Juixe Techknow

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/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If developers think that QA is going to find all their design problems, they are doing it wrong.
• Code wants to be dynamic.
• Unlike what it sounds like, Extreme Programming isn’t a spectator sport where you jump off a ramp with your favorite IDE.
• The web needs an open standard API for user badges and achievements.
• Social network sites should adopt a open standard API for user badges and achievements!
• The user interface made me do it!
• Show me the money, show me the data.
• Technology will date you, as in it will give away your age, like if your used a floppy vs a thumb drive vs neural memory implant..
• I’m sure Hallmark has a card for that, to show our appreciation to the QAs in our lives.
• The meek shall inherit the earth, the geek shall inherit an earth simulation on some social virtual game running on the cloud.
• Can you debug dreams?
• Men are digital, women are analog.
• Refactor yourself!
• Trust No Technology

Team Leadership

• Good things come to those that make them happen.
• Cut out the 20% from Pareto’s Principle from your process.
• Follow your dreams and you will be your own leader!
• Our attitude affects the outcome of our experiences and that is reflected in our perspective which influences our attitude.
• Fear is a virus of the mind!
• Some people are proud instead of productive.
• Sometimes we need to accept and move forward before we can understand.
• One persons Epic Fail is another’s FTW!
• If you don’t remember when you took a vacation last, you need a vacation!
• There are somethings that we are just not going to understand, but that we need to accept.
• If better is not easier and cheaper then it’s not.
• Just because something is better (function) doesn’t mean it’s better (form).
• You have to feed, exercise, and train your creativity before you can make it work for you.

Product Placement

• GIA: Google Intelligence Agency. FBI: FaceBook of Investigations.
• Is Facebook too big to fail or just big enough to get regulated?
• And then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be multi-touch.”
• Cost Plus World Market should really rename itself to 3rd World Market since they mostly sell trinkets from under developed world.
• CVS has the widest and weirdest selection, they sell everything from hard liquor to underwear. It’s basically my party supply store.
• Someone should invent foursquare for fictional places, I would like to check I the Star Wars Cantina.
• I wish iTunes could organize songs by mood in addition to genre and album.

Overheard

• OH: Awww, that gansta cute.
• OH: Travel is my drug of choice, I rather go on a real trip than a hallucinogenic trip.
• OH: I woke up so tired from that dream because I was running in it.
• OH: It’s very hard sometimes to think on your own.
• OH: when you are a parent and are dealing with your kids, you have to be the bigger person.
• OH: I’m sorry for whatever I did in your dream that made you upset, trust me that is not typical of my behavior in other people’s dreams.
• OH: It’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s that you didn’t do anything spectacular.

Quotes

• Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. – Anonymous
• Everyone specializes in their own area of weakness. – Rothbard’s Law
• Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. – Wirth’s Law
• It is not how much you make that counts, but how much money you keep. – Robert Kiyosaki
• All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you. – Prince
• Hope. Deleted – Emotionless Wine Bucket #futurama
• There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. – Roger Staubach
• Control the music industry? Check. Control the publishing industry? Check. Control-alt-delete? Never. – @ceoSteveJobs
• I bet if they had Yelp in 1850, nobody would have taken the Oregon Trail. – @badbanana
• People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. – Jeffrey Gitomer
• Welcome, to the real world. – Morpheus
• I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. – HAL
• Would you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict? – John Waters

From time to time I blast tweets on software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else I’m working through. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Programming is more about problem solving than coding, just like being an author is more about storytelling than writing.
• Next time your significant other starts nagging, throw an IllegalArgumentException!
• I want the web to evolve to a stage where flash is not required! It’s 2010 for God’s sake, why we still using plugins in browsers!?
• why do I have to tether gadgets and string along services just to catch a call?
• Patents? We don’t need no stinking patents.
• When life gives you users, make customers.
• For programmers everything is as easy as alpha, beta, and gold master.
• Good debugging techniques go a log way in and out of the debugger!
• Like the Free Masons, I am part of a secret society of digitari and conspiracy theorists and computer repairmen known as the Free Hackers.
• I am so WYSIWYG!
• If privacy settings are difficult to edit they are hard to implement, enact, and enable correctly.
• Privacy setting should be transparent not secretive and misleading.

