Mike's Blog

Review of "The Genius in All of Us"

2011-08-28T19:34:00.000-04:00

Subtitled "Why everything you've been told about genetics, talent, and IQ is wrong" by David Shenk.

I first saw this book at a swim meet. A parent sharing at our table was reading it and I dismissed it based on the cover main title alone. Through a discussion with the reader's wife she asked me "Are you judging a book by it's cover." My prejudice was exposed therefore I was determined to read it if only for penance.

I recommend this book especially since it is only 134 pages (with 168 pages of notes and bibliography). It starts with a story about Ted Williams that shows the dedication it took for him to become the best hitter in baseball. This theme is repeated many times.The author introduces you to the developmental systems theorists concept of GxE (genes times environment). The book attempts to debunk the myth that your abilities (and to some degree who you are) are mainly determined by genes. GxE will admit genes play a role, but that the choices one makes have a far greater impact than genes.

He then beats up Lewis Terman, but anyone who has read "Outliers" already knows the punch line: you can't predict the future based on some test, specifically one as limited as IQ. He lists some environmental triggers that I like:

Speaking to children early and often
Reading early an often
Nurturance and encouragement
Setting high expectations
Embracing failure
Encouraging a "growth mindset"

Next he introduces us to the with the work of Dr. K. Anders Ericcson. Ericsson and William Chase did studies on improving memory of "average" students. They concluded "With practice there is seemingly no limit to memory performance." From there he articulates the various myths people have spouted over the years about genius; focusing on Mozart (BTW his father was obsessed with making him the greatest composer in Europe as he had failed). He provides these themes for greatness:

Practice changes your body
Skills are specific
The brain drives the brawn
Practice style is crucial
Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment

Then he dives into a famous twin study (from 1981) that "proved scientifically" that genes determine 60% of intelligence and personality; 40-66% of motor skills and 21% of creativity. In case you haven't already guessed the author rips holes in this study and explains the results using GxE theory. Next he lists some emergent ideas from genetic testing of high performers (Kenya long distance runners, Navy SEALS, Jamaican sprinters, etc):

Despite appearance to the contrary, racial and ethical groups are NOT genetically discrete
Genes don't directly cause traits; they only influence the system

Guiding principles suggested by author for people who wish to be great:

Find your motivation
Be your own toughest critic
Beware the dark side (bitterness and blame)
Identify your limitations; then ignore them
Delay gratification and resist contentedness
Have heroes
Find a mentor

More recommendations by the author on how to ruin (or inspire) a kid:

Believe
Support, don't smother
Pace and persist
Embrace failure

His final point is: "Lifestyle can alter heredity."

I admit I was surprised how much I didn't know about recent theory. I knew IQ tests were bogus. I had read Gladwell's "Outliers" and knew of his 10,000 rule, but I still held on to this idea that my genes had a lot to due to who I was. Reading this book didn't change my outlook on life, but it did change some of the dialogue around it.

Lean 101

2011-07-09T19:06:00.000-04:00

Lean is a philosophy derived from manufacturing (see Lean.org for more details) that has made inroads into many things, including software development. When people try to adopt it they tend to focus on the techniques and often miss the big picture. When faced with a task, how you think about it will determine how you attempt to perform it.

Take laundry for example. The most common method is to first sort all the dirty laundry into piles of like colors. Then wash them one at a time and as they wash throw them in the drier. As the dry hang and fold and/or make piles for each person to take care of their own. This divide and conquer approach is usually tool #1 in our tool-belt.

A lean approach would start at a different place. Lean would start on value. Why do we do laundry? What's the end goal? For me it is clean clothes in my closet. If I could have elves do it for me while I slept I would be satisfied. Since I can't seem to find any nocturnal elves willing to work for free I am stuck doing it. I start with four laundry baskets (and some floors) filled with dirty clothes and I need a process for getting these clothes cleaned and put in the appropriate drawers and/or closets. The clothes need to be cleaned in the washing machine, dried (or laid out for those pesky clothes) and folded/hung in the correct location.

Lean tells us to pull value, instead of pushing it. What does that mean? Pushing can be thought of as focusing on the sub task. Let's take the first sub task when doing laundry - sorting. Pushing is doing all the sorting before starting a single load. You make sorting the goal before you move to the next task. This can lead to suboptimization. In lean we are trying to maximize value. One tool lean has is to minimize work in process (WIP). WIP isn't value and utilizes resources without providing value. In my domestic example WIP is piles of laundry on the floor. So how do I get laundry done when I don't have pre-made piles to throw in to the washing machine?

Take clothes that can be washed together from the dirty clothes hamper containing the most import clothes (mine) and toss them in the washer.
When they are done toss them in the dryer.
Go to #1 until all clothes are done

A problem this approach can run into is when I focus on maximizing the amount of clothes I can stuff in the washer. Doing this is similar to maximizing the output of a machine on a factory floor. When I do this the clean, wet clothes have to wait for the dryer. As I am maximizing the amount of clothes I put in the washer my WIP is bigger than it should be. Kanban (a practice from lean manufacturing) uses WIP limits to prevent this from happening. I simply need to learn the amount I can place in the washer so that the washing (a fixed time on my machine) matches the drying time (a variable time on my fancy dryer). This is the Lean principle of Perfection.

In software development lean tells us to pull the value. Value is software that is being used by those that paid (at least indirectly) for the software. One common mistake when adopting a lean based software development approach is to force the business customer into breaking cohesive features into bite size ones that are of NO value to the business by themselves. Instead the development team needs to own the break down of features into bite size one and deliver the cohesive feature in a way that the business can use. Sometimes the feature can be delivered piecemeal, but often the feature is not useful until all parts (think CRUD) are done.

The other mistake is trying to to the entire feature at once. This is comparable to shoving all the clothes in the washer. You need to find the smallest unit that works for your group. In a small group (one-two developers) in can be tackled in extremely small increments (one test at a time in TDD). In larger groups more coordination will be needed. It will be up to each group to find the sweet spot (like how many pants can my drier dry in one wash cycle).

One thing to keep in mind when adopting a lean approach is there is NO ONE RIGHT WAY. Every situation is different and requires different practices and rules to be optimal. The key is the Perfection principle. Never be satisfied. Always look for ways to make the software better, faster and more valuable to the business. Sometimes you will try ides that cause a step backwards in productivity, but these are a step forward in knowledge. Remember perfection is not achievable, but with lean you should always be seeking it.

Review of "The Shack" by William Young

2010-06-27T07:41:00.001-04:00

I loved this book. It wasn't well written (you are not surprised to find that William is a first time author), but the story and the depth outshines all it's flaws. It is not a easy read. I had to put it down several times as I couldn't take the images in my mind and I cried several times but I laughed even more.

The story is based around a fictional character, Mack, and his weekend with Elousia (El - semitic for God; ousia ancient Greek for being), Sarayo (Sanskrit for wind), & Jesus. The chapters leading up to the weekend will turn many away as it isn't a pleasant story. Make sure you have a box of tissues in easy reach for chapters 2-4.

Each chapter has a quote at the head. I liked each one. My favorites are:

Chapter 4: "Sadness is a wall between two gardens." -Kahlil Gibran

Chapter 6: "...no matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself." -Jacques Ellul

Chapter 14: "God is a verb" -Buckminster Fuller

Chapter 18: "Faith never knows where it is being led, But it knows and loves the One who is leading." - Oswald Chambers

The meat of the book has some great lines as well:

"Who wants to worship a God who can be fully comprehended...Not much mystery in that."

"Faith does not grow in the house of certainty."

"There are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of the right things...but they don't know me at all. So really how can their answers be right...?"

For me this book has take the place of "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis as the best book for an introduction to Christianity. I plan on reading it again.

Addendum: The reason I read this book was because my father recommended it. He reminded me when we spoke :-)

Measurement 101

2010-06-06T09:20:00.003-04:00

When I got from spring break I noticed that most of my pants were tight and my typically lose pants fit nicely...not a nice feeling! I shouldn't have been surprised I had stopped going to the gym on a consistent basis and I wasn't watching what I ate for long (just the short time it was on my plate :-) The first step was obviously to get back in the habit of going to the gym. After about a week I noticed some pants felt better, but I wasn't happy with the "just try harder" approach. I decided I needed a change in my approach. I got up my courage and took the big step of...getting on a scale. It was not pretty. In fact it was slightly depressing, but I kept doing it every time I was at the gym.

The point of this post isn't my weight though. It is the about the saying: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." I have had an interesting history with measurement. I have always liked numbers. In fact I used to calculate (in my head) the estimated time of arrival (in minutes) to home every time I passed a sign with miles to home. Yes, I know I have issues. When I worked at Motorola they used to publish our software release sigma number. I found out that this number was the number of defects found in the last release divided by the number of lines of count. This was obviously wrong as I could have added NOPs and got that number lower without improving the quality at all. When I consulted with government contractors (almost all where SEI level 3 or higher) I found several measures that were more complicated but in effect similar to Motorola's sigma. When I spoke up about these measures being easily duped and misleading, the response was: what do you suggest we measure instead? Good question...I didn't have an answer.

How do you manage if you have no quantitative way of saying you are getting better or worse? The key, I think, is something I was taught my a measurement guru a worked with once (Chris Miller, please forgive me if I butcher this:-).

First start with the goal (i.e. improve productivity, quality, waist line). Next find some measures that are good predictors of those goals. Examples:

Goal: medium rare meat - measure: internal temperature as measured by a meat thermometer.
Goal: smaller waist line - measure: same scale at the same time of day
Goal: software productivity - measure: lines of code (this is worth a whole post, but not this one)

Be careful not to believe the measures are the goal as this trap will lead to manipulation and a false sense of where you are. Now, look at your process (lots of people use an idealized process...another trap) and see what measures you can capture cheaply. Start capturing (sometimes the historical data is laying around and you can go back in time) and do some simple statistical analysis to see if any of these measures correlate with the goal measures and thus can be your predictive measure.

Let me give me an example that most can empathize with. I have a goal of smaller waist line. My goal measure is my weight on the gym scale in the morning (experience has taught me my weight fluctuates widely throughout the day). My predictive measures eluded me until my wife introduced me to SparkPeople (image an intersection between Facebook and Weight Watchers) The web site is fairly painful to use, but the android app is quite good and lets me enter in all the food I eat fairly easily. Now I have a predictive measure that is fairly cheap. Now for the simple statistical analysis.

We are after correlation coefficient (CORREL in Google Docs Spreadsheet) . Next we square it and display it as a percentage ("The square of the coefficient (or r square) is equal to the percent of the variation in one variable that is related to the variation in the other." from http://www.surveysystem.com/correlation.htm) The smaller the better. In my case it was .1% so I think it's a keeper.

