<CharlieDigital /> Programming, Politics, and uhh…pineapples

Isaacson on Jobs on Craftsmanship

From an NPR interview with Walter Isaacson, Jobs' biographer:

On Jobs' father, who rebuilt cars, and held design and craftsmanship in high regard:

"He would show Steve the curve of the designs and the interiors and the shapes ... and even have pictures of the cars he liked the most in the garage. He put a little workbench in the garage, and he said, 'Steve, this is now your workbench.'

"One of the most important things he taught Steve was [that] it's important to be a great craftsman, even for the parts unseen. When they were building a fence, he said, 'You have to make the back of the fence that people won't see look just as beautiful as the front, just like a great carpenter would make the back of a chest of drawers ... Even though others won't see it, you will know it's there, and that will make you more proud of your design.'"

I can't begin to compare myself to Jobs, but I think this is a value that's important to me, personally, from a software development perspective.  There is an aesthetic and a beauty to well written code or framework not to mention the pride of the author in crafting a clear, concise, and elegant design -- even in the "parts unseen" by the end user.

I once got into a heated debate about code quality with a CEO who was, at the time, bent on fixing nail pops and seams on the walls of his recently built and painted house.  I asked why he didn't see the same need to put an effort into addressing analogous issues in our code that disturbed the overall quality and aesthetics of the codebase, which seemed to me even more important than a few nail pops.  "That's different" is the only response that I got, but to me, it's the same.  There's a personal pride in building a product with exemplary craftsmanship.  There's a team's pride to being able to walk into a code review with a customer and know that they will be wowed.  There's a developer's own pride in writing software that takes design and usability of the framework into account.

This gets lost in the age of outsourcing and rent-a-coders, but great software is still -- and likely will always be -- a craft that requires skilled craftsmans to build (of course, great software requires more than that like vision and an understanding of the problem domain as well).

Why The Office Is The Worst Place To Work

Caught this editorial on CNN this weekend:

Companies spend billions on rent, offices, and office equipment so their employees will have a great place to work.  However, when you ask people where they go when they really need to get something done, you'll rarely hear them say it's the office.

If you ask, you'll usually get one of three kinds of responses: A place, a moving object, or a time.

They'll say their house, their back porch, an extra bedroom they've converted into a home office, a library, the coffee shop down the street, the basement. Or they'll say their car, or a train, or a plane -- basically, during their commute. Or they'll say really early in the morning, really late at night, or on the weekend. In other words, when no one else is around to bother them.

Indeed, I think it's important to realize that different individuals have different productivity models.  By that I mean that certain people are "morning people" and their brains are most active and creative in the morning.  Others are "night people" where there brains are most wired and effective in the evenings.  Some people feel more comfortable with natural lighting during the day time.  Some prefer a bright working space while others prefer a dim one.

It seems counterproductive to force everyone into one model of the work environment when the preferences that maximize the efficiency of each individual can be vastly different.

And then there's the bigger issue of interruptions:

I don't blame people for not wanting to be at the office. I blame the office. The modern office has become an interruption factory. You can't get work done at work anymore.

People -- especially creative people -- need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get things done. Fifteen minutes isn't enough. Thirty minutes isn't enough. Even an hour isn't enough.

I believe sleep and work have a lot in common. I don't mean that you can sleep at work or you can work in your sleep. I mean sleep and work are phase-based activities. You don't just go to sleep or go to work -- you go towards sleep and towards work.

You aren't sleeping when your head hits the pillow. You start the sleep process. You have to go through phases to get to the really beneficial sleep. And if you're interrupted before you get there, you have to start over.

The same is true for work. You don't just sit down at your desk and begin working effectively. You have to get into a groove. You go towards good work. It takes some time to settle in, clear your head, and focus on what you need to do.

A very good analogy and I wholeheartedly agree.  At the same time, to ensure that this model works, teams need the right tools (Webex or equivalent, chat clients, VOIP, etc.) and the right people to make it work.  To some extent, it takes a good amount of trust that each member of the team understands their tasks and roles to get their jobs done without having to have a manager or supervisor constantly buggering for a status or having meetings to figure out the status of the tasks.

At least for myself, I find it incredibly difficult to work any any problem of moderate complexity without sitting down and having a solid bloc of a few hours to work on the problem.  There's nothing worse than having to do a mental context switch when one is working on a difficult problem.  Well, it's only worse when that context switch is for a meeting that's inconsequential to the tasks at hand

jQuery Conference 2010

I didn't go, but John Peterson did.

Check out his feedback from the conference.

<3 jQuery

A New Euphemism for Bad Code

Ant Death Spiral (via Cynical-C).

This is one of my favorite things about ants -- the ant death spiral. Actually, it's a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that?

