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.

The world belongs to early risers. We do everything we can to delay sleeping, yet we can’t get enough of it. Yet, sometimes we do manage to get to bed early, but we fail to catch the Z’s because we are so anxious to sleep. Being a recent grad, the unregular sleeping schedules are still fresh in my memory, with the odd eating hours as well as the sleepless nights browsing the internet (”research”).
“Sleep is for the weak”, that’s what some actually believe. Well guys, I think you are very wrong. Not only is sleep very important, but due to our newfangled social and professional obligations (damn Edison and whoever invented the candle) we are also expected to stay awake after dusk and still rise a couple of hours after dawn.

I have found a few excellent articles on the subject of sleep, notably on how to become an early riser, its sequel, possibly how to annihilate sleep anxiety and finally, a wonderful article about everything you always wanted to know about sleep but were afraid to ask. The latter goes into hypothetical evolutionary explanations of our sleeping patterns WRT circadian rhythms, and how to make them fit our societal requirements, all written in a funny, pleasant style.

I do not know what to blame it on; sometimes when bedtime comes i’m “in the zone” while coding away, therefore I push back my sleeping hours, otherwise I’m often reading really interesting articles (notice the “s” after “article”) and want to get through till the end, and yet other times… I’m just losing time doing totally unproductive things (yet so satisfying).

The 3 most useful rules I find to waking up everyday at the same time are as follows (but not limited to):

1. To always get up at the same time. No matter when you go to bed, wake up at the exact same time everyday. That way you’re setting your biological clock to automatically be prepared to wake up at a thus-defined time. (i.e no sleeping in, much to my dismay)
2. If rule #1 is observed, go to bed whenever you feel tired. Let your body determine the amount of sleep you need! If your body is set to wake up at 8:30am everyday, you should be pretty lethargic at around midnight or so. Sometimes, 11 could be too late, especially after a pretty heavy workout!
3. Developing a going-to-bed ritual. Mine entails brushing my teeth and cleaning up the smorgasbord of Firefox open browsers (which sometimes actually leads me to NOT sleep!). This will cue your body to go to bed.

In preparation for my job starting on the 31st, I have put it in myself to wake up early everyday (early for me is 8:30 am!). Ever since monday, I’ve succeeded on waking up at the same time and I’m very proud of it, even though its only 4 days now! I can’t wait to start =)