and will always require passionate, hard working and intelligent people just to make it work – let alone be great.

Is Hiring an Art or a Science…

2009-07-14T23:41:00.001+02:00

I was introduced to a hiring technique called Targeted Selection, which basically says that you only want to ask questions based on a persons past to predict how they will respond in the future – you must avoid hypothetical questions.

So lets say that you want to know how someone might cope under stress… you cannot ask this :

“What are your coping methods for dealing with stress?”

You would rather need to phrase it like this:

“Please describe for me a time in your past when you had to deal with stress, and how did you cope ?”

Okay so not a very imaginative questions.. but you get the idea – always frame your questions in the past and based on something concrete.

No Gut Feels ?

The framework asks you to up front define a set of behaviours that you would like to see in your interviewee and if they get all/most of the ticks, then you should hire because they are what you want.

This apparently helps to make the interview more objective and less driven by gut.

Now while I can see the spirit behind this, and understand the logic – that targeted questions based on actual past events are more likely to result is real world answers and not textbook responses -what gets me is the extremeness of things like this.

How can you ever remove the gut factor from an interview ?

I have 2 key problems with ignoring gut :

1. Interview are subjective :

No matter what process you put in place, no matter what framework you make use of .. this will always be a subjective exercise.. and to pretend not is just naive and asking for trouble.

We are taking about people here.

2. I trust my gut :

I know my gut is more that just a random feeling… it is the output of my brain working overtime, processing thousands of thoughts rapidly, cross referencing it with my world experience – forming opinions, making analyses… and resolving all of this in a neat little package called - a gut feeling.. which my conscious brain is just too dumb and slow to understand in any other way.

Why would I ignore that because some over simplified process ticked a few boxes ?

Keep the baby in the bath

Easy tiger… I am not saying that targeted selection is bad.. lets not throw the proverbial baby out with the extremist view bath water.

I am happy to use the technique to help phrase questions to help the interviewee focus on the question.

However – this is no silver bullet for interviewing. I cannot agree that there is a process devoid of subjective gut that can help you pick the correct person.

Once you are past the technical competencies.. hiring like almost anything involving people in the knowledge based industry, is part science… but a lot art – and the only artistic bone I have in my body is my gut bone ( umm so to speak ).

Proof by repetition

Plus if I am wrong, then were does that leave us room for classic stories like “chicken lips” from Peopleware as summarised here :

The idea of employment audition introduced in Chapter 15 had a similar effect. In addition to technical judgement, workers supply a team perspective on how well the candidate will fit in. The authors were part of a well-knit group whose members started to have many characteristics in common, in particular, a similar sense of humour. Their shared theory of humour held that chickens were funny while horses weren't, and lips were funny while shoulders weren't. After interviewing a well qualified candidate, one of their colleagues asked the others if they thought the candidate would come to understand that chickens with lips are funny, they all didn't think so and rejected that candidate.

Try Use Different Writing Mediums

2009-04-25T13:06:00.001+02:00

There is something to be said for the reputation of a medium to encourage a different writing style The very nature of blogging ( or at least for the types of blogs I like to write / read ) is that they are more of a relaxed conversational style – which is a very different thing to standard documentation, which is very factual.

I guess there has always been some sort of structure imposed on creative writing to give it a definite shape within which to express. And that choice of medium is in fact the first part of the creating writing process.

Having never made a study of English, even I can pick up some of the more obviously unique structures or frameworks used in general:

* Short Stories
* Novellas
* Novels
* Poetry
* Slogans
* Articles
* Thesis

What occurs to me is that in the same way, in any knowledge based industry, irrespective of it being a job or a hobby, there is a growing set of writing frameworks that are becoming generally understood and accepted ( albeit more on the web than in the workspace )

* White Papers
* Documentation
* Wiki’s
* Blogging
* Micro blogging

I encourage everyone to take hold of these different mediums and experiment with them in the work place – try it and see the different way in which you will naturally express the same idea simply because the medium is different.

Any knowledge based industry is driven by communication, and if you can improve that you can get yourself / team / company a step ahead of the pack.

Inline Twitter App – Follow up

2009-04-25T12:49:00.001+02:00

Following up from a post I did a while ago Inline Twitter Apps – Discoverability and Uses … ummm wait… that was my last post ( mental note, I must be more regular with blogging ! Might even get some readers that way. )

It is interesting to note that www.uladoo.com is seriously thinking about picking up on the idea. Check out their thoughts on the matter and add your comments Embeddable Charts and a Uladoo Chart Domain Specific Language.

