December in the blogosphere

by admin on December 20, 2011 at 9:49 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

It’s December so it’s nearly the end of the year, which means the ‘blogosphere’ goes into madness about how it’s time to reflect and change and improve and stop procrastinating and just ‘do’ things. Well I’m pretty sure I’ve done that before in various guises, mmm.. every year since I was 15 and has it ever made a difference?

In 2009 I said: “My ‘New Years Resolution’ is going to be to spend as much time as possible doing the things I really want to do.” Out of context it sounds fucking stupid, but I know what I meant, it’s more of a life motto not to waste my time doing pointless activities like making the bed and waiting for hot drinks to cool down before they are usable. It seems a hell of a long time since I wrote that though. I haven’t written an awful lot this year, my mind has been on other things, like moving cities and jobs.

So blah blah, next year will be better, I’ll ‘just do things’ because priorities are bad thing (!?), I’ll waste less time so I can do more of my favourite things, and also be ready to jump at all the new opportunities that come along.

Nah. I’ll probably get up around 7am every day, go to work, each lunch from a nearby deli at my desk, talk to a limited group of peers about self reinforcing ideas, wait until my boss leaves before thinking about going to the gym, decide against it, curse everyone using a phone on the bus, get home and waste my evening on I don’t even fucking know what. Then I’ll spend the whole weekend recovering from a hangover, making up for the fact that I didn’t eat a hot meal all week, cleaning the mess I left each night because “I don’t have time to sort it now”, and trying to remember what the actual point of any of the last 7 days were.

I sound bitter and twisted, and after a few months in the capital I have absolutely no right to be whatsoever! Actually I’m not- that was my anti-resolution, and I think that maybe this year focusing on things I don’t want to do may be better than writing “stop thinking, start doing” on tiny scraps of paper and sending them to yourself. (http://tinyurl.com/cyvalo5)

1 Comment

Chess Timer

by admin on December 12, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Posted In: Software Development

What I would like, when starting a software project in a sizable organization, is a chess timer.

Chess Timer

Every time I ceased to be able to progress with the project, because a detail needs to be clarified, because some decision needs to be made, or because it is waiting on a sign off, I would click off the chess clock. And relax…

I am a hopeless optimist, and fiercely competitive. This results in one thing when it comes to software development- I cannot predict how long things will take, within even 50%, maybe worse. When I start a project, it’s generally “about a week” from completion for the entire 6 month duration. And as far as I’m concerned that is absolutely fine.

What I don’t need is plenty of time to get things done, what I *want* is a ticking clock that I can see all day measuring my performance. The thing is I don’t want to be judged based on, is other people’s priority lists. Just because Bill in accounts is too busy to sign my project off, well, I don’t care.

If developers are to be treated as delivery agents or micro project managers- by looking at the absolute time to project completion, then you are losing all their efficiency. They stop worrying about how lambda functions can help and best practices they could be learning and that git command you only ever use once in your life, and start worrying about why Mike is chatting to Kat rather than emailing them back. Give them that clock, and ‘click’, they can switch to some other project safe in the knowledge that they are not being measured.

According to modern software management opinions, putting developers under pressure does not make them more efficient, and I agree with this. In my experience the negative pressure which is experienced is usually due to events outside the control of the developer- eternal delays, changed specs, pointless meetings, rather than because I screwed up and took too long doing something. If that is the case, my pride as an engineer trying to create a quality product will mean I work twice as hard to finish on time. As a manager I think you need a way to get your developers to feel competitive about their own performance, let them put their effort into creating quality, and let you worry about these other events and pressures. That to me is the role of a manager, and the chess timer fits this perfectly- you are giving the developer the chance to be responsible solely for the things within their control.

The other thing the timer provides, is an accurate way of tracking how long you spend blocked on projects. I don’t think it matters too much how long developers take to write a quality piece software (within reason), because you are getting some increased quality or feature for every hour they work (provided of course that what they are working on is well managed!). However for time projects are blocked, you get nothing at all.