Team Leadership

• You always get further faster with less effort if you work with what you got.
• The next big thing usually sneaks up on those waiting in line to ride the current thing.
• Mo money mo ways to solve mo problems.
• Bad apples introduce bad seeds.
• Litigation stifles innovation.
• Technology is changing so fast that I have obsolete gadgets the unopened packages I bought them.
• I’m coming up so you better get this project started.
• As companies grow, they lose acceleration and focus, but depend on momentum and size.
• I have to call into our all hands meeting tomorrow. Since I have to call in, I’ll be all ears at the all hands meeting.
• A great idea in the mind of someone that can’t or won’t do anything about it is like an orphan.
• When companies can’t create engaging products and new markets they create bogus patents.

Product Placement

• Twitter needs a reliable picture service, as reliable as Twitter, but Twitpic just needs to go away.
• The #newtwitter is like the the #oldtwitter plus HTML crack.
• I wish Twitter was like survivor and we can kick some twits of the service.
• This is how much AT&T sucks, I’m tethering my T-Mobile Nexus One with my AT&T iPhone to tweet this!
• Apple press events are as large as sporting events! Apple should televise them in Pay-Per-View.
• Steve Jobs is a mad genius, you gotta buy his hardware so that you can buy his software and along the way pay for a horrible service plan.
• The new iPod mini is one gadget closer to the Dick Tracy wrist watch phone.
• Apple cares more about design than market share, and that’s why users pay a premium.
• Steve Jobs would make a great James Bond villain.
• And the Grammy for the Album of the Year goes to… Autotune!
• AT&T should rebrand itself as FU&U!
• In addition to Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and Form document types, @google Docs should add a Gantt Chart!

Quote

• We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like. – Eric Schmidt
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs
• Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. – Steve Jobs
• Get into jiggle mode. – Steve Jobs
• So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. – Bill Gates

Cash Angels

• School experience is not in tune with the current job opportunities. College should be more like a series of Y Combinator funding cycles.
• If there is a angel investment bubble, everybody should cash in before they can cash out.
• When you see startup accelerators with names like 500 ACME Startup Founders Camp you can be sure that there is an angel investment bubble.
• Zuckerborg has dropped out of college and he is pledging $100,000,000 for kids to stay in school.

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/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Any software feature request should be broken down to 90% thinking and 10% coding.
• Multiple-touch is the greatest things since buttons.
• If a developer fools you once, shame on you, because they are usually fooling themselves when it comes to giving accurate estimates.
• Don’t take developers estimate at face value.
• Recommend The Rubyist for the Developers Directory on Tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/directory/recommend/developers/rubyist
• Many non-programming software users don’t understand the meaning of concatenated or null so don’t use these in labels in your UI.
• I like to provide solutions that don’t involve complaining.
• If Heraclitus is right and you never step in the same river twice, then you never write the same program twice.
• Bugs keep my code humble.
• A bug’s ingenuity is proportional to a developer’s ego and self importance.
• Bugs like to in build nests out of spaghetti code in untested corner cases.
• Working running code is just one corner case.
• I use dead laptop drives as coasters.
• My emotions are user generated.
• I om nom nom nom on memes.
• The interweb is my inspiration.
• I CAN HAZ DREAMS OF INTERWEB MEMES

Team Leadership

• When life gives you lemons, you may make lemonade. When life gives me lemons, I make myself some limoncello.
• New motto/slogan: Don’t be a robot, unless you are 20 feet tall and can transform into a fighter jet.
• Dream big or wake up.
• The Law of Big Consequences: Large consequences are often the effect of making considerable decisions in a big rush.
• Laughter is the duct tape equivalent of emotions, it can be used to patch up bad feelings or misunderstandings.
• Manual, Error Prone, Time Consuming. Pick none!
• When people dig their own hole they can’t get out of it by digging deeper.
• Fight the power, and fight the hype.
• A key skill in life is to know when to end a conversation.
• Nothing is how you thought of it originally, it is up to you to make it better.
• If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.

