I got an email from Amazon.ca yesterday with a promotion: “Loonie Deals on Books”. The introductory text to the deal says:

Take advantage of the robust loonie with special discounts on thousands of titles. Browse through our lists to discover great bargains on new and former bestsellers across all categories, as well as perennial favourites.

Last time I checked:

CDN: 1, USD: 0.78

I got this off HackerNews today:

Clifford Stoll shoots out some gems like:

When you do something the first time, its science.When you do it the second time, its engineering.When you do it the third time its technology.    

18 minutes for a very well prepared presentation.

Een schip op het strand is een baken in zee.
[A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea.]
- old dutch proverb

Steve Yegge, one of my developer idols, has accomplished quite a feat, demonstrated at Foo Camp; porting Rails over to Javascript. However, this task took him 6 months and 2000 hours, according to John Lam, who created RubyCLR.
His two most recent blog posts, a tad obscure, were about the difficulties he encountered and some of the learnings he obtained from the experience. If you haven’t read Yegge before, his often comical approach makes him a pleasant read, with enough material dating back to the Amazon days to last for a couple of months.

This brings me to ponder on a few things:

I assume Yegge’s development effort is not to grow developer *hrm* appendages but to save other developers time in the future, a noble endeavour. Constructing software of this compexity in this short amount of time does lead me to think it has been rather grueling, and the evidence is in his mysterious tale about magic marshmallows. Should we celebrate the 11 daily hours of sweat Steve + team endured (or enjoyed) or rather despise the heroic effort of a few?

It is perhaps my software engineering formation that shapes my beliefs, but I am not the only one to think there is something to be said on this topic. I do concede that reality might require different courses of action than what is good in theory, however it does make sense that a series of burnouts will not yield any positive consequences; how does decreasing motivation, (perhaps) lowered code quality and increasing reasons for frustration within the organization measure up with a repeatable, more predictable process?

I am not criticizing Yegge or undermining any of his achievements. He remains one of my inspirations. However, as a follow up to his post on agile the Google way, this DOES smell like “bad agile.”

PS: On a side note, this is also another indication that Google is not the Valhalla of software engineers that people make it up to be. The truth is, it is Yet Another Software Company (YASC – I just invented that term, pay me royalties) facing the same, very real problems.

Hello blog.

I am back from the cave I’ve been hiding into, it’s been a while. Here’s a list of things that happened when I wasn’t there:

1. its a new year, 2007
2. Sun has GPL’d Java
3. I’m running a MacBookPro from work

Besides that, NOTHING happened in the world! Absolutely nothing, other than stuff like being extremely taken by work and life things. I’ll be posting again though.

For a start, here are some things that are in my RSS reader that kept me very productive at work:

xkcd.com steve yegge paul graham worsethanfailure peter norvig programming.reddit.com

I read some more, but it wouldn’t be good for my career going forward to have more things in my RSS reader mentioned =) my weekly reports would undergo scrutiny!

Did this picture leave you breathless? It certainly did for me. I came accross this amazing photo set by Alberich Mathews over at Flickr. I wish I had more knowledge to appreciate the pictures even better, but as far as I can tell, all the pictures sport incredible lighting and are beautifully composited. Well worth the click.