One trap I fell into, and still do at times, is the old accuracy/precision trap. I have already described this:

I am sure there is quote out there, but here is my general rule: let the level of precision of a number be based on its accuracy. Accuracy of an estimate is always low so please don't use decimals (precision) If you don't understand, please read this explanation of the difference between precision and accuracy.

In my case it isn't estimation as much as it math. If you spend hours getting your predictive measure (i.e. calories consumed) you are wasting precious time. Let me give you an example. SparkPeople keeps my calories to 1/10 a calorie, but what if round my calories to the nearest 100....my correlation changes to .02%...yes in actually gets better (its a math trick...given different sets of data it could have gone .08% the other way) but the point is .08% or even .8% isn't worth the time it took to write it. If I round my correlation to the nearest whole percentage they both are 0% or practically perfectly correlated. So don't sweat the small stuff and keep you mind on the goal whether it be fitting into old pants or productivity improvement.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Last Week

2009-10-19T08:39:00.000-04:00

Using a One-Handed Clock to Convey Project Goals

A neat way of doing this basic task

Our Biggest Enemy Isn’t Developers Who Refuse To Move Forward, It is Developers Who Pretend To Move Forward

Best title I have read in months

We must ship now and deal with consequences

Better article than Martin's one that inspired it.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Last Week

2009-10-05T11:03:00.000-04:00

An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth
A good explanation to web application bandwidth.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Last Week

2009-09-28T08:13:00.001-04:00

9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You

People sure are a funny bunch.

Rich, Black, Flunking

Fascinating story about a researcher's conclusions and the negative reaction it caused.

Where The Buffalo Roamed

I find this interesting. For those to lazy to read the farthest you can get from a McDonalds in the contetental US is 107 miles and can be found in South Dakota.

Review of "Traitor to His Class"

2009-09-18T08:57:00.004-04:00

Subtitled "The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt" by H.W. Brands.

I long book (over 800 pages) about the president who served the longest (just over 12 years). The book was well written and gave great insight into FDR and how he was a master politician with a view of expansive government control. If you want to know why we have such a large government know all one needs is to read this book. He envisioned government in ways presidents before him never had. He was definitely a master politician and served us well during WWII, but his legacy is felt every paycheck deduction.

I would only recommend this book to people who are serious about history as 800 pages about a single man can be daunting. I had a hard time finishing it. I don't blame the author, but my attention span. I got a little sick of FDR somewhere around page 650.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Last Week

2009-09-07T09:25:00.001-04:00

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

This is fascinating. 67 petabytes (that's 1,000 terabytes) for under $8K! A knowledgeable engineer responds - Sun engineer responds to the Backblaze "Petabytes on a budget" design

Things Every Programmer Should Know - Edited Contributions

Lots of little articles that have something important to say.

Economics in One Lesson

A book in HTML form that drills some holes into what you hear on news programs about the economy.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Last Week

2009-08-23T07:26:00.000-04:00

Fun With Statistics - Veneer of Verisimilitude Edition

I have always hated precision mistakes. Now to use verisimiltude in casual conversation :-)

Chart of the Day: S&P500 P/E Ratio

It's easy to see why the stock market was due for a crash.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting this Week

2009-08-15T07:21:00.001-04:00

What makes a ‘good’ programmer?

Interesting take on an old question. I like the baker and cook prototypes. I tend to be more baker than cook.

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

This is the best article on healthcare I have read ever and it comes from the CEO of Whole Foods.

Kanban In Time-Boxes: The Cadence of WIP and Sprints

Good article that shows how iterations can lead to utilization and how iterations can be used with a Kanban system as a delivery time frame. Lots of good diagrams and explanations.

Review of "1789"

2009-08-09T11:01:00.003-04:00

Subtitled "The Threshold of the Modern Age" by David Andress. The book's goal is best quoted from the publisher, Macmillan:

T
he world in 1789 stood on the edge of a unique transformation. At the end of an unprecedented century of progress, the fates of three nations—France; the nascent United States; and their common enemy, Britain—lay interlocked...David Andress reveals how these events unfolded and how the men who led them, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, and George Washington, stood at the threshold of the modern world.

I did learn some interesting things while reading it's 398 pages. Taxes in France of the 1780's where paid almost completely by the lower end of the populace as the royalty and rich where mostly exempt from taxation. Also, France was completely broke and this as much as anything led to their revolution. In England, Thomas Paine's writing were so incendiary that he had trouble finding publishers. For his part two of the Rights of Man he had to sign off as publisher to give the actual publisher protection. Cornwallis, after failure in war with America, went on the oversee India and then Ireland with some success.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is well written and full of history, which I love, but I didn't like this book. I think that this book might be too advanced for me. Maybe if I knew more of the details of English, French history of the 1780's I would have been able to see deeper meaning meant by the author. As it was, I just picked up some interesting tidbits and the rest mostly rolled through the brain.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Yesterday

2009-08-09T07:52:00.003-04:00

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Quite long but full of good information. If you still believe markets are efficient then please read this. If not then just browse it for some cool graphs.

Exceptions: The Airbags of Code & Defensive Programming, or Why Exception Handling Is Like Car Insurance

This first one links to the second one. They both cover roughly the same subject but slightly different and they are short. Basically is you use an Exception to handle a predictable case (like divide by zero) you should consider a different career.

2 steps to improve your website load time by 50%

I never heard of Content Delivery Network before this post. The concept isn't new, but the fact that Amazon cloud supports this so cheaply is shocking. I guess there is more out there than I have time to learn.

Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB

Another DB I have never heard of as well as a list of non-relational DBs with details on MongoDB.

Lean Primer [PDF]

A good, long paper on Lean that covers the subject well.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-29T17:35:00.001-04:00

Traits That Make A Good Development Manager (guest post)

Great list for anybody who is or wants to be a manager of developers.

Where does the money go?

A graphical view of where the average consumer spends their money.

My ideal IDE

Good wish list. I hope VS 12 does it :-)

Incremental Delivery Through Continuous Design

Good article and a better practice.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-24T19:11:00.001-04:00

Differences in Beliefs Results in Differences in Approach

Quite long, but the author makes some good points. I agree that often Scrum can miss the boat by leaving too many things up to the team. Many I have worked with would be lost in such a situation. I believe process is what you do. If everyone on the team follows a completely different process then improvement will be limited if not impossible. Like the author, I think good management is essential to improvement and much of Scrum seems to be to limit management. I think this inherently places limits on the Scrum team to improve. I think it is due to the history of so much mismanagement in software, but 180 degrees from wrong is still wrong.

The Principles of Product Development Flow

In depth review of The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen.

Locus of Control

From the short article "Locus of Control (LOC) is the belief one holds about who or what controls events – oneself (internal) or factors outside the control of oneself (external)". I have at times been both. I wonder what that makes me?

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-23T19:43:00.001-04:00

My students forged the notes. I turned them into a lesson plan.

This is brilliant! Kids writing excuses notes as part of class!

Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

Tom DeMarco in a 2 page opinion piece has some strong opinions. He starts out slamming his 1982 Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation book. He then writes these gems

"To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value?"
"Software development is and always will be somewhat experimental."

Lessons in Software from Mike de Libero

I'm a sucker for top 10 lists:

Lesson 1. All software is flawed.
Lesson 2. Check-in often.
Lesson 3. Tests, gotta love them.
Lesson 4. Refactor, check-in and repeat.
Lesson 5. Coding is easy, humans are tough.
Lesson 6. The more eyes on your code the better.
Lesson 7. Keep learning and improving.
Lesson 8. Simple is beautiful.
Lesson 9. Learn software development not coding.
Lesson 10. Think about your audience.

Review of "American Lion"

2009-07-21T13:28:00.003-04:00

Subtitled: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. The subject was interesting. He was our seventh president. He came from humble beginnings as his father died before he was born and his mother and brothers died during the revolution leaving him an orphan at age 14. He was struck by a British officer during the revolution which gave his his distinctive facial scar which can be seen on the $20 bill. He won a convincing victory over the British at New Orleans during the war of 1812 even though the war was technical already over. He was the first to lose an election (1824 to John Quincy Adams) after having the most votes due to his rivals joining forces (Henry Clay became Secretary of State) in the House. He was quoted by future presidents (e.g Abraham Lincoln, FDR) and has a statue less than 1000 ft from the back of the white house.

Unfortunately the book didn't live up to the subject. I found myself getting confused as the author would jump backwards and forwards chronologically without much warning. He also quoted quite heavily from letters of the time, that I found difficult to understand, with little explanation. He spent a lot of words on family relations and less on important historical events of the time. I have not read another book on Andrew Jackson, but I would hope there is a better one out there. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times looks promising as it got slightly better reviews at Amazon.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-16T19:18:00.000-04:00

Uncovering Better Ways of Developing Software by doing it and Helping Others do it

I liked the summary of Gerald Nadler’s book from the mid 1990’s, Breakthrough Thinking: The Seven Principles of Creative Problem Solving. Nadler's seven principles:

1. Uniqueness

2. Purposes

3. Solution-after-next

4. Systems

5. Limited Information Collection

6. People Design

7. Betterment Timeline

against kanban

A well written critique to the Kanban craze. He biggest beef seemed to be that without iterations he couldn't tell the business when he would deliver. I think Kanban (or something like it) is the future of software process as I do not see the need for iterations and forcing the customer to split their needs into a size that fits the software team's chosen process. The software team should take the business need, give a date range (with a probable date) and then deliver it as fast as possible using best practices (e.g. TDD). Iterations are not a necessary component. For a detailed response read: Response to critical article on Kanban.

Stack Overflow Architecture

Covers the architecture of Stackoverflow.com and gives it fairly high marks.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-15T19:31:00.000-04:00

Two Timely New Tees

The first one is precious!

free eBook “12 Things to Shorten Your Lead Time” [PDF]

A good short read that will help most people. In summary here are his 12 things (for detail read the PDF):

1. Measure, measure, measure
2. Increase quality
3. Reduce rework
4. Frequent releases
5. Stop working in parallel
6. Shorter stories
7. Visualize and manage flow
8. Rigorously cancel meetings
9. Continuous deployment
10. Shorten product management
11. No single point of failure or bottleneck
12. Leveling work

Where Has All the Income Gone?

Long, but thorough article that shows how easy it is to misunderstand statistics. In conclusion "Careful analysis shows that the incomes of most types of middle American households have increased substantially over the past three decades." The richest 25% have gotten richer, but the middle class hasn't done as bad as many politcal people might lead you to believe.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-14T20:02:00.000-04:00

Kanban Is Process Control, Not A Process For Adding Value To WIP

Does a good job of explaining what Kanban is and is not. I love the quote:

“the kanban is an organized system of inventory buffers and, according to Ohno, inventory is waste, whether it is in a push system or a pull system. So kanban is something you strive to get rid of, not to be proud of”
- Jeffrey K. Liker, “The Toyota Way”, p. 110.

