Retweet May 2009

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Programming

  • Some people expand their mind, I scale and then shard mine.
  • Scale your vision, your thoughts, and then yourself.
  • Refactor, reduce, rinse, and repeat.
  • Model your mind, debug your thoughts, and remove the printf statement from your comments.
  • If you perpetuate bad code, you might be a bad developer!
  • Code is about learning – If you are not learning you are doing it wrong.
  • It is not that an artist knows his tools well that makes him great, it is that he knows his media! As programmers, what is our media?
  • If the media of a programmer is the language, what is the media of the program user? The domain space? Should they be the same?
  • I am dumbfounded by the amount of repetitive, tedious, and manual work a programmer will endure before they even consider automating tasks.
  • Code talks, bugs walks.
  • There is a thin line between a solution and a hack…
  • The absence of a save button does not mean entities can not be saved.
  • Less code is the best code.
  • For any bug fix, all the debugging and all the time put into it is lost if you don’t add a test case for the root cause.
  • JavaScript + jQuery UI + bookmarklet + PHP + Twitter API = tweetmark. I wrote a bookmarklet to bookmark URLs to @juixe.
  • Don’t catch and release exceptions, exception handling is not a sport.
  • My job is to make software easier done than said.
  • DB Rule of Thumb: Don’t ever change the database schema without a second, third, and even fourth thought.
  • There is no magic in software development! Files don’t delete themselves out from version control out of electronic spontaneous combustion.
  • To avoid dubious verbose recursive repetition, variable names are not comments and comments should repeat variable declarations.
  • Debugging is not just about code, debug your process and focus on what works and remove and modify that which doesn’t have positive results
  • Just because you can teach end users new tricks does not get you off the hook from you learning to design an application with fewer tricks.
  • Even when saying the same words, it is possible, and not unlikely, that developer understand features differently than what clients expect.
  • Code can easily be refactored, but developer way of thinking is more difficult.
  • In programming you have to think outside the box and outside the stack.


Team

  • For some reason the FTW team lunch was scheduled at 2:00PM, that is not FTW!
  • Do What You Love, Love What You Do, and Share the Love.
  • In the future people will spend 2 hour working, 2 hours tweeting, 1 hours emailing, 1 hours in meetings, 1 hour on facebook, 1 happy hour.
  • The perception of favoritism is can be as bad as inequality in the cohesiveness within a group.
  • There might not be any stupid questions, but it is a lot smarter to find out the answer yourself!
  • You can only wear so many hats before you stop being effective, you cannot be judge, executioner, and prisoner.
  • If one person wears too many hats there will develop a conflict of self-interest.
  • Don’t do anything because you think someone else thinks like you, communication is hard enough, mind reading makes it that much harder.
  • If people don’t get your ideas, maybe you don’t get how to communicate with them.
  • Wish I could clone myself and outsource my work to my clones! I would definitely be a task master to my clones!
  • The benefits and value of a conference is inverse proportional to the number of conferences you attend.
  • Master your tools, don’t let them master you!
  • There is no I in Team but there is an I in Fail!
  • busy != productive

Business

  • You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you can get some tricked out custom chrome rims with spinners for said wheel!
  • Analyze the problem, simplify it, before you offer a solution. The ‘problem’ could be a manifestation of another ‘solution.’
  • Solutions are tools. Solutions are not as important as are the results. Only in ivory towers are solutions the answer.
  • Just as there is a 10,000 feet view, there is a 10,000 degrees of separation interpretation.
  • Most people have a view between 4 and 5 feet, some a 30,000 foot view. Me? A billion light years view.
  • Problems are opportunities for solutions…
  • There is great value in knowing the right question to ask at the right time.
  • Fortune favors those that favor opportunities.
  • Add value to the point where you can make one plus one equal three!
  • One man’s FAIL is another’s FTW!
  • It is difficult to master simplicity.
  • If I don’t cut it, cut it out.
  • Common biz advice is ‘to make something people like.’ I say, make something new and make people like whatever you happen to make!
  • Solution: trading one set of problems with another set of problems.
  • Idea: There are right shoes, and left shoes, why don’t we develop uni-shoes that fit both on the right and left foot?
  • Idea: I need to build a laser printer for t-shirts, unlike transfers and silk screening, color should be added as shirt as it is threaded.
  • While riding the current wave keep an eye out for next wave. The hardest part is to jump to the right wave at the right time.
  • To win at the game you need to be really good and beat the compitition, or change up and sponsor the game and have everyone play your game.
  • Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity, take it! Don’t wait for good luck, make it!
  • Short term success too, if not monopolized correctly can lead to failure in the long term.
  • A novice will master the art of the sell, a master progresses to the art of the upsell.
  • Epic failure can be your way to success.
  • Repeat customers are the bread and butter of a successful business!
  • Work as hard to retain existing customers as to appeal to new ones.

Product Placement

  • Amazon Kindle went small with Kindle for iPhone, now it went big with Kindle DX. At nearly $500 they should have called it Kindle $X!
  • Google’s motto is ‘Do no evil.’ Microsoft’s should be ‘Be no monopoly.’
  • Speaking of Google, I think I saw the Google street map car/camera on El Camino/Page Mill. I followed it for a few miles… ;)
  • LOL I wanted to say good but I wrote google, I guess their motto ‘do no evil’ works…
  • Pod Feature Request: I want to mark podcasts as favorites just like songs and I want to add markets in podcast so that I could skip to mark
  • Nothing good on the internet, going to read a Kindle book instead. Speaking of which, I think I should be able to tweet from the Kindle.
  • When watching a Flash video from a second tier video sharing site, why does the video re-buffer from scratch if you replay the video????
  • I think the Apple’s iPhone app process has moved to the big brother totalitarian system it depicted in the 1984 superbowl commercial…
  • What is the ratio of iPhone apps approved versus not approved? Imagine if the web was like this! Imagine if Windows was like this!
  • It is said that Americans spend over 100 hours a year commuting, how many hours a year do we spend waiting for Windows to startup?
  • First I learned to spell, then I had to teach my iPhone to spill!

Quote

  • Moore’s Meta-law: The number of interpretations of Moore’s Law doubles every 18 months. – fboender
  • A stupid question can lead to a really good answer – @spolsky
  • ‘Perfect’ is the Enemy of ‘Good Enough’ – Greg Nyberg
  • Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen – Edward V Berard
  • Framework big, brain small – Richard Campbell/.NET Rocks