I attended startupschool about a week ago and that was quite a blast. The folks at justin.tv and omnisio have got the video transcripts up, definitely worth a watch.

I missed the major parts of two talks, and by Murphy’s law, they just had to be two of the top 3 talks I wanted to hear; Paul Buchheit and Paul Graham. We had a production server outage, so I was furiously competing for wireless access point time with 400 other geeks (and PG during his talk… XD).

I did, however, manage to catch this quote from one of PG’s slides:

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

George S. Patton

US general (1885 – 1945)

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.

Instead of reading programming.reddit, dreaming up topics and posting articles on my blog, I have instead opted to work on a CMS for my sweetheart Kristel, both to serve as her online portfolio and to be a fun small project for me to code.

Rationale

The reason why I decided to code a CMS from the ground up is obviously because there aren’t enough CMS’s in the world; who really cares about Joomla!, Drupal, Plone, Alfresco and Ion? Some even have the magic word “enterprise” thrown in there somewhere. CMS, ERP, CRM, MRP… for free?? Pffscht, let’s make another one of those 3 letter acronym software.

Kevin Barnes at Codecraft gives 3 reasons to reinvent the wheel. My personal favourite: reinventing the wheel causes reinventors to understand wheels. Additionally, having a custom made CRM out of love is unbeatable. For me, this application is an opportunity to learn a thing or two, have fun and do other things like working too hard at the office.

Fotofolio

Fotofolio is the name given to my CRM. The focus of this application is to provide designers with a simple solution to obtaining a online portfolio. As the name suggests, there is a heavy emphasis on displaying images and the application allows for much of that.

The interface and features are sparse, both to make it a straightforward and easy to use web application. A user has the ability to create and manage multiple worksets. Each workset can consist of multiple workpieces and each workpiece has an associated image. The published portion of the web application will allow the user to organize the layout according to these conceptual rules.

Technology

I decided to implement Fotofolio using Ruby On Rails. After flirting with the framework quite a bit, it was obvious that all that hype surrounding it is not unwarranted. Other candidates were Django, Turbogears and even Spring. In my opinion, for the scope of my application, only Django stood a chance. However, Rails still won out, whatever you may say, Pythonistas. Migrations rule!

Release

The first release is planned for soon, soon after Kristel’s portfolio is delivered. I do not plan to have features such as skin packs available right away. So far, the bare minimum of features is expected; i.e. putting some pictures in, displaying them on the other side. It is currently 65-70% complete.
It is expected to be an executable pile of source code rather than being an online service, and it will be open source. The license has yet to be determined.

Request

I admit that I’m a bit of a doosie with making up names. I need advice from you 3 people reading my blog about another name to give to this baby. Please let me know of any suggestions you may have.

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!