Built to Fail: How companies like Google, IDEO, and 37signals build failure-tolerant systems for anything!

Author makes the point that handling failure is key to success of a start up. I would argue that it is key to success, regardless of what you are doing. How you deal with failure is a good predictor of success. The best in any field have seen more failure than success.

Securitizing Teens

I have never heard of this idea. I am not sure what the ramifications are, but I like it!

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-13T19:26:00.001-04:00

The Three Types of Change

Jurgen does a good job in this one. He defines three types of change in a complex system (closed, contained, open-ended) and gives examples plus a personal story to boot.

Kanban vs Iterations

The author shows how Kanban solves some problems he has had with iterations. I think iterations was a good step when the starting point was waterfall, but I think everyone's goal should be to abolish iterations as they produce more waste than they are worth.

Lessons From My First Attempt At Bringing Agile Into A Non-Agile shop.

Most interesting that they wound up ditching iterations.

The DFT “à Pied”: Mastering The Fourier Transform in One Day

Good explanation of Discreet Fourier Transform with code to boot.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-11T19:50:00.001-04:00

Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis

A 6 page article on William White, a former BIS economist, who was critical of Greenspan's policies. A string of gems: "[White's team]...observed the real estate bubble developing in the United States. They criticized the increasingly impenetrable securitization business, vehemently pointed out the perils of risky loans and provided evidence of the lack of credibility of the rating agencies....predicted the disaster, and yet not even his own clientele was willing to believe him.... the central bankers knew exactly what was going on, a full two-and-a-half years before the big bang... BIS reported that the index for securitized US subprime mortgages had fallen sharply in the fourth quarter of [2006]...At the London G-20 summit in April, the group decided to promote a crisis-prevention model based on White's theories."

He has come out of retirement to help instruct those who had ignored his advice. There is a cool graph, titled "The Curse of Cheap Money", embedded in the article.

Relearning: The Productivity Problem that We're Not Supposed To Talk About

I fascinating look into code solubility (I had to look this up). Gem "One of the worst mistakes that programmers make in writing code is in failing to recognize that more productivity will be spent over the life time of code navigating through the code than will be spent writing the code"

Better Now Beats Best Later

This is so true! I have done this too many times to count.

Why the Brain Craves Exercise and Sleep

A seven minute interview/overview of "Brain Rules" that covers roughly half of the book.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-10T18:45:00.001-04:00

Why Does Chrome OS Make Sense?

Kent makes a good point that I did not see.

JavaScript Expression Closures and Why They Rock

I didn't get it at first, just as he said, but the ability to delegate functions inline is powerful and the syntax is clean.

Robert C. Martin's Clean Code Tip of the Week #10: Avoid Too Many Arguments

A cute story with a good point. I wonder why we programmers feel that bad code is faster when experience has taught us that it isn't.

Review of "Blink"

2009-07-10T08:30:00.002-04:00

Subtitled "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell.

A short, interesting read that was filled with stories and studies that made you think. The opening story is fascinating. In 1983 the J. Paul Getty Museum purchases a kouros (small ancient Greek statue) for $10 million. They did every thing you could think of the verify it's authenticity. When they showed it to art experts they immediately felt it was a fake, which wound up being the truth. The theme of the whole book is basically stories and studies like that. The brain can do amazing things with short slices.

The next story is about John Gottman and his ability to accurately (95%) predict if a marriage will last 15 years by just observing a couple for 1 hour. He measures emotional slices on a scale (SPAFF) and used the results to predict failure. Another amazing study, by Steele & Aronson, had African-American students take the GRE. One group answered questions about their race pre-test and did half as good as the group that didn't! Another interesting thing was the implicit association test(IAT). The author whose mother is Jamaican took the race IAT and it showed he was biased against blacks. The last story is about classical music. Since instituting screened auditions the number of women in orchestras has gone up 500%. Even women judging women playing were biased if they saw the women before she played.

I'm not sure I learned much from this book but it was enjoyable.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-09T18:05:00.002-04:00

The Power of U

This post starts with calligraphy then factory floor setup then change management then personal change. Next is my favorite part "The four stages of competence" then a high level review of a book Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges. It ends with a picture of a horseshoe. He deserves credit for tying so many things to a single vowel.

A Dubious Foundation

A long article that brings up many scary points. The one the sticks with me is "The magnitude of recent growth in the monetary base is literally moving off the charts, having increased from about $870 billion to almost $1.7 trillion in the last nine months." I see double digit inflation in our near future.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-08T19:25:00.002-04:00

T-Shirt Estimation

A good write up on estimation in a Lean (no iteration) software process.

The Nanny Nation

A review of a new book by Barry Ritholtz, Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy. In the review are some interesting tidbits, like 1971 was a watershed moment as it was the first time the US government bailed out a private company (Lockheed) and the bailout of Chrysler in 1980 stopped the market from correcting the US automotive sector. I might have to read this book.

PMI: US Home Prices Likely Lower In 2 Years

I'm glad I have NO plans of selling my houser anytime soon. This graph also shows how out of bounds the housing prices are compared to GDP.

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

I didn't think they would go there, but they went there. It is a crowded marketplace, but they do have good name. Now can they live up to it?

Refactoring challenge Part 1 - Examination

You have to respect a developer when they post their code and let others shred it, then repost it and shred it themselves. It is a good lesson and I look forward to his journey to clean code.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-07T18:18:00.000-04:00

On Hearing and Speaking the Truth

I have worked in both types of places and find most fall into area #2.

Michael Lewis on A.I.G.

A fascinating 5-page story on how AIG was involved in the gobal financial meltdown. It just goes to show that bad management is bad business.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-06T19:00:00.001-04:00

So You Want to Buy an American Car?

4 out of the top 10 cars with the most domestic content are made by Toyota (with #1 being the Camry).

Lessons in Software from James Waletzky

A sensible top 10 list (for detail follow the link):

Lesson 1. Keep it simple.

Lesson 2. Define ‘done’.

Lesson 3. Deliver incrementally and iteratively.

Lesson 4. Split scenarios into vertical slices.

Lesson 5. Continuously improve.

Lesson 6. Unit testing is the #1 quality practice.

Lesson 7. Don’t waste your time.

Lesson 8. Features are not the most important thing.

Lesson 9. Never trust anyone.

Lesson 10. Reviews without preparation are useless.

Resources on Self-Organizing Teams for Agility

Quite a list for those who have the time.

Review of "Brain Rules"

2009-07-05T09:23:00.002-04:00

Subtitled "12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and Schhol" by John Medina.

I loved this book. The brain has been fascinating to me since I studied neural networks in graduate school. This book is the most informative and readable book about the brain I have ever read. I think it is must read for anyone, especially true if you are a parent and/or teacher. The books main point is much of the brain is a mystery, but there are some thing we do know. He groups this knowledge into 12 rules.

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.

Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.

Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.

Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things.

Rule #5: Repeat to remember.

Rule #6: Remember to repeat.

Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.

Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.

Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.

Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.

Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.

Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

One of my favorite quotes comes in the introduction "If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like the classroom. If you wanted to create a business enviroment that was direclty opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle." There are many myths busted by this book as well as some points to adjust how you live to allow your brain to function better. I think we all need that.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-03T20:44:00.000-04:00

The perils of estimation

The authors makes a good point about making sure you serve the customer needs not your own.

GETting Documents From CouchDB

Pretty simple interface for an online document centric data store.

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

A good explanation of the technique with real world examples. One point that didn't get enough focus is the need for trust in the organization. Without the "respect for people pillar" this will just be a exercise in futility (e.g. the Toyota Half-Way).

Review of "The People's Tycoon"

2009-07-03T09:21:00.003-04:00

Subtitled: "Henry Ford and the American Century" by Steve Watts.

A well written book about an interesting and amazing man. Henry Ford was born during the Civil War (1863) and died after WWII (1947). He was the father of mass production, a fervent anti-Semite, and a pacifist. He created one of the largest companies in the world then almost drove it in the ground by driving out rising stars and undercutting his only son as president. He was close friends with Thomas Edison and received a Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi Germany.

His legacy affects us today. He is the father of Lean, the consumer economy and the rise of the middle class. Some of his ideas were truly weird, but his impact on last century and thus today can not be dismissed. To understand America one needs to understand our history. Henry Ford is definitely a figure worth studying and this book is a good place to start.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-02T17:52:00.002-04:00

FW: Sailing a Straight Course in a Time of Variances

A message on the Lean Software Development yahoo group by Tom Poppendieck that has a great email from Jim Womack on leadership.

Oh, You Wanted "Awesome" Edition

Funny stuff from Codinghorror.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-07-01T18:56:00.001-04:00

Canalizing Design

A great post with a new term "Canalizing" - as in like a canal.

Malcolm is wrong

Seth Godin on the future of writers and editors and how magazines and papers are dead. I think it is obvious, but I have been known to be wrong before.

Hudson River Crossings: Improving Bus Capacity

I never plan on being a commuter from NJ to NY, but this short film was extremely well done!

WIP Limits are for Adults too!

I have had the same thoughts as Alistair. This response from David Anderson basically says we need limits because that's how we do it. I think WIP limits can help when you are learning (prevents you from sliding down the path of large amounts of WIP), but I think your goal would be to not need them as your process becomes more mature. A lean practitioner blogged a similar idea as The Fifth Primary Practice of Kanban, but kinda wimped out on his original idea of "Eliminate Kanban".

Katas.MonopolyTheGame

Interesting idea: work a fairly simple problem many times so the variations will be the techniques used. Now to make the time to do this!

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-30T18:52:00.002-04:00

Immovable Object versus Unstoppable Force: Capex and the Marginal Cost of Production

Kent Beck on economics and other things. Most interestingly is that he is selling a 2 hour pair programming session on eBay! Started at$50 yesterday and after 12 hours has gone up above $200. I wonder what the final price will be?

Why the Chinese Save

This is just plain weird: "Some say that a major cause of the U.S. housing bubble was a surge in savings overseas, particularly in China, where the personal savings rate soared to 30 percent of disposable income...China’s “one child” policy, which created a huge surplus of men in the country, has driven up the cost of getting married...could account for as much as half of the increase in the country’s household savings since 1990."

The Ricci riddle and the law's limits vs. On Race, The Slog Goes On

These two columns cover the same supreme court decision, but look at it COMPLETELY differently. The second is from George Will and makes sense to me. The first makes some statements which make me tilt my head: "The two decisions are mirror images in terms of their consequences, one harming minorities and one harming whites." I don't see how one can make such a statement. I do know that the law is in for a rough road as we recover from decades of racism.

The Case for Restructuring IT

A good case that covers the reasons for the current structure as well as an appeal for change. I think it will happen as money will force it. Lean won manafacturring and it will win in IT as well.

