Indeed! Anyone who has _actually_ worked in an environment with heavy formal testing _and_ a QA department knows that when something gets kicked back by QA it tends to mean:
a) more work b) paperwork c ) schedule delays and the resulting hassles of that d) coming in on weekends e) pissed off *coordinators
Knowing that something I write is going to be tested at _several levels_ and if any of those levels reveals a problem it's going to be a shit storm tends to encourage me to write damn good code. I (and I think most people) don't treat this as a crutch, but more an obstacle.
That's the key phrase. really. Facebook has a metric ass-tonne of private data.. but it is not treated as a secure application. The problem is that it's somewhere in between, and as much as I personally dislike facebook.. I think this kind of "continuous hack" development works well for this kind of site.
It's always a trade off. More process and more layers.. means less features and longer between updates. Great in avionics or banks or military software.. but this is a website! And really if everyone has full access to the live DB.. who needs a back door.. (a thought that would disturb me a bit if I had an account).
huge mistakes and have our customers be okay with it.
Amen! The amount of process and loopholes you have to go through to get code A into production system B tends to be directly proportional to the size of the shit storm which would result in said code being defective.
Facebook gets to be dynamic and "just do it live"-y because even if the whole site goes down it's not a huge deal.. much less some small feature.
That's not to say that some places don't have too much process or a large abundance of useless process.. but it's quite obvious to most people that the amount of process you have for a website (a popular website.. but still just a website) vs say a chunk of medical kit or a large scale order management system is going to be different.. and the same work approach is not going to be valid for both.
I’m personally not a fan of the whole “app” thing. Feels like we are going backwards.
You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.
OS integration and a few features like GPS and multi-touch are one justification, and there are certainly cases where it does make sense to have a specialized client vice a web app to view content from the web, however I think a lot of it has to do with money.
You can’t sell a subscription to a website (unless you’ve got some really damn good content), but you can sell a little app that pulls data off your website and displays it in a different manner.
We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.
The pirates have an advantage that rapidshare is primarly something that is linked to from private forums. It's not something that users search. A pirate can call a file whatchawhig.rar, even encrypt it, then simply include the key in his post (along with the real title of the file). Sample post:
---- Hey guy's check out (some new movie and or song):
(rapid share url)/cooking_lessons.rar
Password is: ohnoes ----
It's not like youtube where the content has to be in a usable format, and the title has to be relevant (and where filtering works fairly well). Rapidshare is just a place to dump data.. with no need for random passerbys to be able to find or use the content. Any simple method would probably eliminate a large amount of the content that is currently there, and then become useless.
Philosophy has gone from something generally valuable to the community, to something that's pretty much only important within it's own academic community.
Would be nice to find a way to put the philosopher mind back to work on real problems, rather than as you said, debating the reality of a bottle of water.
Don't get me wrong.. constructive criticism is always good. I am fortunate enough to work at a place (in Canada) where managers not only receive criticism well, but also seek it out annually.
The problem comes when, and I think this is what's described in the article, people are criticizing for other reasons. Usually like I said in my post, it's because they have an axe to grind. They are usually very loud about it, and in fact often don't even direct it to management (where it might actually get acted upon), instead saving it for the lunch room/coffee break.
I do the same, and find it baffling when other cannot do it.
Guilty as charged. I find there is a limit to how much data I can keep floating around in my skull. I tend to do a lot of my design work in smaller chunks.. using massive stacks of graph paper as a kind of swap area. I literally just sprawl stuff onto the page.. numbering them as I go.. crossing out invalid stuff.. occasionally re-writing stuff when it gets too crazy.
Eventually when everything is "mostly there".. I clean it up on graph paper.. then eventually proceed to plug it into what can only be described as the most unintuitive and frustrating modeling utility ever created (as mandated by the customer).
That said I _can_ appreciate the guys who keep it all up in their heads for weeks.. then one day sit down and just dump it into the computer. You just give them larger more independant sections (so people arn't reliant on their work to continue their own) and let `em go nuts.
