Programming note
Wednesday, 13 January, 2010. Tagged with: housekeeping
My belated apologies. I found I’ve been serving a faulty Atom feed for the last little while. Should be fixed up now.
Why FogBugz doesn't have Gantt Charts
Saturday, 09 January, 2010. Tagged with: software, development
Fog Creek’s Rich Armstrong explains:
Gantt charts are great for managing projects where risk is low or measurable (5% chance that the drywall guy won’t show up for work), or where variability is low (the drywall guy can finish 200-250 linear feet of wall in a shift).
The temptation is to use the same tool to represent complex software projects, but software projects are fraught with risk (turns out the libraries you rely on have a bug) and variability (the customer called again). On a construction project, if the drywall guy gets the flu, that part of the chart might come in at 110% of its initial projected time. In software, a total unknown can triple the time it takes to do a portion of the project.
One of my ongoing revelations this past year is how desperately managers want to have an answer to the question, “How are things going?” If they’re accustomed to managing something other than software development, they’re very eager to use the tools they know (Gantt charts, Excel spreadsheets) to try to answer that question.
(Via Fog Creek’s first Developer Newsletter)
Laziness is a (business) virtue. Sometimes.
Thursday, 07 January, 2010. Tagged with: software, business
Rafe Colburn on what my previous job called “a buy vs. build analysis”:
The question people need to be asking is how little custom software can they get away with having. The ideal number is zero. If you’re working at one of those web design [firms] that rolls a new content management system for every customer, you’re doing your customers a disservice. Honestly, if you’re selling them your own proprietary CMS you’re probably doing them a disservice.
Software developers like to build things. And most developers are confident that they can provide something that perfectly solves whatever problem they’re confronted with as long as they can write it from scratch. Developers are horrible at estimating the long term costs of building applications yourself. And they have an incentive to be bad at it, because if they were good at it, nobody would let them loose to write custom software.
When you do bend the business to fit the software, you can end up writing a lot of glue code to get one API to talk to another API; to push or pull data whichever way it needs to go. That’s probably OK, when you’re dealing with a competent developer community or vendor.
The counterpoint is lack of confidence in the “off-the-shelf” solution. At my last gig, my coworkers and I preferred in-house development because we had just about zero confidence in the abilities of our vendors to provide a stable API, accurate documentation and reasonable integration cost. This collective opinion came from years of bad experience. In our minds, it was lazier to build a solution ourselves than continually fix what we bought from someone else. We were far more trusting of RubyForge and CPAN (and building on top of that) than anything that involved a contract.
Also, pray the company answer to the central question, “Do you want to be in the software business?” is either “yes” or “no.” “Maybe?” is a really scary spot to be.
In case you wanted to eat fast-food hamburger…
Tuesday, 05 January, 2010. Tagged with: technological failure, government, unintendedconsequences, food-safety
I love red meat, and I’m getting tired of reading of how utterly disgusting the industrial process of raising cows, slaughtering them and processing meat is.
Michael Moss writing for the New York Times:
Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.
The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.
Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.
I am blown away that a company selling a food product with a well-established pathogen hazard gets a pass on inspection.
Back in October, Moss had another piece about E. coli in tainted hamburger that’s also well-worth reading.
A big part of the solution is knowing and insisting on knowing where your food comes from and how it got there. If you’re committed to eating red meat, find a local butcher, a supermarket like Whole Foods that grinds their hamburger in-store without byproduct or get a Kitchen Aid attachment and grind your own.
Deliberately spending time
Monday, 04 January, 2010. Tagged with: mindfulness, productivity
I’ve been reading New Year’s related tweets and links with interest over the last few days. New Year’s and resulting resolutions make for a favorite time to rethink prioritization and life lived. I’m in that considering group. I changed jobs not quite halfway through 2009 and became a manager in October. Consequently, I’m very deliberately studying my new role, where I want to go and how I want to get there. I’m also looking at personal goals.
Three books I’ve read in the last 12 months are shaping my thinking. I recently finished Leo Babauta’s The Power of Less. I eagerly devoured Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning after his presentation at the inaugural Developer Day. After I landed the new gig, but before becoming a manager, I read Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans.
I found more value in the last two books than in The Power of Less, quite probably since most of the material is very similar to what I’ve read elsewhere. If you’re familiar with 37signals and underdoing your competition, David Allen’s Getting Things Done or even Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Babauta’s not breaking much new ground for you.
But, what I have been focusing on after reading Babauta’s book is refining my processes of time management. Despite the book not striking me as original thinking, I may be working with it best in terms of actually getting my butt in gear and establishing new habits. Enter Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and something Lopp/Rands calls the Trickle List.
After reading The Power of Less I found myself thinking of several things I want to spend time on, and get cranky about when I don’t. I decided to use one of the techniques Hunt talks about — a mental map. On it went things I already do out of habit, things I want to start doing. It’s ambitious, more for the amount of things I want to try to get to, but I’m not planning on doing everything every day, either. Nor are these things that are particularly large. It is a helpful tool for me to see what spills out as important. I’m going to turn this into my own trickle list (possibly two, split between work and home).
As the seed of this post germinated, I saw two items on Twitter. The first was a tweet from my friend Steve Burnett, leading to the One Week Digital Cleanse. In a nut, spend the first week of the year without social media or spending time on empty net calories. Perhaps that Twitter/Facebook addiction isn’t so hard to break, after all. That’s more than I care to do. Instead, I’ve distilled what I want into this: Be deliberate about how and where I spend my time. What time I do spend on Twitter or watching Hulu is predicated on completely enjoying it. When it’s interfering with the other things I want to do and enjoy, stop.
The second Twitter item was from Dan Benjamin on New Year’s Day:
The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every moment of every day. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
While the New Year is a convenient time to decide on changing life, there is zero reason why right now is not a better time instead.