The Toyota Half-Way

Points out that without respect for people there is no way you're getting any benefit.

On Business Maturity

Good post with an interesting question at the end "Is what I wrote above the case? And if so, how should that impact the way we test software?"

How maths killed Lehman Brothers

As I like to say "Do the math!"

The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us)

The author makes a good point. I happen to think one-size fits all is a bad idea with technology.

How we do MVC – View models

Takes the popular MVC pattern and shows you their approach.

The void is invariant

Details on the CLI that make sense.

New Features in C# 4.0

The 12 page document is the first link on the page. It is a good summary of the changes in C# 4.0 with examples. The changes can be summarized thusly: Dynamic lookup, Named and optional parameters, COM specific interop features, and Variance.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-29T19:52:00.000-04:00

Vacuum tubes populate unique chessboard

This is neat!

Fighting Fabricated Complexity

I like the term fabricated complexity and I believe it is a major component in most systems.The post has some good points but it does go quite deep on metrics so beware.

Real World Refactoring

Some decent code that the author refactors and makes even better.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-27T20:13:00.000-04:00

One day in Kanban land

A great way to describe a Kanban software process. I'm not sure why there is a person who only does deploy, but it's still a good story.

Responsive Design

Video of a talk by Kent Beck (>71 min). I particularly liked this gem "Design = Beneficially Relating Elements". He analyzed data from Gump and found that there is a power law distribution for length of builds and time of runs for failing tests. He says this distribution is it lots of places (e.g. number of incoming calls into an object and size of methods). He thinks it's interesting, but doesn't know what it means other than some of our metrics wisdom must be rethought. I agree.

Lessons learned in 30 years of programming

Starts off with his most negative people series Greg the secretive, Jon the incompetent, Gary the not invented here, and Roger the refactorer. This is followed by good advice summarized here (the details are worth reading):

1. It pays to share everything you know.
2. Give people credit, even if they don't deserve it.
3. Don't play any blame games.
4. When the code is good enough, stop working on it.
5. Work hard.
6. Lighten up.
7. Take time for yourself and your family.
8. Keep studying.
9. Keep regular hours.
10. Don't fool with fools who'll turn away.

Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained [Lifehacker Top 10]

Good ideas to try.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-26T20:54:00.001-04:00

What is Woot?

This is perhaps the most enjoyable FAQ I have ever read. Read it and it will bring you joy!

Google Voice: Cloud Meets Cell

This guy sees big things coming from Google in the mobile landscape.

The 20 Most Practical and Creative Uses of jQuery

Some fascinating ways to make web sites do cool things.

Why are There 60 Minutes in an Hour?

I never knew that the Sumerians used a "...sexagesimal (base 60) number system" by using the parts of the fingers (minus the thumb) to count to 12 on one hand. Sometimes, history is more fascinating than fiction.

The Climate Change Climate Change

I chose not to find time to fully explore climate change, but I do know we humans tend to be a bad predictor and manager of nature.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-25T18:42:00.001-04:00

The iPhone Software Revolution

When Codinghorror first tweeted that he thought the iPhone was more important than the Mac to Apple, I quickly dismissed him as a fad follower. I have come to realize that he is definitely correct and this post lays it out very well.

Elements Of Project Leadership

Short and to the point. Communication and understanding goals and means get you far.

Is Every Moment Paired & TDD-ed?

A great post on why you should always use your judgment and not follow some "rule" without ever really understanding the goal.

Seeking: Checklist for a Sense of Urgency

Good quotes and a list for transformation:

Establish a sense of urgency
Form a powerful guiding coalition
Create a vision
Communicate the vision
Empower others to act on the vision
Plan for and create short-term wins
Consolidate improvements and sustain
Institutionalize the new approaches

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-24T17:11:00.002-04:00

Be The Change You Wish To See

Repeating good advice never gets old.

Requests to the Right Ear Are More Successful Than to the Left

Not very scientific, but it sounds pausible.

50% Time

I think to be great you must want it bad enough to dedicate this much free time to it.

The Funny Thing About Waste

A fairly long article about waste and how it is all perception. It ends with one of my favorite quotes "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." that I can now atttribute to the author, the French poet Baudelaire, as opposed to the movie, The Usual Suspects, I remember it was used in.

QTB: Agile Adoption - How to stuff it up

Good notes on a talk by Martin Fowler on Agile adoption.

Control Charts

A new thread that starts with a good question, but then lays down the gauntlet with "...it may be time to drive a stake through the heart of Control Charts and Common Versus Special Cause of Variance in software." which brings thoughtful response 4173. This response has three links:

Control / Capability Charts on a Kanban Software Development Project - shows how he uses control charts in his team: I don't buy it, but if it works use it
An Introduction to Systems Thinking - which states "It is central to a systems approach that capability measures are used to measure performance...A key aspect of capability measurement is statistical process control (SPC)." This is straight Deming, but I don't think Deming would use them for software as you wind up measuring apples versus oranges.
Freedom from command and control - basically says targets are a bad idea, but capability metrics will set you free. I think measurement is a tool that is useful to know, but using it as a management tool is wrought with so many perils as to be not useful

I think control charts are a useful tool when faced with a process in which you can measure similar widgets. I don't see them as a useful tool in measuring or helping the overall software process as one chunk-o-work isn't really like another chunk-o-work. I have heard attempts to regulate the sizes, but then you are twisting the process to fit some preconceived goal (e.g. we must use SPC). You need a process, but it should be based on your goals, not your tools.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-23T18:14:00.001-04:00

Numbers Are Bad Liars

Gotta love an election in which "...the number of votes exceeded the number of voters"

Where Everyone's a Pig – The Value of Cross-functional Collaboration in Successful Agile Transition

An article from David Anderson that underscores the importance of inclusion in having a productive culture.

Your brain is built to deal with stress that lasts about 30 seconds

Fascinating that stress can cause so much long term pain. Even more fascinating is this gem: "The emotional stability of the home is the single greatest predictor of academic success. If you want your kid to get into Harvard, go home and love your spouse."

The Nimitz Goes To Home Depot

Gotta love the use of low tech for a complex situations.

The Sticky Matter of Ethics

A very good point. Perks are just kickbacks in disguise.

Agile Kanban Journal: Kaizens on Day 1

A personal kanban board with pictures.

The Thinking Tool called Agile

I love his first three slides!

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-22T19:47:00.001-04:00

A Toxic Paradox

Rands on culture and toxicity.

The Open/Closed/Open Principle

Interesting idea from Kent Beck: ordinary and revolutionary design. I have experienced this, but did not see it.

Inconvenient Accessibility Makes Self-Documenting Code

I'm not sure when I would use it, but I like the concept.

Christopher Alexander on the perfection of imperfection

I never did read Alexander's all the way. It looks like I missed some gems.

A new landmark in computer vision

Those smart guys at Google are at again. Pretty cool stuff.

INVESTing in User Stories

I'm a sucker for a good acronym

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-20T19:07:00.001-04:00

Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire

Good advice; when faced with a new situation don't act too fast instead Observe, Interpret, then Intervene.

A Kanban Is Just A Signal To Do Work

A good post on kanban by describing it with a series of pictures and examples. I think this is the best description I have read as it tries to not blur what it is. Kanban is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

Experiences with Kanban

An article talking about a particular project and how Scrum didn't seem to fit the bill. I agree with the stated limitations of Scrum (based on a reading of Lean SW by Mark & Tom):

Why do we have two-week sprints? Isn't that an artificial and therefore wasteful limit that batches up work?
Why do we have seven people on the team? Can we have fewer (or more) team members?
Why do we demo at the end of a sprint and not when the story is complete? Doesn't this sound like batching work?
Why do we estimate story points in an estimation session when some of those stories may not played because of reprioritization?
Shouldn't estimates be done ONLY by those working on a story? Having people that will not work on the story estimate seems like a handoff situation.
Why do we work on several stories during a sprint? Can we work on just one and reduce inventories of work?

The second page goes into how they implemented kanban. This was less interesting to me as it seemed mostly arbitrary and didn't really question/analyze why they did what they did. Stories and examples are good though as they help others with similar problems.

Responses to Ron's Latgest Kate Oneil Story

This response from DJ Anderson is well thought out and makes sense. Of course, Ron responds. I think both have valid points. I would say it depends on the situation and stories are just that...stories that try to teach. Ron does that extremely well.

The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda

It is hard to argue with his logic. I would like to hear where he is wrong.

Browser Security: Lessons from Google Chrome

I am biased as Chrome is my favorite browser, but I think their approach is cool.

Post Agile

2009-06-20T07:46:00.003-04:00

I cut my teeth as a software professional in the 90's as my division went from CMM level 1 to 3. I was a BDUF guy and would brow beat anyone who disagreed. Needless to say, I was unbearable in my youth! I eventually grew up (to some degree) and learned that I didn't know everything and began to question the BDUF mentality. I read Beck's Extreme Programming Explained in 2000 and stumbled on to Agile Manifesto in 2001. I wasn't convinced at first but the ideas bounced around for a while an by 2002 I was convinced.

I preached Agile to anyone that would listen. I wrote about it, taught it, practiced it and even lived it. I guess you could say I was an Agile disciple. My career has taken me places where agile was used in ways that I would call non-agile and in ways that seemed agile but didn't work well. I began to think that maybe agile wasn't the best way to work. Don't misunderstand me, it beat BDUF hands down, but there where things that I wasn't convinced of:

Why do we need a definite sprint/cycle time?
Why does the customer need to split his ideas to fit the developers way of working?
Why spend time on micro-estimates?

I had read a lot of Lean books back in my agile craze (2002-2005) but never could find a practical approach. I had even had dinner with the Poppendieck's and questioned how they made the leap from the Lean principles (value, flow, pull, perfection) to their lean software principles in their book. They were convincing, but I was skeptical (a common theme).

In my current career I get to wear many hats. I support live systems as well as writing new software. It took a while for me to find a process that worked. I couldn't do my one week iteration as I couldn't commit to a single day due to the multi-hat issue. My customers were not very available and features were chunky. I did have a co-worker so I could pair and TDD so I went for it. We did one hour blocks, scheduled each morning based on our work load (he had his hats to juggle as well). We still used estimation, but I found that to be a waste of time as we never used the data. We used feature slices (take a feature and define a chunk of work that was visible and could be done in less than an hour, no internal only chunks. I have examples buried in this post http://mwpolen.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html) The results were good. We met dates even though some weeks had us meeting only five times. Our quality was good and the customers were happy.