This is the perfect description for bad code and bad programmers (and poorly run companies!).  Each development cycle that builds on bad code just compounds the problem until you're locked into a code death spiral of "we don't have time to clean it up" or "it'll take too much effort to refactor it" or "this is just how we do it here".  Instead, each member of the team begrudgingly (or even worse, dutifully and mindlessly marching like ants) continues to use the bad code, copy and paste the bad code, and build on top of the bad code thereby creating more bad code and more dependencies on the bad code that become inexorably difficult to refactor and extract.

WHARRGARRBL!!!11!

In programming and software development, Paul Graham captures this concept perfectly in his essay on the failure of Yahoo! and why they fell to Microsoft and Google:

In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.

But not all hope is lost,

Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, "with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest."

Avoid the ant death spiral!  As Fred Brooks suggests in The Mythical Man Month,

Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones.  But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us.  In one set of their studies, Sackman, Erickson, and Grant were measuring performances of a group of experienced programmers.  Within just this group the ratios between best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space requirements!  In short the $20,000/year programmer may well be 10 times as productive as the $10,000/year one.  The converse may be true, too.  The data showed no correlation whatsoever between experience and performance. (I doubt if that is universally true.)

Take the effort to find, work with, hire, or -- better yet -- count yourself among those programmers that can help teams avoid walking into the ant death spiral in the first place.  Address lingering issues and inefficiencies as soon as possible; fixing bad code early can yield huge gains in agility and flexibility down the line.  Never be afraid to break the cycle and call out bad code and poor practices.

Laptop Buying – For Developers

About a year ago, I caught on to Dell's refurbished laptops over at Dell Outlet and since then I've purchased a total of three four laptops from there and each one has worked out great.

My first purchase was a Dell Latitude E6400 which I used as a primary development machine as I was traveling heavily.  At the time, as configured, the laptop that I acquired was over $500 cheaper than a brand new laptop from their business channel with the addition of a 15% off coupon (which they throw out there all the time; you can check their Twitter stream for updates).  That's a huge savings.  I used it to run Visual Studio 2008 and VMWare 6.5.  It was plenty good, but with the rollout of Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, I definitely noticed a HUGE decrease in performance.  It was excruciating.

I was torn between upgrading the E6400, which I had for less than a year, by adding another 4GB of RAM and an SSD or getting a new laptop, but it just so happened that my mom needed a laptop for some contract work that she picked up.  So I turned to Dell Outlet again and picked up a Core-i7 packing Latitude E6410, purchased an extra 4GB of RAM (total of 8GB), a Muskin Calisto Deluxe from Newegg (a Sandforce based SSD), and a second drive tray from NewModeUS for somewhere around $1600 (note that this includes almost $80 from shipping and taxes from Newegg and NewModeUS) after using a 15% off coupon for the laptop.  It's a great value considering configuring the same laptop from the business channel would have cost around $400-500 more.

The E6410, with the 8GB and the Calisto SSD, is able to lay down some serious computing power.  It handles my SharePoint 2010 Enterprise VM without a sweat.  Visual Studio 2010 is far more usable now as well.  As I almost never use my DVD drive, I swapped it out for a Western Digital Scropio Black (at $80 for 7200RPM, 320GB, it can't be beat in terms of price/performance) and store all of my large files and VM images on the second drive.

I've also purchased an E4310 for my wife this year.  My experience with the E-class Latitudes from Dell Outlet has been so overwhelmingly positive, that it was a no-brainer.  It's a great little machine for the road warrior developer and now that I've felt the heft and the size, I'd seriously consider it myself (although it doesn't have an option for a Core i7 CPU -- i3 and i5 only) as NewModeUS also has a drive tray for the E4310.  She tends to use laptops for far longer than I do Her last one lasted her about 5 years now so I hope that this one can last at least as long.

Refurbished? I'm not really sure what this means.  It's pretty broad I guess, but considering that I got my E6410 in July and the laptop itself was released only in April or May, I figured that it had to be in pretty good shape.  How much wear could a laptop accumulate in two months?  My guess is that the refurbished laptops fall into one of a few scenarios (just my guess):

1. Ordered too many -- perhaps a hiring freeze or some employees were let go before IT was notified.
2. Not needed anymore -- perhaps a company went bankrupt or went out of business?
3. Some malfunctioning component -- maybe the power supply didn't work or the video card was wonky and the whole chassis was returned.
4. Misconfigured -- IT department receives shipment and finds that a batch of the laptops were misconfigured with the wrong CPU or missing other features.

I don't know the answer and I don't know why my laptop is "refurbished", but for all intents and purposes, when I pulled it out of the box, it was brand spanking new; no wear to speak of.

Dell E64xx.  I'd like to take a moment to reflect on these laptops.  I spent quite a bit of time looking into the offerings from HP as well.  In particular, the HP EliteBook 8440w and 8540w which I was also considering.  Ultimately, having had my experiences with the E6400 the first time and seeing the build quality of the E-class Latitudes, it was hard to justify shelling out the additional premium for the HP units (the pretty consistent 15% off coupons for the Latitudes at Dell Outlet are a big incentive).  Given that the performance difference between the two would be largely marginal, I stuck with the E-class laptop once I found out about NewModeUS (Dell doesn't let you configure a laptop with two 2.5" hard drives the way I wanted it configured and it was one of my key criteria as I keep several multi-GB VM images on my laptop).