Inline Twitter Apps – Discoverability and Uses

2009-03-05T15:25:00.001+02:00

Time to throw out one of those ideas that is so far out there that it might just inspire someone.

Twitter continues to be used in more and more interesting ways with bot accounts from the simple @Timer which will twitter you after a period of time, to a graphing tool like @uladoo. And I can only see more of these coming – which if they are useful I am all for ( As long as they support direct messages else they just create spam! )

So before the flood begin ( well maybe it has and I just don’t know about them all yet ) I propose that there be some conformity to how to discover the usability of these services from within twitter – in the same way that all command line applications are discoverable.

Something like this : ( where => is the reply )

D CoolService ?usage => cmd1, cmd2, ?usage, ?more

For simplicity I would assume that the default would ?usage so that

D CoolService is the same as D @CoolService ?usage

?More would be the standard way for getting the remainder of the commands that did not fit into a 140 char reply. This would put the onus on the service to remember some state to determine what a ?more means for that user, given there may be multiple “pages” of commands.

For more detailed help on each command a standard ?help <cmd> would be useful

D CoolService ?help cmd1 => Does cool thing number 1 …

Now that kind of a service would be great for discoverability without having to leave twitter, but that is really just scratching the surface.

Now lets add in this single command “|” and the world changes somewhat.. the ability to pipe can make some of these service even more powerful.

Imagine I have a graph with @uladoo and they supported the following 2 commands :

D Uladoo ?usage => ?stats, ?history:<range>, ?more

which might work like this :

D Uladoo MyChart ?stats => MyChart Ave:5 Mean:3
D Uladoo MyChart ?history:4 => MyChart 4,5,6,4

Now I could pipe these together to get more control over my data and ask questions like “Give me the stats for my data over the last 10 data points”

D Uldaoo MyChart ?history:10 | ?stats =>MyChart Ave:6 Mean:3

This then means that I can use twitter as a way of getting external services to do work for me.. potentially very complex work.

Now lets move that up a level of abstraction and get one service to talk to another with piping :

D Timer 45 | D Uldaoo MyChart ?stats | D WebBuddy MySite publish

Which if somehow this were possible and marshalled would mean something like “After 45 mins get the stats for MyChart and then publish that information on MySite”

Okay so I have no real idea how this might work, but it does suggest that there may still be much more growth for the little blog-chatter service called twitter.

Perhaps the 140 character web service shell ?

Sane Project Management Hindered by Tools

2009-03-03T23:00:00.001+02:00

I think every project manager I have worked with has had their ear bent by my opinions on sane ways to track a project – and in most cases I think they have bought my thoughts, well at least the spirit of them anyway – but in the end thing carry on as usual.

I guess somewhere in my head the question has been passively brewing – why ?

I think today I came across something that helps me answer that question… but before we go there, let me give you an idea of what I think are sane project management approaches :

Absolute Dates vs Probabilistic Dates

Projects are by definition unknowns with variables we don’t understand and others that we don’ t even know exist until much later… but still we insist in treating projects like a absolute science by attributing absolute dates to future work.

Why not simply add a bit of probabilities to the whole equation, and be more honest. Simply put define best case date and worst case dates, making the expected date be the middle of the normal distribution.

What is important however is to not publicise the expected date, but be honest and talk about the distribution –because that is all you really know. Naturally as you tend closer to the end of a task or project your distribution curve will tighten to match the increase knowledge.

Time Used vs Time Remaining

Why do people insist on assuming that information in the past is somehow more accurate or important than information today -that is clearly more informed.

How do they make this assumption – they ask how much time you have put into a task, subtract that from the estimated effort and tell you how far you are into the task…. what ? Umm surely I was the one who told you it would take X… now that I have spend Y on it and understand it Y times more… I think I might be the best person to tell you how far I am.. and by that I mean tell you the same information I told you at the start… I need Z still to complete this.

Automated Timesheets

So there is this really clever project plan that you have set up.. and put lots of thought into it with consultation from your lowly developer plotting out my goals over the next period. Nice.

Then why, pray tell, do I need to fill in a timesheet. I mean really what am I saying that is new ? basically I am just rebuilding the project plan in an excel format – just one day at a time.

