When Intentions Go Public – Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap? by Peter M. Gollwitzer et al.

On the management of software projects:

Programming management will continue to deserve its current poor reputation for cost and schedule effectiveness until such time as a more complete understanding of the program design process is achieved.

We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes — build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again.

Production of large software has become a scare item for management. By reputation it is often an unprofitable morass, costly and unending. This reputation is perhaps deserved.

On the distinction between design and production:

Software production takes us from the result of the design to the program to be executed in the computer. The distinction between design and production is essentially a practical one, imposed by the need for a division of the labor. In fact, there is no essential difference between design and production [...]

The most deadly thing in software is the concept, which almost universally seems to be followed, that you are going to specify what you are going to do, and then do it. And that is where most of our troubles come from.

On dealing with user requirements:

Users are interested in systems requirements and buy systems in that way. But that implies that they are able to say what they want. Most of the users aren’t able to.

We should have feedback from users early in the design process.

On programmer performance (compare with the essay Great Hackers by Paul Graham):

I have a question on the huge range of variability of programmer performance. Are similar ranges found in other engineering areas? [..] The variation range in programming is in fact greater than in other fields.

On the production of software:

We are starting gradually, and building up. My motto is ‘do something small, useful, now.

Large systems must evolve, and cannot be produced all at one time. You must have an initial small core system that works really well.

On testing software:

System testing should be automated as well. A collection of executable programs should be produced and maintained to exercise all parts of the system. [...] As an output of a test validation run, each test should list the modules it has exercised, and as well, should list the interfaces and tables it has tested. It is important to document success, as well as failure.

Like most people living in Stockholm (and other cities I guess) I live in an apartment building to which you have no access. Also, like most people, I work during the day. Nothing special, just normal office hours, about the same hours when your drivers drive around the city trying to deliver stuff to the empty homes of people who are at work.

Knowing that you will fail to enter the building where I live (it doesn’t really matter since I’m not at home anyway), I have tried to contact you to see if I can do a part of your work by going to your terminal myself to pick up my package.

For some unknown reason you can’t refrain from trying to deliver it my empty home. Maybe it is in he nature of logistics people inherited in genes from loyal post office workers of the good old days?

Anyway, this means I have to wait for you to fail delivery and take the package back to your terminal and then send me a message (through regular mail) that you failed. A process that takes several days.

When I walk home from work I pass a 7-eleven with a sign that says “DHL Servicepoint”. It is bright and yellow and only about 150 yards from my home (I can almost see it if I lean out through my living room window). Intrigued by the words “service” and “point” I inquired, though your eminent call center, if it was possible to have the package delivered there instead? I was hoping I could save both you and me some work (and time). For unknown reasons you are not allowed to deliver my package to your own servicepoint. Words fail me.

My second suggestion was to change the address so that you may deliver it to my workplace instead. It is a bit of a gamble since I am in meetings throughout the day and may not be around at the exact random time your delivery guy tends to show up. This was possible, your friendly call center employee told me, but we have to try to deliver the package to your empty home first.

How hard can it be? I had a crazy idea. What if logistics was all about making use of information to optimize flows of goods?
Visa DHL delivery på en större karta

That image stuck with me (and a lot of other people I guess). But interesting things have happened over the years that changed how I think about Sun:

1. Bad: At one point I got the impression that Sun wanted Java on pretty much any platform you could think of. We were supposed to have java on the desktop, server, mobile phone, client, backend, both country and western as Mark Pilgrim would have put it. The Swing based GUIs really didn’t help the user experience in the early days.
2. Good: Someone sent me an email sometime in 2005 saying that Sun was going to let people borrow a T2000 server for free. I checked prices and even though it was expensive compared to a grey box it was a major dent in the Sun-is-expensive image I had had previously. I know other people were talking about this as well even though we mainly did business consulting at the time. Must have been a marketing genious that came up with that plan. I didn’t even work with hardware and I still remember the campaign!
3. Good: Sun open sourced Solaris. This was a major one. I downloaded the DVD image files as soon as they became available. I know a lof of other people who did this as well. Never used it since even though I have looked for it.
4. Good: Zones. At one point I believe everyone I knew wanted to set up their own hosting business selling zones to Rails and PHP developers. Noone did. I don’t know why, but Linux virtualization was beginning to increase market share. Having tried both Xen and Zones, Zones felt a lot better. But everyone is selling Linux-based virtualization with Linux-based OSs anyhow (try filtering for Solaris in the list). Why?
5. Good: And now the storage thing. Having seen the bill from a government agency for their current storage solution I am beginning to think that Sun storage will have a huge impact.
6. Good: Glassfish. I know a lof of people doing Rails development and many are starting deployment on a tiny Linux VPS and then move it to a Glassfish instance once income is increasing.

