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"But I can tell you the names of some of them.” “Of course they answer to their..."

Sun, 27 May 2012 21:08:00 +0100

““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)

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

Sat, 26 May 2012 20:08:00 +0100

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.

Software Quality.

Yes, Dorothy**, I care about software quality. What on earth does that mean though? (After all who would say they don’t care about quality in fact?). For me, it means that the overall reliability of the software increases over time, and that the malleability (changability) of the software (time it takes to add an additional thing to it) is largely constant over time. The problem with the whole “permanent beta” revolution is that it sounds as if it means that everything is permanently flakey. I’d rather we think of software as “permanently incomplete” than always needing more QA (which is really what beta was originally meant to me - ‘feature complete but not QAd’ - but that’s really a silly notion). But software always does need more QA. Someone*** said that software without bugs was software that someone had spent too much time on (though actually surely software with loads of bugs is software someone has spent too much money on). The idea being, that software has bugs (just like, say our kitchen has microorganisms around at all times) but we have to keep cleaning them up so they don’t build up and give us food poisoning, not that we should be putting our cooking utensils in autoclaves.

Better Workflows.

I love building and designing software that helps people manage their work better. I love using software that helps me manage my own work better. I started helping people with their workflows when I was designing an order and invoicing system for a retail dairyfarm with a milkround in the early 90s. Most recently I’ve been helping a book promotion company help manage and track book reviewers. We’ve also designed and prototyped a system for tracking digital film production (in a very light-touch yet high-reliability way). Despite having studied fine art and fancied myself from time to time as an artist, I’m less interested in pretty things (what Marcel Duchamp called (I think***) ‘retinal beauty’ , than in conceptual clarity (this is what Plotinus called ‘the intellectual beauty’). So when I was working in 3d realtime graphics, I was actually almost aspect blind to the quality of the rendering and how lovely a transition might be, and only concerned with how easy my software was making it for the designers to create the scenes they wanted (I was creating a highly-specific authoring environment for 3d interaction designers).

Designers and developers understanding their users.

Of course if we’re to make things that help people manage their work better, we really have to understand people, and not just any people, /the/ people that will use our software (hence the somewhat unfashionable word ‘users’). I know I’m meant to get out of the building (HT Stephen J Blank) and go and talk to the potential users (and the purchasers) to find out what’s currently making them desperate for the product that I’m about to write. In my most successful projects though I’ve found that working with an ehtnographer, or some other field-based researchers, has brought “the user” more effectively into the building than when I’ve tried to leave it (and let’s face it, it’s nice in this building - I know how to make tea here, I have some headphones and a comfy chair). Having got some contact with the users, we (designers, developers, field-workers, ethnographers) have to build up some kind of a model of our understanding. Our primary modelling system is language, which is why Ward Cunningham brilliant calls our understanding which gets embedded in our software a “System of Names”. Note that although part of what he’s talking about is naming things****, i.e. trying to refer to a set of ideas with a name, the other and more important part, is that once we have the names for the consituent parts, we need to relate them to each other in a mostly-coherent way. It’s very important for this set of language to be fully shared between designers, developers, and the owners and users - and a lot of (which is why it’s important to be able to change ones vocabulary as one moves through the project****)

* With grave apologies to Haruki Murakami for nicking the title template

** That’s for our readers in Kansas

*** With some apologies for the lack of bothering to look things up throughout - all these things are only a few internet searches away, but it’s a major distraction from actually writing. You can look them up yourself, and then laugh at me for getting them wrong.

**** Which sounds like the Augustinian picture of language modelling (< the beginning of The Blue Book (I think***)) but keep reading

**** A minimal refactoring such as “change name” (so trivial in Smalltalk, or Java under Eclipse for example) is very powerful, and one of the things I really miss (because so very difficult to implement automatically, and boring and tedious work to do manually) when working in ruby (and even more so in rails)

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

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:54:07 +0100

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

- from Undoing merges in git.

"… it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 22:33:39 +0100

“… 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.

Thinking about process (Hashrocket, Terralien)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:14:34 +0000

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.

"[Pixar] have a daily “build” of their movies in progress so they know where they stand, with..."

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 07:40:38 +0000

“[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)

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

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:11:00 +0000

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

- DevOps Borat (devops_borat) on Twitter

Experimental music from very short C programs (by viznut) (via...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:47:33 +0000

Experimental music from very short C programs (by viznut)

(via @nyeparry - my music source )

oh my god this is cool stuff.

"The mandatory end-of-month password change: Few common IT policies drive users to distraction as..."

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:08:01 +0000

““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

How bad can a public website get?

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:15:00 +0100

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.

Readme Driven Development

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:44:51 +0100

Readme Driven Development:

Really good post on writing your read-me first

Found that writing user manual first was very helpful for writing the sugar api for Brainstorm realtime 3d engine: http://cleverplugs.com/sugar/

Oddly I ended up writing api methods that seemed unlikely to be used other than for a learner trying out the engine. However they made the learning process much easier (and encourage console/command-line usage).

Watched: The Book of Life, Hal Hartley

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:41:00 +0100

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167059/

Jesus wears a suit

Magdalena smokes a cigarette

Watched: Somewhere, Sofia Coppola

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:30:00 +0100

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421051/

Read: Managing Career (Harvard Lessons Learned)

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Managing-Career-Harvard-Lessons-Learned/dp/1422118614

Holiday: wine-tasting / stretch-limo

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Huguette drove us. What you see is what huguette. “I hope we don’t bottom out” (we did). Je suis québecoise mais je parle bon français.

Gainey (wine)

Fess Parker (davey crockett hat, wine)

Roblar (too much wine)

Holiday: Katy Perry

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

http://www.katyperry.com/santa-barbara-ca-santa-barbara-bowl/

Holiday: Santa Barbara Zoo

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Feeding Elephants, Giraffes, Lions

Holiday: Walk on Hendries Beach

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Walk, lunch, margaret, playground, jetlag

Workflow for Chef with Vagrant

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 04:13:05 +0000

Workflow for Chef with Vagrant

Presentation Patterns

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 06:24:40 +0000

Presentation Patterns :

Fascinating upcoming book in development which aims to operationalize new trends in Presentation methods into helpful patterns and (humorous) anti-patterns. It is being developed in the open with comments and reviews elicited via twitter (@ppatterns).