Timesheets should only be filled out by exception only.

So what Did I come across

Okay before I get carried away ( could you see how that was being written in the first person )… lets bring this back to the topic at hand – what did I come across and why patterns tend not to change.

I saw this blog article by Steve McConnell where he talks about a web based product called liquidPlanner which does all of these things… and I don’t mean that it supports these ideas as an option, I mean that they are fundamental to the way the tool is created and used.

I played around with it a bit – and it was great to see the concepts I believed in being concreted into a complete tool – not just trying to hack these concepts onto the existing tools you are working with.

Then it occurred to me.

Why did things not change

I think the main reason that things don’t really change even after people buy into an idea, is that the existing tool set is forcing you another way. The inertia of the status quo is just too strong.

Now that there is a tool based on these concepts, there may be a mainstream shift. I am not saying that LiquidPlanner is the answer – but a pioneer yes ( well a public one at least – I am sure there are other tools that have done this but without the backing of a Steve McConnell they have not gotten the publicity ).

This will – I hope – lead to a new market for tools and communities to help mature this type of thinking – and stop it just sounding like the whining of developers who do not want to fill in their time sheets and just want things different.

Conclusion

I guess at the end of the day this is true for us all, which is why classics like the Golden Hammer are indeed classic :

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail”

We are strongly influenced by the tools we are using – despite our thinking, which is why I have argued before that it is important to try something radically different to what you are used to to give you perspective.

My Greatest Developer Asset: I’m not too bright

2009-02-26T08:36:00.001+02:00

I have been mulling this topic over in my head for a while now… because on some level I know it is just true, things have to be simple for me to understand. I do not deal with complexity well - I need to unravel it before I am comfortable– and this is I think is where my strengths lie.

I came across this research article which talks about why people who tend to be incompetent are more likely to not know that they are in fact incompetent – so I decided that I must write this to do my bit to help correct this.

When I was mentioning the potential blog title to a few people – they were very quick to jump to my defence ( bless them ), which in its self is interesting – a belief that being bright is a complement and conversely not being bright is an insult ( as if you could change it ). Granted the title is some what provocative – but at its heart is really just someone saying – I know my limits, and people want to defending that.

When you talk about being bright, it is open ended or looking forward – it by definition has not end point. When you talk about someone being not bright, it is like looking backward over a journey that has just come to an abrupt halt – like there is no future.

This I think might be why people like to operate at a level of complexity that is just beyond them, and they are happy with the black magic that is going on around them ( because without the black magic what is to prove that what they are doing is complex ). Forcing them to operate at a level of unconscious incompetence.

For me the moral of the story is simply this : being a humble programmer is not about underselling yourself, it is just about being realistic, it forces you to face all task with the correct respect for your competency level – which is put much more eloquently by Edsger W. Dijkstra in his closing statement at the ACM Turning Lecture of 1972 ( The Humble Programmer ) :

“We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.”

Productivity by having More Time in the day

2009-02-20T21:53:00.001+02:00

I have argued before that the productivity stack is not about speeding things up, but more about improving quality - but wouldn’t the world be an interesting place if you could add hours to your day by making time go faster….

Nope I have not been drinking or smoking anything, but I came across this a while ago How to Save Time by Watching Videos at Higher Playback Speeds which show you how to use AviSynth ( a video scripting language ) to change speed and pitch – which all seem very geeky, cool and is a pure time saver.

It turns out after a little bit of searching that Media Player supports this out of the box Ctrl, Shift,g – granted you don’t have all the control you get with AviSynth , but nice that it is just supported.

Sadly this is may be something that everyone else knew about and something I missed while hiding under my rock – but if like me you did not know about this, then enjoy the extra time you get and use it to become more productive.

Twitter, In the Information Stack

2009-02-09T11:14:00.001+02:00

This is a follow on from a previous post, Blogs, in the Information Stack where I started to look at my different information technology stacks.

Today I want to look at Twitter.

If you have never looked at twitter, but have heard of it, then you are likely to be confused about what I am saying.. because I am sure your view of it is one of…

“umm isn’t that the one where people send global sms’s ( texts ) about what they are doing, even to the point of describing their bodily functions… umm yes that is bound to be a great source of information… now moving on from this stupid blog article.”

