Snrky

Good metaphor/bad metaphor

2013-05-21T09:22:00.000-05:00

Yes. I have heard both these metaphors used. I can't even remember the specifics about what we were discussing when it came to the bad metaphor, it took me so far afield in my head after it was uttered aloud in a meeting. I knew what was meant, but the image of all those babies rolling into the ocean until it literally seethed with them...horrifying. I don't want to be on that project, it sounds like a death march. For babies.

Title: Good metaphor/bad metaphor

Snarky: When it comes to that project, we're just whistling past the graveyard. Keep in mind, like any project, the baby may roll over, but when it does, we should be careful not to let it boil the ocean.

I'm fine if they want to save even more money by avoiding the use of "friends".

2013-05-16T09:00:00.001-05:00

Some companies don't like the word colleagues. Colleagues implies a working relationship. Working relationships imply an hierarchy. Hierarchy implies the relationships are not as collegiate as they could be if everyone were truly equals, despite the inequality of titles, location, and other factors. Friends is nicer. And it's funny. Because you can all pretend you're sort of in the mafia, which isn't hierarchical at all, and that everyone is a made man, free to openly discuss business.

Then again, it may just be a way for upper management to avoid learning names.

I was pondering whether this was the longest wording I've ever used in a Snarky. Could be. If so, I dedicate it to all my reader friends...you know who you are. If it's too much to read, che peccato.

Snarky: We feel allowing anyone at director level or higher to use "our developer friends" will save the company money by allowing them to focus on something other than learning your names.
Title: I'm fine if they want to save even more money by avoiding the use of "friends".

This will in no way generate a better proposal.

2013-05-14T09:00:00.001-05:00

I don't care if it looks like a bunch of spaghetti or really thin french fries, that's definitely straw. After some additional time to think, this probably deserved some sort of Wizard of Oz Scarecrow reference about lacking a brain, but that just seemed to be overkill. If you want to read additional layers of meaning into the comic, metaphorical, pedagogical, analogical, and so forth, please feel free. Whatever you come up with, I meant to include it as part of the whole experience. This comic is just the strawman for a comic with deeper meaning.

A straw-man proposal is a brainstormed simple draft proposal intended to generate discussion of its disadvantages and to provoke the generation of new and better proposals. The term is considered American business jargon, but it's also encountered in engineering office culture. Sometimes "straw dog" is used instead as form of political correctness.

Often, a straw man document will be prepared by one or two people prior to kicking off a larger project. In this way, the team can jump start their discussions with a document that is likely to contain many, but not all the key aspects to be discussed. As the document is revised, it may be given other edition names such as the more solid-sounding "stone-man", "iron-man", and so on.

In software development, a crude plan or document may serve as the strawman or starting point in the evolution of a project. The strawman is not expected to be the last word; it is refined until a final model or document is obtained that resolves all issues concerning the scope and nature of the project. In this context, a strawman can take the form of an outline, a set of charts, a presentation, or a paper. [Wikipedia]

The explanation at Wikipedia of how the DOD uses all sorts of ABCman variations and how that relates to Ada is a neat piece of trivia.

Snarky: Strawman
Title: This will in no way generate a better proposal.

It was that or a shirt with the corporate logo?

2013-05-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ah...I did one very close to this once before. But one is more management focused. And one is more development focused. That pretty much captures the schizophrenic nature of my job nowadays. One day it's security and management, the next day it's architecture estimations, Powershell scripts, and reviewing C Sharp modules that are in desperate need of being rewritten to centralize overly reused bits of logic.

I think it would be fun to take brands and turn them into developer-centric brands, but that just screams badges, which has already been done. That whole mess just makes me feel like I'm back in Scouting earning merit badges with a focus on requirements and metrics rather than learning what I really need to learn.

Snarky: They stamped me with two bars because I know rails!
Title: It was that or a shirt with the corporate logo?

As long as I don't have to write a unit test to assert it's true.

2013-05-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

I spend a lot of time lately working on SOC 2, NIST 800-53, and FedRAMP security digs. One of the differentiation factors that is often discussed is whether a security dig is prescriptive and bound to extremely specific pieces of evidence that must all be fulfilled, or whether a dig is an attestation, and the rules are not strictly speaking externally determined, but attested to by a company and only those the company attests to fulfilling and providing evidence for matter. It's amazing that one little idea can make such a huge difference in a dig, although when you pull both versions through the microscope and look at the security control proof through the lens, it looks suspiciously similar when it lands on your desk with a four hour deadline.