One could argue that if you don’t care about time to completion, and developers can effectively switch between projects then there is no problem here, since your efficiency is still optimal. However we all know that business *does* care about time to completion- it’s just the developers who shouldn’t and/or don’t. The point here isn’t to minimize blocked time, although that is obviously a goal, but that it is properly tracked by the chess timer, so we can see exactly what proportion of a task or project’s total duration it took up. This isn’t something I have seen in my (limited) experience, but am interested to know if other companies do track.

1 Comment

Hyperbole

by admin on December 12, 2011 at 9:53 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I saw a really annoying sentence in a software management book earlier. It read something along the lines of “In all but a few cases, there wasn’t a single delay that was caused by technological factors”. WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE LIKE THIS?

Surely it should just be “few cases were affected by delays due to technical errors”. OK, I concede that there is a modicum of additional information about the distribution of technological delay across cases in the original sentence, but that really wasn’t the point.

When I’m reading text quickly, I’m not neccessarily going to read every single word (which is what I imagine most people do with a book on software management, otherwise God help them), so why make it unneccesarily difficult to decipher with the stupid hyperbole?! (The answer is, I suppose, because the author wants us to buy into their theory)

└ Tags:
  Comment

10 things I’m sorry about and regret doing at the work black tie christmas do 2011

by admin on December 10, 2011 at 6:50 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

1. phone hacking
2. telling a girl she that her ‘costume’ looked like it was made of tinsel
3. telling a girl her dress was two years out of date
4. trying to lift two men simultaneously whilst they were embracing and causing a pile on
5. somehow acquiring an additional bow tie and overcoat
6. pretending to kiss a girl who arrived with, but was explicitly not the date of a colleague
7. engaging in dinner conversation about herpes and HIV for approximately 35 minutes
8. spilling vodka cranberry on a vintage clutch handbag and not telling its owner
9. not wearing a pocket square despite having declared the rules of pocket square enagagement to my colleagues weeks previously
10. switching the place cards at the table

  Comment

Airplay Dojo

by admin on June 6, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I’ve been working on Airplay SDK for Ideaworks3d for 6 months now, and it’s been a blast. I’ve learned a crazy amount about all sort of deep and dirty technical areas, and become an order of magnitude more productive using the GNU GCC toolchain, vi, python and git. My focus is better and I can work harder for longer than ever before. These things are all linked- the more I learn, the more interested I am, and the more interested I am, the less I need to eat cakes and watch DVD box sets by the carton.

On thursday I gave a 30 minute presentation to the London Python Dojo about Airplay SDK, and some work some colleagues and I did on porting python and creating some bindings. The project is hosted at https://github.com/guy127917/python-airplay. It’s kind of raw at the moment, but we have some basic stuff running, and the slow down doesn’t seem too bad for 3d stuff, so it looks promising. Some of the bindings require changes to the SDK which aren’t available to the public right now, but let me know if that is an issue and I’ll see what we can do.

The presentation went quite well I think, I guess it was more of a talk than a presentation since I didn’t take any slides. I didn’t really get through everything that I wanted to- 30 minutes absolutely flew by! So moral of the story is, though you may be able to wing it, it’s better to have some structure. The main reason I didn’t do more preparation is because I spent all my time getting a tech demo running, which only accounted for about 15 seconds of the talk. An iPad is a lot less impressive than a projector in front of a crowd!

I really appreciate having the opportunity to present though, so thanks to the Dojo and Mr Tollervey for giving me the chance. I really enjoyed it and hopefully can do something similar in the future. I actually wrote about wanting to do some talks not very long ago, so it’s nice to see a bit of progress there.

In fact, that post has reminded me why I like writing things down from time to time- it makes the whole “I was such an idiot 2 years ago, now I’m MUCH wiser” mentality more transparent and you can see it and isolate it if it is causing issues. So hopefully I will write more regularly in the future (famous last blog words).

└ Tags:
1 Comment