But thankfully twitter is just a tool used by people, and where there are interesting people there are interesting comments.

So duh… interesting people interesting comments… how is this really part of my information stack, other than perhaps a bit of textual voyeurism.

Here is how I have found myself using it, and the value it has added – but to understand that lets take a step back, and talk about the other more typical sources of information :

Books : This is the classic tried and tested method. It is thought out, researched, and edited – but usually dated by time its is printed – but that in many times is okay because they may not always be technology bound.

White Papers / Articles : These are like the middle ground between a book and a blog. Researched and edited, but slightly smaller – also quite infrequent.

Interviews / Conferences : These are the middle ground between the White Papers and the Blogs. It is kind of informal discussion about well researched things – these come along quite seldom ( per person ).

Blogs: These tend to come out quite quickly and give an indication of the view and opinions of the blogger. Typically the blogger is well versed in their topic but there is no expectation for solid research or formal editing. It is understood to be more opinion based or conceptual which may link to formal documentation.

What you may have noticed in the chronology that I put these in, is that there is a relationship between the medium and the distance from the thoughts of the author. The further away from the author you get the more refined and edited the work becomes.

Twitter is unique in that you get, for the first time ( without working with them ) access to the day to day ( for some hour to hour ) thoughts of the people you read / hear; You get exposed to the technologies that they are playing with; You get exposed to the people that they talk to and find interesting, you see what they are struggling with.

And this is just the tip of the ice-berg of what you can do with twitter.

Twitter search gives you the ability to eavesdrop onto any conversation based on key word searches, like who is talking about Erlang. Again not who has blogged about it because they now claim to be experts… but who is playing with it, what pains are they having ,what do they think etc etc… and what’s more.. you can ask them - directly.

If you are interested now, might I suggest you check out this blog post How To Twitter - First Steps and a Twitter Glossary by Scott Hanselman and enjoy the new source of raw information you can now get.

Is Small and Simple Profound or am I just Geeky

2009-02-06T07:52:00.001+02:00

I am not sure what is says about me, or our industry in general, but I just saw this in my reader :

Copy and Paste is so Yesterday

from The GitHub Blog by mojombo

Getting a clone URL into your clipboard is now just a single click away!

And what was my response…

“oooohhhhh”

umm What ! I get excited about a little-baby-feature-lit like this that is going to save me less than a second, and what is more it is not an operation that I am going to do over and over, what am I excited about ?

What makes it worse is I am an obsessive keyboard users, I avoid my mouse like the plague ( unless it is faster is the rare case ).

Am I just being geeky or is there more to it.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, it is great when you see something that has been designed, with clearly no other intent other than to make your life a little bit easier.

Perhaps it is that its one of those really small things that you know does not need to be done, and there are considerably higher priority things that could have and should have been worked on, but because this was – it feels like a gift.

Perhaps it is because you get the feeling that the people behind this are using the tool too, and there is not a just a giant money making machine driven by ethereal thinking over hyped by an aggressive marketing department. It feels real.

Perhaps I am just a geek – but I think small and simple things show the heart behind a system, which is profound.

Innovation Happens in the White Spaces Between the Organogram

2009-02-04T08:56:00.001+02:00

Disclaimer : The title comes from the book “Slack” by Tom DeMarco ( Thanks @Anonymous for the reminder – I could not remember )

Innovation does not happen in the Organogram.

In any growing business that is looking to improve reliability and predictability you need to spend time setting up processes that are repeatable – this processes are managed, cryptically by managers, and done by the people on the ground.

This patterns repeats itself up the levels of abstraction so that you have ( wait for it ) : managers managing many managers. Follow that recursively up the tree to the CEO / Board, draw it down on paper, and lo and behold you have an organogram.

But the organogram only represents the work that needs to be done, it is by definition orthogonal to innovation, since innovation is not about repeatability, it is new.

Some might argue that you can simply place innovation on the organogram. Appoint an Innovation Team with an Innovation Product Manger so that innovation is no longer in the nebulous white space, invest money in it and off you go.

While that is a good idea, it will not work, at least not as well as it could, unless you understand where innovation actually happens.

Where does innovation happen ?

Innovation happens in the mind of a person. Any Person. Period.

So What is the White Space ?

If you were to draw a box around an organogram, this area would represent the mental space, time and interactions of the people in your company. The blue blocks are the people that mange and execute your processes - that are the bread an butter of your company.