Overall, these laptops have been a joy to work with.  Far better than that Lenovo T series laptops (which my sister purchased herself despite my suggestions and which I use for some clients).  The screen is bright, the connectivity is great (though no USB3, it does have eSATA and a DisplayPort connector), the keyboard is excellent (especially with the backlighting), the web cam and microphone are excellent, it has a pointer "nipple", and the build quality is top notch.  I regularly pick up the laptop one handed and there's little discernible flex; the chassis is very rigid.  I also like that the system is so easy to customize for the do-it-yourselfer.  This allows you to buy a cheap chassis (focus on the CPU) and simply just replace the RAM and the HDD.  The entire underside (a thin, magnesium alloy plate) is held in by one screw (to my surprise).

Even with the Core-i7 onboard, it isn't any noisier nor does it run appreciably hotter than my Core 2 Duo packing E6400.

I've also come to really like the overall design of the E-class Latitudes.  They're relatively thin, simple, and classy looking.  Much better looking than the Lenovos.

Dual Core or Quad Core? I struggled with this for a while as I was heavily considering one of the quad core Core-i7 processors.  However, I'm glad I chose the dual core.  I've found the performance to be excellent and the price, heat, and battery life trade-offs to be the big win.  Generally speaking, in development, it would seem that your limiting factors are the disk speed and RAM rather than the number of physical cores.  Given that the dual core CPUs have faster physical cores than the quad core CPUs, my feeling is that one is probably better off with the dual core Core i7 CPUs for a development laptop.

There was some good discussion on a thread over at NotebookReview.com with great insight on the topic.  Highly recommended read for developers in the same quandary as I was on dual core vs. quad core.

At the time, I was also thinking that having a quad core would help in terms of the VM (I was getting terrible performance on my SharePoint 2010 VM) by being able to assign two cores to the VM, but the VMWare documentation seems to advise against this (can't find it now, but there was a whitepaper on this very topic) in most scenarios.  In practice, with the 8GB of RAM and the SSD, the dual core Core-i7 has proven to be more than enough.

Suggestions for Developers. For any developers looking to get your own laptops or for small development shops, I'd definitely recommend looking at Dell Outlet and the E6410 and E4310 laptops.  Wait for the 15% off coupons and you'll get yourself a steal.  For the time being, unless you plan on getting the top of the line quad core Core i7 and you aren't concerned about heat or battery life, I'd stick with the dual core Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs.

Here's what I would do (once I've got a 15% off coupon code):

1. Buy the chassis with the best CPU and ancillary features that are important to you (web cam, battery size, BlueTooth, Windows 7, x64, etc.) that you can find in their database.  For the most part, disregard the HDD, even if it comes equipped with an SSD.  You can kind of disregard the RAM, but look for something that has 4GB in one slot.
2. Buy a Sandforce based SSD (the Calisto is a great SSD -- I've already purchased two of these).  You can check LogicBuy.com as amazing deals do occasionally surface.  Target at least 120GB.
3. Buy an extra 4GB of RAM from Newegg.
4. Buy a drive tray from NewModeUS for your chassis (do note that the drive tray is an actual SATA interface -- WIN!).
5. Buy a Western Digital Scorpio Black HDD and plug that into your new drive tray (Amazon has good prices if you have Prime).  Use this drive to store you large files and your VMs (store your source files on the SSD for speed).
6. Buy an external enclosure for whatever drive you take out of the chassis.  I've used the ACOMDATA Tango enclosures (see my review at the link) which supports eSATA.  Use this as an external drive or for backups.
7. Do a clean install with the SSD as the primary.
8. Once you have you system reinstalled, be sure to change the write caching policy to improve performance on the disk in the tray.  Follow these steps:
   1. Right click on Computer
   2. Select Manage
   3. Click Disk Management
   4. Right click on the disk and select Properties
   5. In the Hardware tab, select the disk and click Properties
   6. In the new dialog, select the Policies tab
   7. Here, you should enable write caching and you can also turn off the Windows write cache buffer flushing if you want.  Since it's essentially an internal drive now (unless you plan on hot swapping it) with battery backup, it should be pretty safe (but do so at your own risk!)

Write caching configuration

I'm not sure how the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive does in terms of large files that you'd be working with in terms of VMs, but I've had pretty good success with the Scorpio Black.

Suggestions for Dell. Get some better web developers.  Seriously.  The Dell Outlet site is barely usable.  It was terrible before they fixed it up, but they've somehow made it prettier, but much harder to use -- I wouldn't have thought that possible given the state the site was in when I first used it.

With a bit of patience (waiting for the coupon), luck (finding the right configuration for your needs), and elbow grease (upgrading a few components yourself), you'll have yourself a killer development machine at a great, budget friendly price.  My E6410 is now my primary and only development machine.