Product Placement

• Amazon knows what books you bought for the Kindle, how often and for how long you read, can add and remove books, and read your bookmarks, notes, and highlights…
• FaceBook, Inc = F.B.I.
• Apple wants to design multiple-touch devices, Google wants to crawl content, Facebook wants to own your social graph and associated data.
• Facebook is really dumbing down the web with the like button.
• Facebook’s Open Graph is not really open. If you don’t own the platform, can look through the source, can own the data it is not open!
• Did someone just unlocked the Foursquare Sellout Badge at Yahoo HQ!
• I’ve had enough Lifetime movies for one lifetime.
• The world according Ronald McDonald is made out of corn meal.
• The McChicken nugget is the worst thing since sliced bread.
• Peeps are the most disgusting artificial food product.

Qoute

• One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. – Bob Marley
• I don’t like negotiating with people I can’t beat up. – Goldberg
• We live in an amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation. – Louis C.K.
• Beware of artists they mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous. – Queen Victoria
• He eyes are the nipples of the face. -The House Bunny

In a typical day, software engineers, use diagrams, charts, and a ideograms to represent the software systems we work on. The biggest problems with software can also be described visually, such as the following image which tries to explain problems of software engineering.

Software Engineering Explained

When software engineering is that complicated, just imagine how the software application produced in such an environment looks like.

How Software Looks Like

Creating a clean, simply to use, functional application is harder than you think. Only a few companies have been successful with simplicity. Most enterprise applications look like a mosaic of buttons and text fields.

Stuff That Happens UI

Here is a screen shot showing the complexity of a software application.

FileMatrix UI Complexity

If you have any images, graphics, diagrams, or charts that illustrate the complexity of software engineering feel free to share in the comments.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the Danish creator of the PHP programming language, recently tweeted the following bit of hubris.

For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another – Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)

That sounds like something that DHH would say, who also happens to be a Danish programmer. In one hand he did invent a new programming language, in the other it was PHP. In one hand he made web programming accessible to thousands of developer, in the other hand the code produced by most of these developers is unreadable and unmanageable.

Of course, a great many folks took the troll bait and commented on the validity of the tweet. My favorite comment was from
Entropy on Reddit.

Kenny G plays the saxophone better than I do, but that provides little solace for his countless victims.

I was not able to find additional background to this tweet, but I can only imagine he tweeted it in good fun, and not in my milkshake brings all the developers to the yard, and their like, it’s better than yours.

Software users didn’t take Knuth in college and you should not expect them to have a Computer Science degree to understand how to use your application. There is no worse assumption that a software programmer can make than to assume that end users know what you are talking about, especially when there is so much miscommunication involved in specifying, designing, implementing, testing, and releasing a software application within an internal team. Your users don’t understand your language, they don’t understand what you mean when you say object-oriented, exception handling, concatenated document, application server log file, null pointer, database query and they don’t care so don’t use these expressions in labels or descriptions in your UI! If you have to explain your User Interface to a end user, your are doing usability wrong. Forget leaky abstraction, there is nothing worse than leaky implementation details in your UI. If your users have to use suspended disbelief and take your word for it to understand how your User Interface works, you should go back to the drawing board.

One of the reasons why the User Interface and User Experience is so horrible in applications, especially internal and enterprise applications, is that they are done by programmers, usually prototyped quickly, and shipped soon thereafter. The truth is that programmers have to wear multiple hats, depending of your company size, these included tester, computer programmer, domain expert, UI designer, type editor, IT, security guru, database administrator, system architect, document writer, and more. In addition of having to fill all of these roles, there usually must be done in a tight deadline with many technology risks, unknown factors untested partners, and already late dependencies.

The simple fact is that the more hats a programmer wears the less productive he will be. If you have programmer having to manage your version control system, update your application UI, and debug memory you are not getting your monies worth. The more hats you have developers wear, the more time it will take to context switch, the more time you spend tracking down issues, and the more you pay in the end.