The white space is any and every time someone spends time outside of a defined block. When that happens you are coming dangerously close to having someone trip over an innovation.

You can promote this in an infinite number of ways :

* Build slack into your projects
* Formal Socializing
* eating together at lunch
* Google 20% style projects
* Encourage internal and external Blogging
* Cross division Information sharing ( many time this would be helpful just within a single division )
* ….. anything that puts people out of their block - in your time, once they go home don’t expect the innovation to be directed to you.

Sadly many real organograms may look like this, especially in a software development environment. Carefully designed to eliminate as much innovation as possible, both from work and peoples personal life.

Start-ups are naturally innovative

Start-ups are naturally innovative because they have loosely defined roles which people move between quite fluidly and as such spend a disproportionally large amt of time in the white space.

It is not about the passion and drive of a start-up that breads innovation, it is the time spend in the white space.

You have the same potential for this in a larger company too, if you find the white space.

Putting Innovation on the Organogram

Now if you understand where the white space is, and you have the courage to encourage people to spend time there, then you can and should put it on your organogram, so that you can manage - give the same reliability and predictability - to any innovative idea.

Just don’t make the mistake of thinking the innovation will come from inside the blue innovation block – that block can only manage the innovation to delivery.

A Pearl of Wisdom from the Erlang FAQ

2009-01-28T09:34:00.001+02:00

A friend of mine was reading the Erlang FAQ and came across this pearl, which I think should become required reading for any PHB who is planning on adopting a new technology, of any form, in an attempt to solve world hunger - and quickly.

<snip>

5.16 ...estimate productivity in an Erlang project?

A rough rule of thumb is that about the same number of lines of code are produced per developer as in a C project. A reasonably complex problem involving distribution and fault tolerance will be roughly five times shorter in Erlang than in C.

The traditional ways of slowing down projects, like adding armies of consultants halfway through, spending a year writing detailed design specifications before any code is written, rigidly following a waterfall model, spreading development across several countries and holding team meetings to decide on the colour of the serviettes used at lunch work just as well for Erlang as for other languages.

</snip>

Now now can you not like Erlang when you find this in the FAQ.

Shaping Blogs or Micro Blogs, surely not!

2009-01-25T22:30:00.001+02:00

I came across this post a while ago, I think through twitter by Joost de Val where he shows how to get Google Analytics to track links that come through twitter, since the bulk of twitter is not via the web, so Analytics will make it look like all those hits are direct traffic.

With this information you are now better able to track your twitter users through you pages, as they may behave differently to readers from other sources. This I am sure is going to help people mine their data considerably better.

But should you be doing this ? …really.

Perhaps if you are a company, and you are using twitter as advertising space, and you need to be able to calculate your return on investment in spending time tweeting, this makes some financial sense.. but still.

As an individual blogger or twitter, I can understand the keen interest you have in seeing stat on things like Google Analytics or Google WebMaster Tools, because with the exception of comments that is really the only feedback you get – but surely it should just be feedback.

Here is my concern, what do you do with the information ?
As a individual blogger, if you start to use that information to shape the content of the blog, well then who is really editing your blog… yes you may be writing it, with all the knowledge, humour and skill that you have, but you are not the editor, and that for me seems to weaken the concept of a blog.

If I am wrong, then I think something like Skribit will do really well : “a content suggestion service helping bloggers discover relevant topics to write about from their readers.”

Just because I understand the financial reasons for a business to analyse the behaviour and source of their traffic, that does not mean that I think it makes it the right decision.

Yes you may lose out on traffic in the short term, because I am sure there are great minds careful analysis behind these decision ( which sounds like advertising to me ) but, that price you pay upfront for the integrity that you gain when YOU blog, where you are either an individual or a company.

A Response to Joel’s Thanks or No Thanks

2009-01-14T21:00:00.001+02:00

How do you make a comment on an article, if it is not a blog, and you have no direct route to the author ? Simple you blog it and let the internet take care of its self.

Okay I guess that would work if there were a popular blog, but hey you never know :-)

I just read a recent post by Joel Spolsky entitled How Hard Could It Be?: Thanks or No Thanks, where he discusses the difficulty of how to reward innovative ideas, while at the same time not creating issues.