So, in the end I guess Sun isn’t that enormous massively over priced giant anymore. But why aren’t people running their web apps on Sun hardware or on Solaris? I guess one of the reasons is about scaling down. There are many Linux-based VPS providers out there running on cheap hardware. The cost/Mb RAM for a VPS is tiny these days and maybe it is too costly to get even a small Sun server up and running you want to resell capacity.

So, why aren’t everyone using Open Solaris on beige boxes? Beats me. The community seems helpful. Maybe there just isn’t enough tutorials/blog articles about getting Rails, Django and Drupal installed and configured. Maybe it needs a better package system and/or setup tool for the command line?

What do you think?

(note: if everyone in my feed does this there might be a slim possibility to see all my followers looking like me. Apart from me, who will look like someone else. Ah, the excitement!).

So no, we don’t hire architects. We hire developers. In a small team, there is no room for management deadwood.

I agree completely. My view is that the title “Software architect” is a misnomer for what most architects in the software industry do, or at least what they should be doing.

It is part of the weird trend that career advancement means getting away from actual programming for some reason. Maybe that is part of a bigger problem when the only way to get a higher pay is to become a manager of some sort? A couple of years ago, most programmers I knew aimed for a project management position. Programming was a dirty job that you had to put up with during the first years in consulting.

When my title was “business analyst” I tried to do as much programming I could and I haven’t regretted that for a moment. In fact, I believe that more people from the business side should get involved in programming to get a better understanding of the fundamental principles. For example, it would be great if business people could write their own acceptance tests and with the booming trend of DSL:s you will probably get involved anyway.

If you’ve made the transition from a hierarchical environment to an agile, self-organizing team, you know what I’m saying. You won’t ever want to go back.

Absolutely. It is the same thing as discovering things like Ruby/Python/Rails: it makes you wonder what the hell you were doing earlier. In many ways I feel sorry for young software developers that go straight into Rails or similar frameworks today. They are not as appreciative as the rest of us:-)

I have been running the beta version of MailPlane which provides at desktop version of Gmail (using Webkit). Apart from keeping Gmail in a separate branded window it also provides standard mac shortcut keys as well as desktop integration for screenshots and other file related things. Pretty sweet.

I was interested to see if Prism could provide a similar experience. Prism is currently an early beta at version 0.8 so it isn’t fair to expect too much of it. The feature wish list looks great.

Launching prism and creating a Gmail app worked great. However, Prism currently has some issues:

• It consumes close to 100% of a CPU core on my MacBook which makes it unusable for now.
• Font size can not be adjusted (should be a parameter?).
• There is a white space at the bottom of the app screen which reduce valuable screen estate.

I would also like to see an option to map access keys to native OS keys (e.g. Prism forwards ⌘+r as alt+r to the web app). This would allow users to work with the application in a way indistinguishable from a desktop application. also, if there was a way to interact with files (drag and drop etc) à la MailPlane I could see how Prism could be the preferred choice of many application developers in the future.

Couple it with a stand alone Ruby on Rails app (by using Joyent’s Slingshot) and you have a whole new way of developing applications that work offline, online and in a coherent way with other desktop apps. The future is bright!

The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. As you may know the OOXML format has been heavily criticized (by many e.g. Google (PDF)) for allowing embedding of closed Microsoft-specific objects in the document standard and thus making it difficult for non-Microsoft software to read OOXML documents.

Unfortunately, SIS is an organisation where anyone can become a member. Member organizations can send participants to a working group for a fee. The current rate is 17,000 SEK (~$2,500). The day before the vote that decided if SIS would say yes to OOXML in the ISO there were a couple of new members in the SIS/TK321/AG17 working group:

And so, Sweden will be voting yes to make OOXML an ISO standard.

For more information see:

• Patrik Fälström’s post “Microsoft managed to buy the vote of Sweden in ISO?“.
• Slashdot.
• Dagens Nyheter (in swedish).
• noooxml.org.
• Matusow: Open XML – The Vote in Sweden

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“Seam carving” allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping, but also without distorting important features in the image (such as faces).

The video shows some intresting results when using this method too much, but the overall result is very impressing.

Hackzine has more details.

• There is no doctype declaration. Not that it would have mattered anyway…
• The markup starts out nicely with divs and spans and then freaks out with some classic table layout. I though that went away in the nineties…
• Inline styles are used all over the place.
• Headings start at level 5. And continues to level 4…
• Images are missing an alt attribute.

This contributes to making MySpace an inaccessible mess. What does it prove? That you can be successful with a crappy site? Maybe the laugh is on me.

The Hackety Hack

His latest endeavour seemed uninteresting at first. Hackety Hack, a toolbox to teach programming to kids. But after a while it dawned on me. If Ruby on Rails is beginning to make inroads into the Enterprise by challenging web development paradigms, Hackety Hack will in time question many of the programming paradigms taught at universities today.