Lately I have been reading a lot on kanban (9 stuffs to date) and like the way they focus on pull. When I find myself in an area where it is not clear what is right I tend to go to the root principles. Hmmm what are good root software principles? I'm not sure I have any, so I will use Lean's as documented in Lean Thinking (value, flow, pull perfection). Value and is easy to me as agile got the community focused on that years ago. Pull seems easy as well as I always pull the highest priority item and I think the agile community has done a good job here as well.

Flow...that's tricky. Software doesn't have pieces that come together in a manufacturing sense. I think software is design so I will use flow to mean the flow of the design as documented in code. I am thinking of a flow of a river and how I don't want trees caught on any rocks in my river (which is a metaphor for my design). I like that idea...probably been used before but my google skills can't find it. Then flow is a clear design (clear river path) which is represented by clean code.

All that leaves is perfection which I like to state as continuous improvement. This one is interesting to me. The thing I have always done through my career is try to improve. Even in my BDUF days I was always looking for ways to make a better design. Agile talked about this and tended to box this inside a practice commonly called a retrospective. I was a big fan, but I have found that retrospectives are hard to do correctly. I think the reason is that is you box the principle then it's easy to push the box around. I think continuous improvement has to be a focus every day, every hour. There is no time that is a bad time for improvement.

I think I have a better understanding of where I am philosophically. I'm not sure agile as a term works for me anymore. It did a great job pushing the software off of the waterfall tower. I will always think good thoughts about the movement and I think all software developers owe a great deal to those authors who banded together and pushed and pushed. Now it's a snowball picking up things they never intended, but that's the law of unintended consequences. I think lean and kanban can push us towards a being better and I hope they do as I still see lots of software that doesn't do the job it should. We have come a long way, but there is so much more to do. I guess that's what draws me to software development. No matter how good you are there is always room for improvement.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-19T19:59:00.002-04:00

Kate Oneal: Funding Susan’s Project

Good story by one of my favorite software authors.

No, 37Signals, Planning Is NOT What You Think

This post defends planning from an attack from a small shop. I agree completely. My view can easily be summed up with a quote:

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Hollow American Economy Update

Interesting that this guy has met with a state governor and that there are folks who see that you can only sell a ponzi scheme for so long before it explodes.

One Curse a Day Keeps the Burnout Away

I'm not sure cursing is the best solution, but the article is a good read on system dynamics and criticality.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-18T17:39:00.002-04:00

The Amazing Adventures of Kanban

A fun way to tell the history of Kanban.

The Interview Question You Should Always Ask

I never thought about it this way, but this guy has a good point.

Shifting The Burden And Fixes That Backfire – Archetypes Part 1

A good post on to archetypal system issues

Shifting The Burden
Fixes That Backfire

Zach the Cat as an Example of Why Businesses Should Experiment More

Freakonomics co-author with a funny story with a point.

Kanban Development Oversimplified

A good general overview of what Kanban can mean to an Agile team's process.

Software estimation considered harmful?

I have been thinking lately that estimation is a waste of time. This post has a quote from Peopleware "... the highest average productivity, with a score of 12.0, was on those projects that didn’t estimate at all." I also liked Estimation Considered Harmful.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-17T18:17:00.002-04:00

Review of Ulysses by James Joyce

This is the funniest book review I have ever read. A colleague found it because NPR did a story this morning on Bloomsday. I tried to start the book but lost the desire quickly. After reading this review I am not sure I will ever try again.

Reforming Project Management

Review of what looks like an interesting book: RETHINK: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation based on an article in HBR that the reviewer nicely sums up with:

Describe your operations in terms of desired outcomes (the whats)
Identify the activities supporting the desired outcomes
Identify the capabilities supporting each of your activities
Identify activities most critical to your company's success
Design a more efficient operating model

RE: Definition of Lean

I love the quote "Kanban is a scheduling tool – kanban by itself is hardly sufficient to qualify a work system as lean. That lesson was learned in manufacturing long ago – I hope we don’t have to re-discover this in software development!" BTW the blank image is corrected here: Toyota Way 2001 (post 4172).

Nice Examples of Cumulative Flow

I'm not in love with Cumulative flow charts, but the examples are interesting.

30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners

Fun and informative although not without opinions.

Austan Goolsbee on Colbert Report [Video]

Funny on many levels.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-16T18:23:00.003-04:00

The In-N-Out of Value

Great post on how customer value is intangible, but not invisible. Outsourcing looks like it works until you lose all your customers.

Systems Thinking: A Technique To Find Project Problems

A good overview of systems thinking.

Reminder: Know what you're measuring

A good story with a good point...measurement can lead you down a rat hole real easy.

Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002

A rare rant by Codinghorror, but at least he provides a solution.

Transactions are bad for REST

A good argument that I have no opinion on, therefore he is right by default.

Letters to Joel Spolsky

Entertaining if you know of Joel Spolsky.

Making it easier

Fun rant with a minor point at the end.

http://unite.opera.com/

As predicted by Kas Thomas, Opera 10 has an embedded web server. Some cool features are "Fridge...place for people to leave notes on your computer. Share your personal photos with friends around the world without the need to upload them. Access your complete home music library from wherever you are."

Exceptions in Constructors: How Reflection Helped Workaround an Oracle Bug

An interesting article about an obscure .NET topic.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-15T21:54:00.000-04:00

Krugman vs. Ferguson: Letting the Data Speak

An interesting look at long term interest rates and how it isn't clear what the future holds, but thinking is still needed.

How TDD and Pairing Increase Production

A great post on the different between external and internal quality and how internal quality dictates your speed and how TDD & Pairing are the best ways to keep internal quality high and thus productivity high. It is also funny and in your face!

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-13T19:52:00.003-04:00

More Judicial Activism, Please

Will reminding us that there are supposed to be a separation of powers for balance. Over my lifetime the executive branch keeps pushing and getting away with more every president. I do not think this is a good thing.

My Named Cloud Is Better Than Your Named Cloud

Ron speaking his mind and doing a good job of speaking mine as well.

Here's what Opera is about to unveil

I wonder if Kas is right and if he is what is will mean in practice. I have always thought a peer-to-peer network was more powerful than a server/client one, but I have lots of thoughts that end up being a dead end.

And Get Rid Of Those Pesky Programmers

A fun post on why programmers often clash with business and what can be done.

What Pair-Programing is Not

A good post on pair programming.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-12T16:05:00.003-04:00

Planning Fallacy

I agree completely. I prefer the wide-band delphi for estimating projects. I like buffer (via CCPM or if you prefer a book Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn) plus extrapolation for managing timelines during a project.

You’re Not Your Data Access

An interesting blog about taking things too seriously...I agree completely, but you should never use regions! :-)

AML (Arbitrary Modeling Language)

I to have been a UML user and advocate, but now use AML. My AML looks a lot like UML, but I don't worry about the syntax as much as the communciation.

Frog & Bike Thinkers

An simply way of breaking down the type of thinking you need to solve problems. There is no "one way" that always works.

Pushing vs. Pulling

A good article on communication pattern pros and cons.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-11T18:44:00.002-04:00

Managing WIP isn't the same as Limiting WIP: Part 2

A good explanation of how Agile started by using a small,batch push system and how Lean is about implementing a pull system and how Kanban makes a team more productive. I have found the justification for sprints and planning games to be more about making people feel comfortable versus more productive.

Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

Starts with a good introduction to Kanban as applied in TPS. I am wary of extending Kanban so literally from manafacturing to software. I believe software development is a design process and thus needs a different set of underlying principles. I think the Toyota Product Development (Michael Kennedy has a good book on it) is a better starting point. The flow is around funneling design decisions using set based design to come up with the optimal design given all the known constraints. I think we are heading in that direction, but the picture isn't clear to me yet.

Hope is Not a Risk Management Strategy

A good post on software delivery, risk management and other good stuff. This gem is worth repeating "..many teams adopting agile practices start with perhaps the worst practice of all - stand-ups. Effective stand-ups rely on a high level of trust and a willingness to put yourself out there, and to challenge others when they aren't. A team who doesn't have that [TRUST] typically finds stand-ups that end up not actually exposing impediments."

The Ins-N-Outs of Lean

An interesting look at Lean fast food.

The Seven Pillars of an Agile Team: Introduction

An interesting take on what makes an Agile team successful. I wonder if Agile adds anything?

Coding: Keep method/variable names positive

An interesting look at making code more clear by being positive.

Dreyfus Model of Kanban Adoption

Some good info in helping identify different levels. It wouldn't be hard to generalize it.

Simplest versus first thing that could possibly work

Good exploration of simple versus elegant in code design.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-10T20:27:00.000-04:00

Questioning the Hawthorne effect

It appears that the Hawthorne effect is myth propagated far and wide without any real evidence!

Dumbest Generation Getting Dumber

Sad commentary on the state of U.S. educations. Particulary distrubing is this quote "...the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers."

Classes of Service and Policies

Using classes of service in Kanban to handle backlog items of varying priorities and type sounds like a good idea. That way it is clear to all what the process is for handling various work item requests.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-09T20:49:00.001-04:00

Kanban with Pomodoro, it’s like spaghetti with sushi but it might work

An interesting idea given that I was just talking about this exact thing with a friend.

What is best, Scrum or Kanban?

Another post of comparing Scrum to Kanban. I particularly found the section titled "This is why I prefer Kanban" as I have had my doubts about iterations and estimation as must have features. I work in an support environment and the concept of iteration did not fit, so I adopted a Kanban like approach and had much success. BTW I did estimations, but never used them at the micro level and stuck with a lose high level commitment based on completion of all features with a buffer built in.

How to Engage People in Kaizen

Good advice on any improvement effort.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-08T21:27:00.000-04:00

You're Only as Busy as You Want Yourself to Be

Jurgen's latest is a good one. It is tough for control freaks like me to grasp, but it can happen.

Pair Programming: So you don't want to do it…

My experience agrees with this completely. Changing the way you do you work is always uncomfortable, but don't let that discomfort stop you from doing a clear best practice.

Engineering or Customer Service which is more important?

A good short post with a point.

An End of an Era for the Lean Community?

Although this post is aimed at manufacturing, I see a strong parallel to software. Winning the idea battle is a good start, but just a start as legacy has power.

High Test Coverage Ratio is a good thing, Anyway!

I am often worried that people dismiss 100% test coverage as "impossible/ivory tower/a good goal". I have worked on projects where 100% test coverage was the starting point and MC/DC coverage was the goal. When you have test coverage so many things are easier, like refactoring critical sections of code. The goal is 0 defects, because once a defect gets into a release it has many negative affects.

Health Care-Becker

One of the cogent articles I have read on the issue which recommendations. I am no expert but I highly encourage everyone to be more informed.

Kanban vs Scrum

Good opening dialog with a link to a 26 page PDF (although most pages are not filled completely). The paper has an overview of Scrum & Kanban as well as good pictures to aid in the understanding. I recommend it to anyone who thinks about the process they follow to get their work done.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-06T22:50:00.000-04:00

MythBuster Adam Savage's Colossal Failures

An hour long video the first half is a talk on failure. I never knew Adam Savage was such a good speaker.