Snarky: They asked me to provide attestation for our security investigation. I think I'll need you to vouch for my character.
Title: As long as I don't have to write a unit test to assert it's true.

And her wheelhouse is making up metaphors like wheelhouse?

2013-05-04T14:13:00.002-05:00

I really thought I'd used this before. After all, management discussing wheelhouses was one of the things that inspired me to contribute to a stick figure comic blog. Then a friend pointed out this article about buffling and we discussed wheelhouses, pivots, and religious metaphors for business for quite a while via email. I like that 360 makes the list. That gets appended to way too many words. And I have to agree with him, Thought Shower just sounds perverse.

As for Pivot, which was already the subject of a comic this week, I was in a meeting the very next day where it was used six times. Exactly six, because that was how many ticks were on my doodle pad.

Snarky: Our project manager told me we have complementary wheelhouses. I introduce bugs. You fix them.
Title: And her wheelhouse is making up metaphors like wheelhouse?

All you did was switch from radio buttons to a drop-down.

2013-04-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

I heard "pivot" in a meeting for the first time last week. I know it's rather new to some people, being part of the whole Lean UX mood, although admittedly much older than the current hype, but it's already starting to seem overused. If it can be applied to both strategic, enterprise-level, planning, and discrete bits of UI...it covers too much ground. Someone else apparently feels the same way, as they also have a comic, and I think it's more amusing than mine: http://startupnook.com/midweek-startup-humor-the-lean-startup/

If you're not familiar with the term, Wikipedia gives it its own link under Lean Startup:

A pivot is a “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.”[1] A notable example of a company employing the pivot is Groupon; when the company first started, it was an online activism platform called The Point.[4] After receiving almost no traction, the founders opened a WordPress blog and launched their first coupon promotion for a pizzeria located in their building lobby.[4] Although they only received 20 redemptions, the founders realized that their idea was significant, and had successfully empowered people to coordinate group action.[4] Three years later, Groupon would grow into a billion dollar business.

Billion dollar idea. I'm pretty sure the pivot I heard announced the other day wasn't worth more than $100.

A few more pivot-based links for the read-y:

Snrky: Pivot! Pivot!
Title: All you did was switch from radio buttons to a drop-down.

Remind me again how many software projects you've overseen?

2013-04-25T07:30:00.000-05:00

It's probably wrong to judge one's ability to do their job based on how they pronounce a particular word, but I'd like to believe there exists a line at which one's inability to 'talk-the-talk' should be enough of a red flag to prevent its being crossed. Unfortunately, we tend not to even see the line until it's too late.

Title: Remind me again how many software projects you've overseen?
Snarky: How many is a "jiggabyte"?

Or we need a closer bathroom.

2013-04-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

I dedicate this to Erik H. who both sits by a foosball table, and shared this Dilbert strip about a ping-pong table not so long ago. Also inspired, in part, by a bit of decoration I did for someone's cube that involved about three dozen coffee mugs of varying sorts, like Wonder Woman, medication-related mugs, Minnesota tourism mugs, kitty cat and puppy mugs, and a variety of others in holiday themes and assurances that even at sixty he'll still be sexy. It looked surprisingly like the comic, but with pictures rolled up in each mug.

I'd like to think the coffee cup balancing on the divider wall scores bonus points.

Snarky: I didn't mind the noise from foosball, but this beerpong has to quit.
Title: Or we need a closer bathroom.

It's hard out there for a VP.

2013-04-18T08:47:00.000-05:00

Given the seemingly constant re-arranging of office space that happens in large organizations, it's a little surprising that the some clever higher-up hasn't floated the idea of using spaces that are generally ignored to be re/multi-purposed in the name of space efficiency. Or maybe said higher-up has thought about it and realized that the elevator is simply too fraught with the possibility of causing psychological trauma (via simthsonianmag.com) and done us all a favor and continued to ignore it.

Title: I know it's not an ideal venue for our 1-on-1 but it's the only standup space that hasn't been converted to an executive office.
Snarky: It's hard out there for a VP.

I'm glad you're telling me our shared understanding.