My first programming class at university was in ML, a functional programming language. I remember that we played with lists a lot. And recursion. Then we made a parser for our own symbolic programming language. I guess that pretty much killed my entrepreneurial spirit for a couple of years.

Kids who learn how to set up a blog in five lines of code, send messages over the internet and play with mp3 files will not accept that. The first kids out of Hackety Hack camp will soon be arriving at universities all over the place. And they will question the curly braces, the semicolons and Arcane ways to make Old programming languages Pleasant.

If I was a university professor I would make sure to have a look at some other programming languages apart from Java and C# (do they teach C# at universities?) before these kids come and ruin my programming classes.

I predict that Sweden will be the last bastion of uninterested software developers. To make some sort of vague statement I have made a Hackety Hack t-shirt for my 2 year old son. I hope he will be at the front lines of the Hackety Hack revolution.

Update: A bunch of people asked me where the highres print came from. The original logo is of course from Why the lucky stiff. Here is the Hackety Hack logo PDF that I created in Inkscape.

Ola Bini is also concerned about Microsoft not letting ther developers look at the Ruby implementation. If you remember the whole SCO debacle I guess it isn’t that strange. Microsoft is in the position where software they develop potentially may end up in millions of computers. Apparently the US legal system awards damages in proportion to this. Thus, any issues with a Ruby implementation on .net can quickly become costly.

It is all quite bizarre. Does this mean that the Microsoft version of the Ruby language is different from the “original” Ruby? I guess we will never know. Developers will probably write a lot of Ruby code that runs happily on the CLR. Rails applications will be deployed. But I am sure that there will be “special cases” where IronRuby will differ from “original” Ruby.

Therefore is was refreshing to see that Queensland University of Technology are progressing steadily with their Ruby.NET implementation. Currently you can actually compile a Ruby script into a .NET 2.0 assembly that other CLR languages can talk to. This may be the spearhead into the other half of enterprise deployment options.

All in all the future of software development looks bright. Will developers that invested a lot of time in Java or C# switch? Or will they move on to maintaining applications?

Why (some) IT-managers like Rails but don’t like deploying it

When I was a consultant I talked to many IT-managers that had heard about Ruby on Rails. They were intrigued by the fact that Ruby and Rails were created for developers rather than machines. Most of them realized that developer time costs more than computer performance today (although some of them were still spending money at developers writing unnecessarily complicated code to run fast on hardware that costs less than 20 developer hours).

However, these IT-managers weren’t too keen on deploying Rails applications in their environment. You see, if you spent the last five years creating a homogenous server environment it is likely that you have invested a lot in it. The following typically applies in this type of environment:

• You have specialized server administrators that know how to deploy, run and monitor aplications in the environment.
• One or more large vendors have sold you expensive software in which you run your applications.
• The same vendors have sent you a lot of marketing material telling you how lucky you are to be running their software and that your competitors are running the same thing.
• Developing software for the environment requires expensive consultants. This, obviously, means that you get professionals.
• Software typically runs fine in the environment.

The environment may be Java or .NET. The investment is typically bigger if it is Java.

And then Rails developers come to you and say that your investment in this homogenous environment should be thrown away. You staff should be retrained and deployment no longer takes a week. Obviously these developers must be lying.

Why Ola Bini and the Jruby team may increase Rails adoption

Any day now it will be possible to wrap up your Rails app in a WAR-file and put it right into a Java server environment. It may already work for all I know. Server administrators may not even see the difference between a Rails app and a regular Java app.

When this is easy to do I believe that Rails will se a much larger adoption in larger organizations (with these types of environments). And from there it will only get better. Thoughtworks seem to be in on the same track.

I guess both Sun and Microsoft realized the importance of being able to run Rails applications in existing environments. Sun is supporting JRuby and Microsoft hired John Lam to make Ruby run on the CLR (they already had Jim Hugunin make it possible to run Python code fast on the CLR).

Interesting times are ahead!

I guess we will have to thank Ola and the JRuby team for that…

Update: I was just told that James DD snapped a picture of me sitting next to Ola at Railsconf London. It is a small world after all.

Update 2: And here are instructions on how to create a WAR file of a Rails app for deployment in Tomcat.

When asked if that could lead to electricals being sold in its iconic blue and yellow stores, he replied:

Maybe. It depends on the stores. They are big, but they are still crowded; there are lots of products we would like to have in there.

Will we see an IKEA computer? It is an interesting idea and IKEA has a lot of good design people so why not? My suggestion is to call the first model “Bill”…

Most of their findings were not surprising; people expect wifi in hotel rooms, want to be able to watch TV on their cell phone and so on. One thing did stand out though:

25% of the population regularly reads one or more blogs. Among persons 26 and younger the figure goes up to 50% but for the group 60 or older it is still close to 25%.

This is very interesting.