The subject of the article is about Noah Weiss who did an internship with Fog Creek Software, and during that internship came up with the idea to host the Joel jobs page which in a year made Fog Creek >$1mil.

What interests me is that, in the end he decided to offer Noah 10 000 shares in Fog Creek, on the condition that Noah comes back to work for him after his studies. In the end Noah was recruited by Google and so forfeited the shares.

Okay so now you all know the story; Joel here is my question / comment :

Why did you put a condition on it the 10 000 shares ?

As I see it, you were prepared to part with the money so why not just do it anyway. At the end of the day it was the idea leveraging your exposure that generated the money not the work, and the spirit was you wanted to reward him.

However, more importantly, I also see ways in which doing so would have been profitable to you too.

We know that Noah already worked at Fog Creek, so he has an idea what it is like, and I am sure that he enjoyed the experience; being part of something new that ended up being a success. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have rather lost Noah to Google, but have him still have a vested interest in Fog Creek, about 10 000 vested interests in fact; so when the novelty of the nirvana, that Google might just not be, wears off you might be his first option.

Not that you need any more exposure, but it would be a nice article to read about a Google employee choosing to go back to a smaller company ( albeit it a well known one ).

It would also have put a whole new spin on your internship program, where people would now be flocking not just to see if the work place matches the articles, but also knowing they may have an opportunity to profit from their unique ideas – and of course that just means you win more because you become the landing ground of these fresh ideas.

If you could/do do it again, would you put the condition on the shares next time ?

Values : Inspiration vs. Behaviour

2009-01-14T10:45:00.001+02:00

I buy the concept of a company having Values, but only when those Values add real value to me on a day to day level ( or at least I can see their positive influence around me ).

However, Values are one of those things that has to try and walk the thin line, one one side is inspiration, on the other side, a glowing pedestal inviting ridicule…. I fear it is more likely most fit into the latter, but I have never really looked around, so I hope, for the sanity of all knowledge workers, that I am wrong.

Since it is such fine line , there are times when, even with good intent, people fall on the wrong side of the line.

The company I am working at right now is fully of incredibly talented and dedicated people, who are always keen to help; go the extra mile; genuinely care about the product and the people around them.

So in an attempt to capture this natural heartbeat, what better way to do it than to cement these into Values :

Ownership. Passion. Care

I guess the argument would go something like this: For the new people joining, they can ask these key questions when they approach any new task, am I employing Ownership, Passion and Care.

However I see it as rather counter productive :

While the intent is noble, I think it misses the key point, and that is that the Values are something that is supposed to inspire, give you something to measure against, not describe desirable behaviour.

No matter how many times someone asks me to have more ownership, show more passion, care more, I never will, even if I want to want to. Why… simple because Ownership, Passion and Care are the overflow, the manifestation of something you believe in, something that has moved you.

In many ways Values like this are frustrating, condescending and irritating - just like well meaning person who saying “Smile” when you are not happy.

A smile is a manifestation of happiness, not the path to it!

For software developers ( all knowledge works ? ), it is generally an innate need to write good software ( do a good job ) that drives them, even when there is nothing but negative or ill conceived “motivation” trying to get in their way. Which is why generally you will not get developers to see any real value in Values.

At the end of the day, you should never be targeting your Values at your new people; they are going to learn it from they people they work with anyway, and that is the way you want it.

Make sure you inspire your best people, so that they are Passionate about what they do, Care about work and take Ownership of everything they touch; this will bleed life through a company more than any desired behaviours guised as Values ever could.

Add a new language to your stack : Erlang

2009-01-11T00:01:00.001+02:00

You know the typical good advice, learn a new programming language to improve your coding skills. Well this is never more true that when you pick a language that is totally different to the paradigm that you work in right now.

So for me, coming from a C/C++ background, it has been quite refreshing to look a one of the functional programming languages: Erlang. It really forces you to question what you think are fundamentals of programming.

Take for example your assumption of what a variable is. Given its name you might assume that it is something that can vary over time, but in Erlang it varies only once, ever: the time you first assign it.
Think C# immutable strings, that is every variable in Erlang.

…umm but wait…. so how are you going to do any form of looping ? And how do you increment variable… surely you have to at least once in a program ?

Ahh that is the kind of paradigm shift that I enjoy.