Have We Got a Deal for You

Will makes fun of the GM plan. Bets part is near the end "Washington's "rescue" of GM began because GM is "too big to fail," and bankruptcy is (well, was) "unthinkable." Big? GM's market capitalization, $375.8 million on Wednesday, is about the size of California Pizza Kitchen's ($340 million) -- is it too big to fail? -- and one-eleventh that of Harley-Davidson ($4.3 billion). Fail? If GM has not already failed, New Coke was a success."

MSDN Updates - and RFC for you

Interesting on two points, one that if you care you can help shape a better MSDN and the other is in showing different web design ideas.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-05T16:22:00.001-04:00

Six Thinking Hats And Project Management

I had never heard of the 6 thinking hats...interesting.

Ditch Crunches for Push Ups and Save Your Back

Never did like crunches, but I didn't know they are considered harmful! I am tempted to try http://hundredpushups.com/.

Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs

Some classic response to input...my favorite is #8.

What are you solving for?

This is so true. Just the other day a customer told me to cube the data and I know several co-workers who would just do that without asking why.

Three Levels of Control (Example)

Jurgen gives examples of the three levels of control.

Refactoring Exercise

Brett Schuchert of Object Mentor posted some "ugly code" and asked readers to refactor. The comments are the various refactorings.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-04T18:49:00.000-04:00

There’s an emotional lie to over planning

A short quote from Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life that rings true to me.

Waste Is As Waste Does

Starts off with more GM scary stats (last it year it mode twice the number of cars as Chrysler, but had over 4 times the staff, including 6 VPs of HR!) The best part is in the last 3 paragraphs ending with "Every time you walk through a maze of cubicles and offices to get to the factory floor to lead a kaizen event, you are probably missing the greatest lean opportunities your company has."

Bug Psychology

An interesting little story that shows how code can get bad while people are trying to "fix it".

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-03T20:01:00.001-04:00

Three Levels of Control

A post on how manager's should manage the system, not the daily actions of their people (smells like Deming). Short and has some good ideas.

Shock Therapy: Turning A Beginner Into A Freestyler?

An interesting idea, but I think it matters which type of theraphy is applied.

Deliver something of value every week

An old tale told in a refreshing way.

Collaborative Agile Contracts

Interesting idea, but the details are scarce. They will deliver more at Agile 2009, but sadly I will not be there.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-02T19:05:00.000-04:00

What's behind the Dow changes?

GM & Citigroup out and Cisco & Travelers in. That was quick!

Which refuge?

A decent discussion of the use of coercion ending with this quote "Which means that in addition to being the first refuge of the lazy, coercion is also a refuge of the ignorant."

Turn Your Project Into A Pirate Ship

Bizare title, but it hooked me with this quote "doesn't like running a business team...kind of smacks of corporate horribleness. You know, those awful, embarrassing team-building exercises that you read about in business books."

Laffer and the Portability of Knowledge

Interesting point that starts by explaining the Laffer curve then applies it to knowledge. Informational, short and pictures to boot!

Limited WIP Society

Not much there but a definition of What Is Kanban.

Breathe fire over HTTP in Ruby with Typhoeus

Any post referencing a obscure Greek god and parallel programming is a must read. Also worth mentioning is Ruby Fibers: 8 Useful Reads On Ruby’s New Concurrency Feature and Ruby-Toolbox.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-06-01T19:02:00.001-04:00

A Deep Breath

Great post on how to prevent crisis in a project. Any summary wouldn't so it justice, but I will say the key is communication.

Is Asia Becoming the Center of the World Economy?

A thoughtful look into the current and possible future state of the world economy.

Management lessons from Gears of War 2

The title sucked me in and it was worth the short read.

The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

An interesting look at programming languages.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-30T19:43:00.001-04:00

The next Google

Seth wrote what I was thinking when I saw Bing & Wave. Microsoft is truly dying.

Ease at Work

A great talk by Kent Beck in 7 fairly short videos totaling roughly an hour. Worth the time if you are a programmer. He uses one of my favorite phrases "Schedule Chicken". He also claims it takes on average 13 times for an idea to stick.He introduces the phrase "novelty vampires" in video #7.

How to Teach a Child to Argue

I have done some of this but never looked at the topic deep enough.

The Kissinger Politics Stakes Law

2009-05-29T18:40:00.004-04:00

My neighbor informed me of today's quote of the day:

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
- Henry Kissinger

I had heard a version of this quote long ago and immediately fell for it! Years later I was working on a multi-million project at a multi-billion company and noticed that the politics seemed to fairly tamed based on my own experience. Once the project went live I noticed that slowly little stupid things crept up. I turned to my colleague who had been there many years and asked "What' going on? So and so seems to be treating me differently than before..did I do something wrong?" His reply stuck with me "It's not you it's BAU!"

I have long be a fan of organizational laws. Conway's Law is my favorite. I propose a new one:

The Kissinger Politics Stakes Law

As the stakes of an endeavour increase the politics will decline. As the stakes decrease the politics will increase.

If you think about it, it explains so many odd behaviors. Why during WWII did the US Government function so well and during the 90's boom do so poorly? Why do PTA elections seem to be more ferocious than US Presidential ones? It's the hidden law we have all been witness to!

I can't be the first to see this...Google provided the answer Sayre's Law. So it seems Kissinger gets credit where credit is not deserved....how Sayre-ian :-)

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-29T17:50:00.002-04:00

Agile (Wrongfully) Assumes Craftsmanship

Great post from Jurgen! I recommend everyone in the software field read this post. It isn't long, so no excuses! Just one quote because I can't help myself:

In his book Complexity and Management Ralph Stacey wrote:
”Rules are not what make an organization function. What people do despite the rules is what brings an organization success.”

You Should Get Out More

"A study finds that living abroad for long periods of time boosts creative thinking." Now how does one convince the family? :-)

Tips for Retrospective Facilitators

Good advice. My only addition is that sentence case writing only work if you have neat white board writing. I do not, thus ALL CAPS is better than two words that no one but me can read.

Latency, Throughput, and Variance

An interesting article by Kent Beck using diagram of effects with some anecdotes to show how automation and early delivery seem to slow you down, but in the system as a whole cause you to speed up. Old conclusion told using different means.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-28T19:47:00.002-04:00

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum

An 8 page article on helath care costs. It starts with a fact that McAllen,TX is "one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care." Here are some gems:

"So here, along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Square Dance Capital of the World, a medical community came to treat patients the way subprime-mortgage lenders treated home buyers: as profit centers."
"Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. "
“When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,”
"The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes."
"Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure."
"The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future. "

Too big to fail? Overcoming size disadvantages - JPMorgan Chase

Some great points about the danger of keeping failed institutions afloat. Even better are the two articles linked in the post "The Need for Failure" &"Jamie Dimon's Straight Talk Has A Good Ring". Some gems from "The need for failure":

"It encourages banks to get bigger (or more interconnected), and it subsidizes risky behavior."
"...the solutions that have developed on the fly have done severe damage to the notion that there is a well-ordered capital structure that means something."

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Looks cool. More details and opinions can be found at Tech Crunch and O'Rielly.

Bing!

Microsoft is going after Google! Tech Crunch has a detailed look. Looks interesting and one has to like competition is a stale market.

Freestyling: Beating Agile, Lean And Plan-driven Hands Down

I love it and I agree. We are all looking for "The Answer" when we are it!

Challenging convention

An article that makes sense about marketing...this is rare for me.

I just heard a great quote

Great post on change without real change. Favorite quote "to paraphrase Brian Marick "Gone from 'this is the best project i've ever worked on' to 'thanks for making my job suck less." And it's hard to get excited about that.""

The Best Part of Lean

Reminder why Lean has the principle 'Respect For People'.

PTOM: Black-box analysis of legacy applications

Story of replacing an legacy system. Good story with lessons to boot.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-27T17:32:00.001-04:00

The Secret To Boosting Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager

My experience agrees with her statement "You know failure to communicate is one of the biggest causes of project failure, don't you?" The post reminds me of Gerald Weinberg's Quality Software Management books.

Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices – The Arrowhead Anti-Pattern

This article explains this anti-pattern well and has example code.

Assessing Agile

A 30 minute presentation on the state of IT and how getting to be more agile requires a deeper understanding of where you really are. Of course there is a pitch at the end, but it's not too bad.

The 5 dysfunctions of teams in code

I've always been a believer in Conway's law and I now know where I got the quote "no matter what the problem is it's always a people problem" - Gerald Weinberg.

I was surprised that C was #1, C++ was #4.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-26T18:20:00.001-04:00

Top 10 Lessons Learned in Interpersonal Skills

Great post on an area we all need help in from time to time. In summary the lessons are:

Lesson #1: Make Useful Assumptions
Lesson #2 Assume Positive Intent
Lesson #3: Know What You Want
Lesson #4: Meet People Where They Are
Lesson #5: Listen To Go Deep
Lesson #6: Choose Your Words Carefully
Lesson #7: Relationships Are About Perception
Lesson #8: Project and Expect The Best
Lesson #9: Keep Your Wits About You
Lesson #10: Create Change In Stages

Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices – You’re Doing it Wrong!

Some new anti-patterns (Arrowhead, Heisenbugs) and some familiar ones (Monster Objects & Utils Class).

How TDD and Pairing Increase Production

Good article debunking familiar reasons for not trying these best-in-class practices. The conclusion is worth repeating:

If you want to increase the productivity of your team, then do these three things:

write a microtest that fails before you change any code;
adopt a “no-pair no-keep” agreement;
establish a shared understanding of internal quality.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-25T21:49:00.002-04:00

Blind To The Whole

Analysis on units per dealer for Honda, Toyota, Ford & Chrysler before and after the trimming. The only change in rank ordering was that Ford went from #3 to # 5.

A Clarion Call For Leadership

An update to his "The Hollow American Economy": A Clarion Call For Leadership "a little more positive and motivating".

Why The American Civil War Is Important

Engaging and funny post on a much covered topic, but he still managed to bring something new.

In Praise of Silence

Short and to the point. I use my hammock for just this purpose.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics

Good post on web site metrics with recommendations.

The value of a fresh mind

A good post on stepping away to be more productive.

Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds

Good post explaining the wisdom of crowds and how they aren't creative.