2013-04-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot of UX Lean (or Lean UX, take your pick) documentation lately: Jeff Gothelf's book, hearing him in person on the O'Reilly webcast, going to a Lean UX presentation at Minnebar, and pestering my senior usability expert about her opinions on the subject. I'm a firm believer that knowing a little bit about everyone's job gives you exactly what Lean UX strives for: shared understanding. Most of the time, however, at least to me, it seems as though they're playing catch up with Agile, but that somehow it's better because it's UX and PMs and the business driving frequent communication, iteration, and putting the minimal viable product in front of the customer, not developers.

And then I think, what do I really care as long as the outcome is the same and we get cross-functional, co-located, single focus, teams that iterate, adapt, and build something great.

Snarky: Our new PMO-driven Lean processes are an improvement over Agile as they won't come with the developer-centric baggage.
Title: I'm glad you're telling me our shared understanding.

Any weekend plans?

2013-04-12T09:12:00.002-05:00

Now there is evidence that having a best friend at work does wonders for retaining good employees, but not every relationship in the office will be so healthy. Often, particularly when there are competing priorities deadlines, history among co-workers, and office politics at play, innocuous comments can really be hard to parse. But maybe there is hope.

Title: Any weekend plans?
Snarky: Is that a trick question?

So they're formalizing your existing behavior?

2013-04-09T08:30:00.000-05:00

This is one of those snarkies where I couldn't decide on a favorite title. Perhaps I'll just post all five for a week. We have no problems at snrky.com doing the same stick figure cartoon half a dozen times. Iterate, baby! We're an agile stick figure comic site. Here are some alternatives I was considering...

Your flip flops are smelling up the colocation space. (I think this would have been better).
I'm not participating in tank top day, no matter what you say.
Paired programming does not mean wearing matching Hawaiian shirts.
Casual still means shirt and shoes.
How did you know the new policy before it was announced?
Fezzes are cool. (for geek cred - but I'd have had to put a fez on Poor Paired Cube Guy and there wasn't one on my contact sheet of props. That, and trying to draw a Tardis would have taken me at least an hour I should be spending on taxes).
Alternates to that last one: bow ties are cool. Cowboy hats are cool.
Turning your shirt inside out is not casual...not really.

Snarky: They said we’re now casual all the time. I embrace it as more than a simple dress code.
Title: So they're formalizing your existing behavior?

Why do you think we have so much time logged under "stabilization"?

2013-04-04T08:52:00.001-05:00

An aspect of building software that I both love and hate is the transition from paper (spec/design) to actual working software. On the one hand there is something very satisfying about seeing actual working code. It's thrilling to us geeks. On the other hand, one of the unfortunate side effects of the way contemporary (read: agile...-ish) projects get managed where the software is broken down into small chunks for implementation is that it can be difficult for the developers to "see the forest through the trees". In other words you get a lot of technically "correct" (read: works as spec'd) code that doesn't actually "work".

In the enterprise, responsibility for avoiding this generally falls on the "integration testing" team, but in my experience many of the problems aren't necessarily caused by disjointed features, but a lack of understanding about how the potential customers on the site actually interact with it.

It turns out design matters.

Title: Why do you think we have so much time logged under "stabilization"?
Snarky: I didn't realize there was such a fine line between fixing bugs and gold-plating.

Worse than having a truncated classpath?

2013-04-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

Sigh...once again, a joke that doesn't work so well if you're female. I'm just going to tag them as sexist, even if the issue is that they're not gender neutral. You could use the less concrete definition of emasculating, but it still has it's roots in male genitalia. It's too bad the word is tied to that specific definition, because I think it's perfect for referring to those times when you realize you don't have something on your machine that you would expect to have either a.) in the normal course of your development or b.) at least inadvertently over the course of a few years of development using a specific machine. I pondered castration jokes for the title for a while, at least until it made me uncomfortable and I didn't want to keep tying work to castration, and settled on a line that was only sort of referential instead of a pun. And then I spelled truncated wrong, as truncatated, and had to truncate it, which is way too ironic for early on a Tuesday morning.

Snarky: How can I not have JDK 1.6 on my machine? That's devasculating.
Title: Worse than having a truncated classpath?

"Because that's stupid" is not a valid reason for closing out bugs.

2013-03-28T08:34:00.000-05:00

Title: But what if that was the justification for building the feature in the first place?
Snarky: "Because that's stupid" is not a valid reason for closing out bugs.