Think about how you might write some c++ code to determine the winner of a game of Rock/Paper/Scissors

Winner CalcWinner( Attack player1, Attack player2 )
{
   // check for a tie
   if ( player1 == player2 )
   {
       return winner_tie;
   }
   //check all cases where player 1 wins
   if ( ( player1 == rock     &&  player2 == scissors) ||
        ( player1 == paper    &&  player2 == rock    ) || 
        ( player1 == scissors &&  player2 == paper   ) )
   {
       return winner_player1;
   }
   //all other cases player2 wins
   return winner_player2;
}

Now before you think in a functional programming way, it is hard to imagine that any language could be that different, so this is what it would look like ( well at least by someone who has been doing Erlang for a day or so )

%First check for a tie
calcWinner( {player1, Attack },{ player2, Attack} ) ->
    { tie };
%then look for all the cases where player 1 wins
calcWinner( { player1, rock }, { player2, scissors } ) ->
    player1wins;
calcWinner( { player1, paper }, { player2, rock } ) ->
   player1wins;
cakcWinner( { player1, scissors }, { player2, paper } ) ->
    player1wins;
%all other cases are when player 2 wins
calcWinner( { player1,  _ }, { player2, _ } ) ->
    player2wins.

What is interesting here is that you have a method per decision, and Erlang will do pattern matching on each of the methods, in the order listed, to call the correct one, which just returns the result. The logic is really done in the definition of the methods.

Another example that challenges your normal paradigms. How, in a world where your variables can only have one value, do you represent a change of state in a service ?

An Erlang approach might be, have 2 message pumps. Pump 1 is state one, and when the appropriate states change event occurs, just skip to the second state message pump.

Its the kind of though that would not have been natural, but forced to think like that, it is beautifully clean and easy to debug. In hindsight quite OO in nature: unique classes per state.

The moral of the story, pick a language that is very different to what you know, not just a syntax change, to grow.

Your Work Hours in the Productivity Stack

2009-01-06T22:14:00.001+02:00

The hours you work can change your productivity. I am not talking about the number of hours, but when you choose to use the hours.

It is one of those things that are just blatantly obvious in theory, but but once you experience it, it really does turn the concept into reality.

After a nice long Christmas holiday, I agreed with my wife that I would adjust my working hours, instead of working the standard hours at my company 8:30 – 5:30, I would work 7-4, to take advantage of the summer daylight so as to enjoy more family time. Little did I know that it would improve my productivity. ( Thankfully this is not a thesis, because I cannot substantiate that claim with documented facts )

The thing I noticed immediately, which made me aware that this increased my productivity, not just meeting my emotional needs for better family time - which probably has palpable productivity increase of it own, is that when it comes to the close of the day, I am not tired.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love to work hard, and work hard until the last minute, but once I pack up to go home, I am tried, not because I am bored, simply because after that many hours of concentrated work you get drained – or so I thought.

Now I am not.

It does not take a controlled study to imply the productivity improvements for my company of having a full day of work, without feeling the mental exhaustion towards the end of the day ( and the knock on affects of fixing the errors the next day ).

If your company gives you the freedom, I suggest you experiment with your hours, and find the 8-9 hours that you can give that do not leave you tired at the end of the day.

I am lucky that my 8-9 hours fall in such a way that I have also improved my family life, I wish you the same.

Under Pressure People Become Dogmatic

2008-12-20T23:10:00.001+02:00

I will pick on project managers here because it is easy to spot this error in others, but what I am interested in, is how do developer manifest this same behaviour ?

Working on a project that has month bound delivery points, i.e. if you miss by a day, then you miss by a month.

The Key developer on the project raises the flag that we are not going to make the scheduled delivery date, there is just way too much still to do. Not specifically because the list of to-do's is still big, but simply because there is lots of integration that still needs to take place, an vast experience has shown that something will come up in this domain.

Now you would think, being outside of the pressure situation, the project manager would see this, understand and continue to clear obstacles out of the way… but wait no… because the pressure is on to make it happen, what does the project manager do, well the thing that the project manager knows best…. Set up a meeting to discuss the work that still needs to be done; create get new estimates on the out standing work, look for ways to shuffle the resources on the remaining work; Understand exactly how late it, etc etc

But why… surely the heart of project management is 2 fold
1) Remove obstacles, and
2) try to predict when there will be a slippage.
Now the interesting part to me is that in this case the slippage has already been detected, so why go through the PM exercises designed to determine if there is going to be slippage… we already know ! And the remove obstacles is always valid, but ironically the meetings ( there were 3 formal ones in this case ) were the obstacles in this case that needed removing. Everything that was done was in fact counter productive to the 2 key elements of project management.