Review of "Outliers"

2009-05-24T10:11:00.004-04:00

Malcom Gladwell's latest, "Outliers", is subtitled "The Story of Success". It is a good read with great stories, good facts and interesting theories. Given that in hardback it is only 285 pages it is definitely worth the time even though he failed in his mission to transform the way I view success. Though, I can't fault him for having a lofty goal. The book is story driven and the introductory story, "The Roseto Mystery", is fascinating. Roseto, PA was founded by immigrants from Italy and became the focus of a study by Stewart Wolf due to their abnormally low rates of heart disease. Their environment, nutrition, heritage were all ruled out. It was caused because they were a close nit community.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one, opportunity, starts with a chapter titled "The Matthew Effect" with a subtitle from Matthew 25:29. He goes into a discussion of Canadian junior hockey and how the two best teams in the best league are predominately born in the first third of the year. The cut off for each league is Jan 1, thus the kids that are just about to turn 10 are in the same league as kids who just turned 9. The biggest and fastest are selected to play more often thus they get better. It's not just sports. Kelly Bedard & Elizabeth Dhuey found a advantage of 4-12 points on the TIMMSS scores for fourth graders who were older.

This is followed by "The 10,000-hour rule". The rule is that about how long it takes to master a skill. Lots of stories, including Bill Joy & Bill Gates, but the one that stuck with me was the a study done by K. Anders Ericsson on music students at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. They divided the violin students into three groups based on ability. The star group had all put in at least 10,000 hours of practice while no one in the other two groups had. The good group was around 8,000 and the worst group was at 4,000. Is is talent or hard work? The second observation was around the richest people ever (BTW #1 was JD Rockefeller at 318 billion in current dollars! Gates is only #37 with only 58b :-). 14 of the top 65 were born in America between 1831-1840. Just old enough to be able to take advantage of the oil & railroad boom, but not old enough to dismiss it as a fad. They were in the right place at the right time with their 10,000 hours.

The next two chapters two parts titled "The Trouble with Geniuses". Some interesting stories (most notably Christopher Langan), but the one that grabbed me was about Lewis Terman and his obsession with IQ scores among children. He documented the best of the best and found that his life work was basically an error as his "termites" didn't all become the leaders of their generation. They basically fell into three groups much like the violinists. The next chapter was titled "The Three Lessons of Joe Flom". The three lessons were "The importance of being Jewish, demographic luck & the garment industry and meaningful work". The chapter was interesting and showed that success isn't predictable. The best law firms of the time passed on Joe Flom, but being from a hard working family and willing to take any work laid the ground work for the opportunity of the 1970 corporate takeovers legal boom.

Part two, legacy, starts off with "Harlan, Kentucky", but I would have called it culture of honor after the book where he got the idea. The chapter can be summed up in the fact that your heritage (going back generations) effects who you are in profound ways. The next chapter, "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes" continues this idea in a discussion of world cultures and their effect on airline cockpits. Cultures with high Power Distance Index (PDI) had higher rates of crashes than one's with low HDI. I'm glad they figured it out before I had to get on a plane with a Brazilian (#1 HDI) crew :-)

The next chapter is "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" which has some fascinating facts. Rice paddy farmers work an average of 3000 hours a year and the case is made that hard work is highly correlated to good scores on math tests. The TIMSS test has a questionnaire with 120 question. Erling Boe found that he could predict TIMSS outcomes based on the number of questions filled out in the questionnaire. The is followed by "Marita's Bargain" which tells the amazing story of the KIPP Academy. The part most interesting to me was the work of Karl Alexander. The city of Baltimore gave CATs at the beginning and end of the school year. They found that the poorest kids did the same (+189) if not better than the richest kids (+184) during the school year (the best performers where the middle class +214.) During the summer though the poorest kids gained 0.26, where as the richest kids gained 52 points!

He ends with a touching personal story, "A Jamaican Story", about his parents and his mother's parents. It is amazing and if you read nothing else it is worth the time of getting the book out of your local library just for these 16 pages. All in all a good book and one that makes you challenge assumptions we all make from time to time.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-22T17:17:00.002-04:00

Understanding the President’s CAFE announcement

Very long and detailed. If you want to be informed please read.

Tesla now worth half GM's value

How far the mighty have fallen.

Jumping The 20 Fence

Good read. Some good stories with a point to boot. "...by “winning” I mean the client and their clients were stoked, and it literally made people cry...one of our User Acceptance participants (an actual rep) started to cry. "

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-21T17:44:00.001-04:00

60 Second Guide ot the US Budget

A picture is worth a more than a thousand words in this case.

The Hollow American Economy

His draft paper is a good read. While I'm not sure manufacturing is the only answer the paper has these gems:

"While Bernie Madoff will rightfully go to jail for his crimes, it can be argued that our entire economy has become a grand pyramid scheme – borrowing money we don’t have to buy real estate at ridiculous prices, to make money by selling it to someone else at an even greater price, and on and on until we inevitably run out of buyers and reality sets in – we have way more houses than people who really have the money to live in them and, like all pyramid schemes, the whole thing collapses. Only this has been a government sanctioned pyramid scheme – government urged for that matter – and the perpetrators are not going to jail – they are being made whole with even more borrowed money."
"Very important questions must be asked and answered: If manufacturing cannot compete with American wage rates, how is it that Toyota and Honda do so well? Can legacy costs for old union agreements really account for the entire gap? Or is there more to it than that? What is the reason for the disparity between publicly and privately held companies – why do the privately held companies do so much better, and why are they less apt to outsource? "

More Good News

Hopefully this economist knows what he is talking about :-)

Shocking Survey Results about Performance Appraisal

I agree with this completely. I wonder when organizations get this simple fact.

RunPee.com Suggests the Best Movie Bathroom Breaks

A web app designed just for me!

Chartle.net Creates Venn Diagrams, Interactive Maps, and More

Looks cool.

The perils of not logging out

A 3 yr old buys a $15K digger on an auction website!

The Coming California Bailout

Will is particularly diatribic in this one. California is typically the leading indicator for political reform. I see higher debt and taxes for all.

Comparing Kanban to Scrum

Some good points. "Scrum like all early (first generation) Agile methods really do not change the project management paradigm very much." Kanban might be the next step in the evolution of software development. The key is to think of it as a step that is built upon/using good ideas of today (e.g. TDD).

CopyPasteTool is a Tiny, Dead-Simple Clipboard Helper

Small download and simple usage for those of us who live by copy and paste.

C# 4 and the dynamic keyword - Whirlwind Tour around .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2010) Beta 1

A good description of the the "dynamic" keyword in C# 4 also some references to other dynamic languages as well as a high level review of the new DLR.

Clean Code and Battle Scarred Architecture

Most interesting to me is his formula "comp(f)² X (1 – cov(f)/100)3. + comp(f) Where comp(f) = the cyclomatic complexity of the function f. and cov(f) = the unit test coverage of function f." He aims for .1%. I wonder why such a complicated function is necessary, although I like the idea of a simple metric to keep a system from having a hidden ogre.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-20T20:44:00.001-04:00

Measuring Perfomance on SCRUM & Re: Measuring Perfomance on SCRUM

Age old bad question and a rather decent follow up. Responses worth reading 38623 & 38638

Getting to Zero Defects

I didn't learn much, but I thought this post was well put together.

Metrics, Schmetrics & Metrics, Schmetrics - II

Good posts on metrics the good and the bad. Part II provides a good example of a project dashboard. I have been doing something similar for a few years and highly recommend it.

Kanban is a tool for tapping people's potential by fostering creative tension in the workplace

Has a good quote The Birth of Lean, a book I think I might like.

Australian doctor uses household drill to save boy

There is nothing more fascinating than reality.

ASP 4 - Whirlwind Tour around .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2010) Beta 1

A good synopsis of C# 4.0 with examples. He covers Interop & COM changes in detail with CLR and DLR and BCL, oh my!.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-19T18:25:00.000-04:00

Everybody's Lying to You

The Motley Fool at its best! "Lie No. 1 -- Consumer spending will solve our problems... Lie No. 2 -- Housing will bounce back... Lie No. 3 -- (Insert name here) is too big to fail."

The Best Advice I have Received

Some interesting advice. My favorite is "If you get to thirty and you still think persuasion is about making a logical argument, you have already lost"

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News & The rebirth of news

Good articles on the potential future of news.

New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch

Fascinating all of the things you can control on their cloud. This cloud idea has some legs.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-18T17:51:00.001-04:00

Must read book: Brain rules

I have placed a hold at the library already. The author has a website (http://www.brainrules.net/) and a blog. Brain Rules for public speaking is particulary interesting and short. Here are some teasers from the review:

Sleep makes your smarter - your brain processes information you need in your sleep
Exercise makes you smarter - our brains and bodies work best when moving
There is no scientific basis for how schools or courses are structured
The left vs. right brain thing is waaaay overblown
True multitasking is biologically impossible

When there's disagreement on feedback data

Some decent sounding advice on giving negative feedback.

Survey for Software Quality Attributes - Where Should We Focus?

I'm not a big into Quality Attributes, but I have found them useful in certain situations. The post has a nice Excel spreadsheet that would be useful if I need them again.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Book Review

Looks like a good book as it parrots many ideas I have. "Use before Reuse" was a term I used back in 1996.

Why Isn't My Encryption.. Encrypting?

Latest by Codinghorror is a good story and a lesson in "Understand All Parameters to Library Functions".

The Death of Richard Dawkins

A short story by Steve Yegge. It is humorous, a little confusing and makes me think, maybe I should just call it "Classic Yegge". I'm not sure how this story fits into his series "A programmer's view of the Universe" (part 1, part 2, part 3) I might find out in his next installment, but I might not.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-16T20:23:00.000-04:00

Making history: President Obama's call to Gov. Jon Huntman Jr.

Obama picks a Republican Governor to be ambassador to China. I'm impressed.

The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

An exploration of group sizes. The graph at the end is fascinating if it is true...group satisfaction is highest at 7 and then again around 50, with a dip in between.

Greed's Saving Graces
Will on efficient markets versus regulation. The article is best summed up in this quote "Greed is worse than a moral defect; it is a cause of foolish pricing. That is why markets know it when they see it. And when markets are allowed to operate, greed generates its own punishment." The key is information flow.

Google patent on floating data centers

Instead of SkyNet it will be OceanNet that is the ruin of civilization :-)

How to Start with Kanban

A simple overview of a Kanban process. Has a lot in common with other process improvement techniques, but the focus is on pull rather than push.

The LoC Misintegration

Some interesting points about the nature of programming languages. Introduces the term "referential transparency" and dismisses Java as impractical. All in 10 paragraphs!

Review of "The Element"

2009-05-16T07:22:00.010-04:00

I recently finished "The Element" subtitled "How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything" by Ken Robinson. I think it is worth the read as it is only 260 pages and has some good ideas and some great stories. It starts off with the title of the book and entices you with stories and a general criticism of public education as done today. He then goes into a decent discussion of intelligence with extra attention debunking IQ tests.