The product manager/developer relationship is inherently tense in my experience. I think it's because developers, ahead of the technological curve when it comes to building software products, recommend features that go over like a lead balloon when pitched to the product team. Not being the 'business' experts in the organization, they are then left to implement what in their minds are inferior or *gasp!* obsolete solutions.

Having then to go back and fix bugs in said features (arguably, their own fault), it can be hard to resist adding a few snarky comments in the bug tracker.

We are legion...

2013-03-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

I hadn't heard helpdesk referred to as helldesk in a very long time. So it was amusing to see it in an article that struck close to home such as this The Daily WTF, Accounting for Development. Primarily because the gist of the post once happened to me as a contractor. I wasn't an accountant, but I was told the job I was interviewing for - and it was a two-way interview in my opinion, most contracting gigs were - would be bypassing IT. The team I was talking to needed a new application, but couldn't convince IT to implement it on their time schedule. They'd found some money in their budget, and wanted to use it "during the fiscal year" (which I interpreted to mean there might be money to start their project, but not necessarily to finish it) to show off what IT wasn't building and that they could build without them. I wouldn't be referred to as a developer, just a "consultant", and I couldn't use corporate (disk/software) images or database instances, or even corporate resources at all if possible, because then IT would find out and put a stop to it and "they have more corporate clout in our organization."

I politely declined the gig, which really annoyed my contracting placement rep - although the fact that I'd been sent alone spoke a bit to faith in my ability to sell myself and make good decisions - until I pointed out we'd lose all other contracts with that rather large company had I said "yes". I've often wondered if they ever found someone willing to take on their IT-flanking object and how miserable that person must have been once the inevitable political fight erupted.

Snarky: They're sending me to helpdesk, and I asked that our paired arrangement be maintained.
Title: We are legion...

Only if you don't consider its purpose to be bug generation.

2013-03-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

After all, software is eating the world...or so I'm told.

Title: Only if you don't consider its purpose to be bug generation.
Snarky: Creating software is not our core competency, or so I'm told.

I think you should ask HR.

2013-03-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

I'm certain this is a sexist Snarky. The issue with the Mythical Man Month (which is why I feel ok making fun of it, because it's got a bad title) isn't around the number of words spoken, but around the number of people involved, the communication channels, and, if you wanted to add any new vector, the number of projects/context switching opportunities, although that number directly influences the number of individuals in most cases, with some overlap.

Women are not 2.8x larger an issue than men on software products. I'd go so far as to say that if your mythical man month is comprised of all men, adding a woman to the project probably decreases her weighted value due to generally better communication and variance in perspective.

So where did this come from? I was reading this Mental Floss article this week about "Why do Women Tend to Talk More Than Men?"

"Studies have long suggested that the average woman speaks about 20,000 words a day. The average man, on the other hand, hovers closer to 7000. That means in one year, a Chatty Cathy could wind up speaking 4.7 million more words than a member of the quieter sex, or the rough equivalent of narrating War and Peace in its entirety ... eight times."

Fascinating that proteins can have such concrete impacts on our lives. After a lot of consideration, I've decided it has very little to do with software development (unless it's beneficial) and more to do with marriage.

Snarky: I heard women use 13,000 more words per day. Do we use (m + 2.8w(m + 2.8w - 1))/2 instead of n(n − 1) / 2 now or is there an easier formula?
Title: I think you should ask HR.

I see now why you choose not to comment your code.

2013-03-14T08:07:00.000-05:00

It is both a blessing and a curse when you find that your team writes code that is structured, both in organization and syntax, similarly. On the one hand, you have consistency which if nothing else is pleasing from an architecture standpoint. On the other you have consistency, which makes it easier for your teammates to claim ignorance of bugs and pawn the work off on you and simultaneously more difficult for one to deny authorship of said code. At least we have source control for that....right?

Title: I see now why you choose not to comment your code.
Snarky: Yes it looks like something I'd write, but it's not mine. You'll just have to go ahead and fix that bug.

I couldn't resist...

2013-03-14T00:30:00.001-05:00

With all the hulabaloo over Google Glass at SXSWi, I couldn't resist sharing Adrien Chen's Gawker article on the topic, because it had me feeling a little like an a-hole myself laughing out loud in a crowd of twenty or so people waiting for the evening bus ride home from work today. Nicely done.

And since the opportunity to preemptively coin a new term is still available I'm going to take it.

Glass-hole.