So why ?

I would have to assume that this is because when the pressure is on, you go back to the thing that is certain and concrete.
Creating timelines is something you know you can do, and at the end of it you will have a real something to show the pressure above. Removing obstacles on the other hand is a soft science, and near impossible to show to the pressures above.

Imagine trying to explain to someone when they asked… “"So the project missed its deadline, what did you do to try and prevent it ?”…. “umm well I chose not to have ‘strategy’ sessions so I would not become an obstacle” … despite the truth I can understand what that would be a hard option to sell.

It is so easy to point fingers from the other side, but what do developers do that is similar when under pressure ? What are our technical crutches that actually get in our way when we ought not use them ?

Blogs, in the Information Stack

2008-12-05T14:10:00.000+02:00

The key layers to my Information Stack are :

Blogs
QA Forums
Twitter
Social Posting ( Reddit / SlashDot / Digg etc )
Google

I was going to blog about each of these, but for now I will just stick to talking about blogs today ( so this does not become one of the killer post from Stevey's Blog Rants, which he will tell you is why his blog is so popular, so perhaps a mistake :-) )

Blogs

When I first found out about blogs , I thought that they would be interesting, but really how much value can you get out of one person. Surely you run the risk of being swayed too much by just the opinion of a single person, and get a horribly distorted view of the world. Then to balance that you need to listen to many other blogs on the same subject to remain objective and informed.

So potentially not a reliable source of information.

Experiencing it however, it is quite different indeed. The difference is in a large part attributed to the ideology of the author; when the author knows their blog is not about them, but rather about the tribe that is following them. In which case the become a very powerful conjugate of valuable information.

Typically blog writers are themselves very avid blog readers, and as such you are getting a huge range of views and ideas melded into a single stream of thought. At the same time you are likely reading many of the same things, or at least being exposed to the same field of information. There is huge power in the ability to have someone voice an opinion on something you may have an opinion on. It forces you to think about what you understand.

Bloggers also tend to be very honest, not just about speaking their mind, but also about linking to people who totally disagree with them, because they know that it is not about them being right it is about them having a view and sharing it, and exposing the other view. Blogging ( tends not to be ) proud. Arrogant yes, but don’t we all love that just a bit!

I think that is why reading blogs really pushes you into blogging too. It grows and helps to shape opinions.

Why Email makes you think you are Superman

2008-11-26T21:50:00.004+02:00

I have just finished reading a the latest Coding Horror Blog Is Email = Efail?, and it reminded me of the lesson I have learnt about Email over the last year.

Email is nothing short of a brilliant communication tool. It has the potential to address the classic issue described in the seminal book Peopleware about phones interrupting not only you, but also all those around you. Email sits politely just waiting for when you are ready to deal with it.

It is also great for those who find face to face communication somewhat harder.

However, like all good things there is always the other side that comes back and bites you. This is the part that I am talking about. It is quite insidious because it is guised in such good intention.

Its just too easy.

Like most of you I am sure, you have found your strategy for dealing with large volumes of mail, this is mine here on Stackoverflow. However, and this is the rub, the better you get at this, the more mail you receive.

How so ?

Well, because email allows you to hold multiple conversations at effectively one time, we do! You run through your inbox in your preferred strategy and respond to, and effectively, either start a new conversation or continue one. Again, because you can.

The fallacy lies in the fact, that we are not really able to hold down that many conversations, at least not in any meaningful way. Especially in a work environment, when a conversation is really just the tip of piece of real work to follow.

Email give us the ability to start more things that we can really give our attention to.

What to do ?

The lesson that I have learnt is that you need to just use your email less. If you need to hold a conversation with someone, then just do it. Walk there in person, or pick up the phone or IM, and get it done! Don’t do anything else, until that conversation is finished. The illusion of multitasking will be alluring, but in truth, the one task you are now addressing will be completed sooner, and you are now in a position to be far more productive in the few things you chose to focus on.

The others will have to wait, they were going to anyway! The only thing they lose is the progress bar of email they would have gotten as you would have trickled the answers to them.

Just because Email tries to make you believe you are Superman, you are not, well at least I am not!