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“ But I can tell you the names of some of them.”
“Of course they answer to their names?” the Gnat remarked carelessly.
“I never kenew them do it.”
“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to tehm?”
“No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?

— FromThrough the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (thinking about Ward Cunningham’s System of Names)

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What do I care about when I care about my work?*

I’m trying to decide about what I care about in my work, and how this may affect the next decisions in my career, so I thought writing it down might help. I’ve got a limited time to write today, so I’ll write about the first three things I thought about when I thought about caring about my work: Software Quality, Better workflows, Designers and developers understanding their users.

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“ This requires that anyone you’re collaborating with knows how to handle rewound heads

— from Undoing merges in git.

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“ … it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of a story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three or six or ten thousand words.

— http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/it-has-never-got-easier.html
Steinbeck’s letter to his creative writing professor, Edith Mirrielees.

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Link » Thinking about process (Hashrocket, Terralien)

Just stumbled across Hashrocket’s clear and beautiful Process overview. I love it’s simplicity and executability. But it got me thinking of Terralien’s process description which I’d read and thought about in 2008 or so, (and which I had to look up on waybackmachine, because Nathaniel’s now just doing spreedly).

To summarise Terralien’s process - you (as a product launcher) initially went to Terralienwith a product concept and commissioned a fixed-price Product Outlining service (some discussion, some business analysis, some diagramming/IA) and then you commissioned a fixed-price Launch Cycle (or more than one).

In my own consultancy work I’m finding this split between outlining and development iteration has traction — even when clients come to me with something complete (or half-complete) that they need help with — it always involves a bit (a few hours to a few days) of discussion, analysis and diagramming with plentiful options for dialogue, before going onto some form of iterated development / code+process review.

The difference between the Hashrocket and the Terralien ideas are the kinds of constraint/gateway. Hashrocket’s embodies different stages as the constraint - there are different activities that open the gate for the next. However Terralien’s gateway is purely time - the orientation has to be: is this going in the right direction, because we’re running out of time. And in any case the idea is not “how much will my idea cost” (because this is almost always impossible to know at the outset) but more “how much of my idea can I get built within a known and fixed time” (a launch cycle). This is a much better question and delivers a better kind of answer.

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“ [Pixar] have a daily “build” of their movies in progress so they know where they stand, with sketches and crappy CGI filling holes where needed – compare this to traditional moviemaking where it’s only at the end

— Why you’ll always think your product is shit | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)

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“ If you have Big Data process is involve grep, you are do it wrong.

— DevOps Borat (devops_borat) on Twitter

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Experimental music from very short C programs (by viznut)

(via @nyeparry - my music source )

oh my god this is cool stuff.

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“ The mandatory end-of-month password change: Few common IT policies drive users to distraction as regularly and reliably as the aggressiveness of enterprise password policies.

— When passwords attack: the problem with aggressive password policies

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How bad can a public website get?

I was trying to report a non-urgent crime (vehicle incident I witnessed involving another bike rider) in London. The Met police force site came up nicely in Google and there was a sitemap and looked like the possibility of finding the right form through deep links via search.

Firstly the Met police force site gave me a nice 502 error (any page), in full tomcat style (at least it wasn’t a default (Apache) Forbidden notice - this came later). Ouch, embarrassing.

But at least it cleared after about ten minutes - (server coming back up or deployment finishing perhaps?) I tried waiting for came back and eventually found the correct page to report this problem (under “Roadsafe London” — not “Online crime reporting”, or “Crime and Internet crime reporting” or any other ways of communicating online in this byzantinely complicated site).

The process was painful because of a number of errors (not least a 256 character limit on the text box for the anser to “Your information… Please provide as much detail as possible in order…”). So being a good web citizen (and besides this is kind of a busman’s holiday for me), I decided to report the problems (including the various broken links etc I had gathered).

But was that going to be easy? There’s a link to “Website feedback” in ‘contact us’ but that gives rise to effectively a survey form allowing you to tell how your experience with met.police.uk made you feel (I’m sure a useful form, but no way to report specific errors). I didn’t feel like I needed to make a “complaint about the police” (don’t want to add my noise to that important stream).

So eventually under “General Enquiry” I wrote up my:

“Detailed website feedback”.

In order of importance

1) There are several problems with Roadsafe London form at https://secure.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/

a) VERY IMPORTANT: there is a very small character limit (256 letters!) on “Your information” — doesn’t give enough space to put in details requested by the form: “Please provide as much detail as possible in order for us to deal with your information in the most effective way, please include such things as dates, times and places as well as details of any other people involved.” This needs to be increased to several thousand

b) Need ability to put in “more details about Vehicle” under “Vehicle details” (e.g. this was a NL-registered tour coach)

2) On the main “Reporting Crime” page (http://www.met.police.uk/reporting_crime/), under “Online reporting”, the link labelled “Access online crime reporting” links to “Customer feedback” (https://secure.met.police.uk/yourvoicecounts/index.php) — it should link to “https://online.met.police.uk/”.

3) On many pages, there are links to “Crimes” (http://www.met.police.uk/crimes/) — this page gives a “Forbidden” error - as a stopgap you should make this page some kind of index page. Examples of these links - in the top menu for https://online.met.police.uk/, https://secure.met.police.uk/enquiries, for https://secure.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/ etc.)

4) The site needs a proper website error reporting form.

The website feedback form only allows me to report general feelings about website, not an ability to report broken links and issues such as the above.

5) Judging by the length of the list above you need a QA team working on your very important website.

Did it surprise me when I clicked submit I just got the form back, wiped clean (no, not at all) — I guess my session must have expired (session, for a general enquiry form with no server-side state - ah, that must be tomcat (or at least bad J2EE coding). But add to that, no messaging to tell the user what has happened. You do need to be a web developer to use this site.

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