Creativity is the next topic. I loved the relative pictures of the planets. Some great stories including one on my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman. He ends with a great quote from William James "...if you change your mind, you can change your life." Next topic is the zone which wasn't new for me, but his history of Myers-Briggs was. He claims they were unqualified to make such a test and research shows it to be unpredictable for judging anyone. He recommends the HDBI.

Finding your tribe is next. The stories were good, but the material was lacking. I think the Internet and it's various ways of connecting with people would have fit nicely here. Maybe I should read "Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us " by Seth Godin. Next was what could be stopping you is your fear of other's opinions. Again, nothing new but some good stories.

Luck was next and it made up for the last two chapters by shining a light on "The Luck Factor" by Richard Wiseman. Wiseman identified 4 principles that characterized people who call themselves lucky:

Maximize chance opportunities
Listen to their intuition
Expect to be lucky
Don't allow events to deter them

People who call themselves unlucky have the opposite. In Wiseman's eyes luck is attitude!

Next he covers the roles of a mentor (recognition, encouragement, facilitating & stretching). He follows that by talking about a fear of age, "is it too late?" Good coverage of how age and health are affected by creativity and doing something you love, shockingly the point of the book. Next is on doing something for love or money. Nothing new there. His last chapter is a condemnation of how we run our public schools and a Utopian, highly impractical approach he recommends.

While I agree that test driven education is completely wrong, I'm not sure his recommendation is actionable. Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't met a teacher who thinks that time spent preparing the students for standardized tests is beneficial to the students. Education is tricky because it is so dependent on the one being educated.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-15T19:30:00.001-04:00

What Ms. Pelosi Knew - It's a good question, but not the only important one in this torture debate
I am not interested in either party's attempt to make the other look bad, but this article isn't about that and it had a good quote at the end " It was a collective failure in which a number of officials and members of Congress and staffers of both parties played a part . . . Precisely because this was a collective failure it is all the more important to comprehend it and learn from it."

The Invisible Hand Hoax
I always wondered about this quote from Adam Smith...now I now the REAL "TRUTH" :-)

Keeping Your Pints Honest

I can almost get behind this idea as I hate "pints" that are small, but come on...a LAW?!?

PHOTO: Ian Hall writes: "Last night I was passively

A great example of easy customer service via technology from NetFlix.

Search Options
Google had added some cool search options.

Congratulations, Google staff: $210k in profit per head in 2008
I had no idea Google was making this much and I'm a sucker for graphs!

Go Fragile! Fear-Driven Development

Some Friday humor.

Statistical Data Mining Tutorials

Not an interesting read, but a neat reference.

Why I don't use CouchDB

I almost didn't read this as I thought is was going to be a rant. I was pleased to find a well done critique that asks some good questions and provides examples of other products that do it better. I am no DB expert, but I find articles like this one informative.

The Security Implications Of Google Native Client

I did not read this as security implications typically bore me, but it was cool that Google's Native Client can run Quake!

To Test or Not to Test? That’s a Good Question

Fairly long story to get to his point, but I liked the story.

Priyesh's Law of Excessive Separation | Elegant Code

Funny and short..now to use it myself :-)

Project-wide controller survey through reflection

Cool .NET 3.5 code using LINQ with reflection...very cool.

Null Is Not Empty

Great post about NULL and C# nullable types.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-14T17:33:00.000-04:00

Comparison Shopping: The real reason CEO compensation got out of hand

Much like pro-athletes CEO's get more because of their peers, but with CEO's the peer selection process is usually skewed. This gem near the end sums it up nicely "We all want to be a little better than average, and for board members who like to think they have an above-average CEO, this may translate into the choice of a relatively favorable pay package and a set of peers to match."

Total Company Involvement

Good story and a point to boot.

Why Do Computers Suck at Math?

It is always good to review the basics, but I can't help but think we need to get to a place where programmers shouldn't care and let the computer figure it out. While computers are bad at thinking they are excellent at computations.

Tincture of Lawlessness

George Will's latest rant. Admittedly he is not objective, but the he is reliable and this is disturbing:

"California...trimmed $74 million...cost the state $5.42 billion last year...But the Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from 223,000 caregivers who are members. And the Obama administration has told California that unless the $74 million in cuts are rescinded, it will deny the state $6.8 billion in stimulus money. "
"The administration proposes that Chrysler's secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims -- and 55 percent of the company."

Present.io Sets Up No-Software-Needed Web Presentations

Cool service (free with limits). Watch out WebEx!

Anxiety or Boredom Driven Process Improvement?

I do not agree with the reasoning in this blog, but I like the graph.

TeamCity.CodeBetter Project List

An interesting list of projects to check out when one has the time.

Nuts & Bolts: Campfire loves Erlang.

Erlang love from a Ruby shop...interesting in it's own right!

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-13T19:47:00.000-04:00

Is the Stock Market an "Efficient" Market?

Long but very informative of how/why bubbles exist. Some gems "...Federal Reserve should have lanced the housing bubble no later than 2006..." and ended with "Even if the Federal Reserve could not have spotted the housing or credit or stock market bubbles before they burst, it knew or should have known that these booms could be bubbles and that if so they would burst and when they burst they could bring down the economy. This made the expected cost of the booms high, even though that cost could not be quantified...high enough to justify intervention, or, at the very least, the formulation of contingency plans to deal with worst-case scenarios." We don't need more regulation/government but we need action by the organizations we already have.

Let’s Avoid Other New Deal Policy Blunders

Good read on the past, present and future of Government spending in the name of recovery. Some gems:

"Based on budget deficits as a share of G.D.P., Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were the most Keynesian presidents with budget deficits exceeding 4 percent of G.D.P. in seven out of their 12 years in office."
"The largest Bush deficit was 3.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2008. ...President Obama and the Democratic Congress agreed on a fiscal stimulus package of nearly $800 billion in mid-February. This appears to be a true Keynesian push. ...budget deficit of nearly 10 percent of G.D.P. for 2009."

Why Jeff Bezos Is Obsessed With Waste

A good post with this gem at the top "...one of our Kaizen experts asked me, “I’m in favor of a clean fulfillment center, but why are you cleaning? Why don’t you eliminate the source of dirt?” I felt like the Karate Kid."

Bug Squash – Another Software Team Anti Pattern

Good story that I have experienced..this was preaching to my choir!

REST – Good, Bad and Ugly

Best one pager on REST that I have read.

why even defect prevention isn’t enough

A good story on defect prevention and root cause analysis.

We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner!

The winner"How to Talk to Your Doctor" is good advice.

The Evolution of a Website Design

The guy goes through his design of a new website blow by blow over 4 days. I see some flaws, but I think it is a good design. You can see the final version @ http://stackoverflow.carsonified.com/.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-12T19:09:00.000-04:00

The Epitome of Waste

This consultant dug through the Chrysler bankruptcy papers to see they had "...40 people at the average dealer to sell and take care of 1.5 cars sold per day. Plus another 3 or 4 people back at Chrysler to handle the paperwork." Toyota sold 1.5 times the number of cars with less than half the number of dealers. "As the lean community knows all too well - DIRECT LABOR IS NOT THE PROBLEM!" Great quote from Will Rodgers to boot "If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising, then they wouldn't have to advertise them."

Ignore sunk costs

Great point that is useful for everyday life.

A planetarium in your pocket

I now want an android phone...too cool!

ManagementSpeak

"He operates at a strategic level, not the day-to-day work you’re involved in. Translation: He sits in his office, reading the Wall Street Journal and playing Sudoku, and will get the credit for anything you achieve."

One of the toughest job-interview questions ever
Good story on the validity of problem questions. BTW I had never heard of the cuckoo hashing algorithm either!

John Heintz on the Lean & Kanban 2009 Conference
Kanban is the new BUZZ WORD. I haven't seen anything worth reading until this one line: Kanban is "...Limit the number of things in work to a fixed number." I'm not sure that a fixed number is all that important, but I'm not omniscient.

Axum – Introduction and Ping Pong Example

This is looking like a cool project. It in reminiscent of ROOM (Bran Selic) in that it uses Actors and Ports. I also like their attitude "Download it, use it in anger, and give the team feedback on the MSDN forum."

Debugging: Get to a stage where it works

Another good use of version control.

Sneek Peek at StoryTeller (i.e. my FitNesse killer for .Net)

Interesting tool and competition is always a good thing.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-11T17:47:00.002-04:00

The Screw-Me Scenario

Rands on meeting preperation and how to handle the time when someone tries to give you the screw. Thought proking and useful as ususal.

Vote for the national Doodle 4 Google winner

Some neat doodles from all school age groups. Look even if you don't care to vote.

Tackling the risk early on at a task level

A short story about how one person uses risk to decide what to tackle first. I recommend taking the most valuable feature slice first with TDD. Hook up the GUI last and then do basic testing before acceptance testing by the user. I have done things described in this story, but I find them to be less productive then a user slice first mentality.

Sam Maloof, master furniture craftsman
Fascinating man who builds furniture by hand and is 93. My favorite line is "He doesn’t take measurements before he starts a project."

The American Press on Suicide Watch

Good article that asks some good questions about the current state of the news media.

Why the sea is boiling hot

A post in response to We need both engineers and artists in programming which was a post in reponse to Uncle Bob's keynote at the latest Rails Conference. Even if you are now confused, this post by Uncle Bob is worth reading if you are in the software field or call yourself a professional.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Yesterday & Today

2009-05-10T20:15:00.001-04:00

Take the Initiative

Oswald Chamber's reiterating that God will not force us "We have to take the initiative where we are, not where we have not yet been."

Magic Ink

I haven't read something this good and thought provoking in a long time. If you write software please read this. The current state of UI is bad. Hopefully some of these ideas will be incorporated into tools for designers to use when building web apps. It will happen one way or another.

What happened to Microsoft?

Paul Graham predicted Microsoft's decline in April 2007. This guy further outlines the decline. I wouldn't put any money on MSFT. I think they are "too big to succeed".

Smalltalk: Our Death has been Exaggerated

RT by Uncle Bob. Shows he is open to being told he is wrong...I like that.

A re-introduction to JavaScript & Javascript in Ten Minutes

I am reading and learning more about JavaScript lately. Given that it's Google language of choice I might have no choice in the near future (when Google rules the world ;-)

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

2009-05-08T19:46:00.004-04:00

Correction: Facebook Does Not Make You Stupid
I can finally use Facebook without harm ;-)

Does WalMart Have the Right Idea?
A link to a paper that shows what I have always felt about unions in the 21st century.

Eight Best Practices for Building Scalable Systems
A concise list for scalability. I can't think of anything else to add.

The First Axum Bits Are Now Available
Looks neat...if I only had time to play with it!

Thanks to Reginald Braithwaite for correcting me on his review of the book "Learned Optimsm" that I linked to on 5/2.