In that case, I’m taking a sick day. I took an arrow to the knee.

2013-03-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

We've had Skyrim humor before. Although that was 2011. Time flies! Time to move on to another source of humor, perhaps. You can catch the Skyrim Tumblr if you need a fix. We'll move on to Bioshock, Gears of War, or XCOM. Maybe some humor about missing time.

For some additional laughs, I strongly recommend these three pages. Hilarious, if you're not my wife. She doesn't think they're funny at all.

Snarky: If this code were Skyrim, this method would be my room full of cabbage.
Title: In that case, I’m taking a sick day. I took an arrow to the knee.

Why do you think I hate documentation so much?

2013-03-07T07:53:00.000-06:00

In the world of corporate software, there are two facts about documentation. It exists and very few people read it. You see it in many companies, particularly big ones. A project starts out with gusto -- a thirty or forty page "whitepaper" or "roadmap" outlining the particulars of the business or technical concept du jour that is going to either set, or change, the direction of the organization for years to come. As implementation gets underway, reality takes over and the brilliantly written documentation collects dust while the project goes on to become a wild success, utter failure, or most commonly join the ranks of the countless corporate software projects that bumble along doing an adequate job of what they originally set out to do. Eventually some or all of the original developers on the team move up or out and new blood takes over and gets up to speed on the details of the project by reading...code. The documentation is however often good for something -- finding the name of a developer who can help you fix bugs.

Title: Why do you think I hate documentation so much?
Snarky: Why are you fixing bugs in that code? Weren't you off that project like three years ago?

I left the razor in your desk drawer.

2013-03-05T08:00:00.000-06:00

That's right. There was a shaving the yak reference last Thursday! That's the fun part of having two authors and not sharing details before publishing. Things end up being a surprise and we can riff on each other and even try a few punchlines with one comic. More than anything, working on this version tells me I need to get much better at using GIMP.

My co-author's link to Joi Ito's Yak Shaving article struck a nerve, because I'm guilty of this in one of the core behaviors I engage in, cleaning. My wife has been annoyed in the past because when I clean, I tend to focus on clutter, and I'll just go, go, go, moving one section of the mess to another place, then removing, removing, removing, chasing the pile as it hops from place to place. And if there's painting to be done, or dusting, or scrubbing, I ignore it. It's a separate issue. Why? Because those are subroutines I can cut out of my main method, which was to clean space x, minimizing the scope of the function, or reducing the recursion. And I'd rather get full coverage of the routine I'm working on, than partial coverage of a number of routines, or routines where the duration doesn't suit my requirements. Interestingly, the garage seems to be a Utility Method in my system, as things migrate from all over the house to a table in the garage, and from there out of the house completely, to recycling, trash, or a charity. The garage generally represents the second to last routine I call in all cases, so in some respect I've separated it from the other cleaning and it's not necessary to finalize the last step to consider the main job done. Unfortunately, it acts sort of like a database and now and then I have to engage in a bit of index optimization and orphan removal so that there's storage space available for more operations. I could add more storage, but my company doesn't have a sufficient budget.

As Ito says: "They talk about many hackers spending a lot of their time "lost in life's subroutines" and that "some of us like solving puzzles a bit more than we like solved puzzles." They suggest that super-efficient hackers "learn when to say no to the temptation of endless fiddling." Veeeery interesting. So this is what I've been doing all my life. Shaving Yaks."

Snarky: Seriously. I don't even known where to start, let alone where we'll end up by the time we're done.
Title: I left the razor in your desk drawer.

Yak courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 license. English: Yak (Bos grunniens) at Letdar on the Annapurna Circuit in the Annapurna mountain range of central Nepal. 3 April 2012. Flickr. Author: TravelWayOfLife.

3 days ago.

2013-02-28T08:26:00.000-06:00

When you bring new developers in to help enhance an already established product with new features it can only mean one thing. Refactoring. Which inevitably leads to branching and merging like, a lot. All par for the course on a software project but when you end up concurrently maintaining separate branches of code for bug fixing the current release, working on new the features, and integrating a new UI design, all while simultaneously upgrading the IDE, ORM, and Framework versions behind the scenes, things can get rather hairy.

On the upside, we have had ver little in the way of merge-induced code catastrophes. Whether that's due to having a team of solid developers or dumb luck is probably up for debate.

Title: 3 days ago.

Snarky: Just automerge it.