I've worked with the kind of people the article is describing. Usually they are pissed of at management for whatever reason, and are taking out their frustration by bitterly and publically complaining about every minor mistake or indecision to anyone who will listen. They are experts at creating mountains out of mole hills. This can do a lot of damage. Having a guy around who is perpetually bitching about management takes all the fun out of work.. which kills productivity.
Managers make mistakes. If they are big and frequent, there are much better (and more discreet) ways of bringing this up.
Implementing a test suite isn't free.. nor is working testing into your process.
If he implements the wrong test methodology (I feel dirty using that work) he may end up spending 40% of his coding time satisfying test requirements, which ultimately only catch 1/4 of the bugs.
I would generally say some testing is always a good idea.. but too much testing can actually be a bad thing. Especially if it is very process and time intensive.
In other words, more analysis than "less bugs good" is required for something like this. Salary and dev time is definitely a factor, but there is a lot of other stuff to consider.
That's a little.. extreme. That kind of trust isn't assumed with credentials (at least not in my book) but builds over time.
Not only that but the boss may (and likely does) have a broader knowledge of the company and it's objectives, and any time you're talking about spending more money I would expect to have to at least show the boss a few power point slides or something. At the very least, having to convince management that an idea is sound is a good exercise, and may cause you to look at things you would have conveniently ignored.
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?
Are you sure that it will be?
but I'm sure that in the long run it would save time and money
How much time and how much money?
What you need here is hard numbers to back up your opinion. Specifically, and I hate to say the word, but you need metrics.
- How much do these bugs cost (these are a mixruee of hard numbers (dev time, etc) and "fuzzy" numbers (customer relations and so forth)? - How much is setting up this test suite going to cost? How much is it going to cost to use it? - How effective do you think it will be (look at existing bugs.. would they have been caught)?
That last one is especially important. Testing is good, but it doesn't solve all problems and there are other options. Really take a good look at whether previous bugs would have been found in your proposed system.
Once you have this information, the math then becomes pretty simple.
If your program is modular-ish.. it might be possible to do a trial. This is probably a good idea anyway. There are different ways to do testing, some of which are incompatible with certain development mindsets. Best to find that out early on a small piece vice the entire code base.
This thing sounds more synthetic than a lot of synthesizers.
Hitting the notes is only part of the guitar playing equation. Technique is just as important. Even implementing basic string muting would make a huge difference here.
however the solution is to use a fixed width font, and specify a page/character limit.
Problem is a lot of these fonts, while working great for code, are hard to read in narrative forms. If they are printing these out, they probably want to use a font that doesn't "look weird" for the sake of the people who have to read all this shit.
I'm impressed they actually restrict it based on printed width. I've seen a _lot_ of form type apps where it'll let you enter the data, and then just cut it off when it gets printed.
Fairly poor “top 10” list. Nothing on this list was particularly extreme, and not really “geek” oriented.
I guess the problem with this kind of list is that _everything_ has an extreme. Pick something you like, and some millionaire probably has an obscenely expensive version of it. This list was mostly the extreme versions of things I have no interest in.
Often with these extreme versions they’ve just taken something existing and covered it in gold/diamonds/rare metals/rare woods.. which isn’t all that interesting to me either. I remember there was some vodka (touted as the worlds most expensive) that was basically just garden variety high-end vodka with a column of diamonds down the center.
The only thing on this list that really held any interest for me was those speakers, but at that cost it’s totally not worth the novelty, and they probably look terrible close up (as this kind of stuff tends to look great at a very specific angle but look ridiculous from everywhere else).
Ah well, can’t spend it all on philanthropic interests.. I guess after a while you run out of shit to do with that much money.
Oh calm down.. this has nothing to do with prejudices..
Yes, in the ideal world everyone would be free to express their finely honed sense of self image at all times in all situations. In the real world we have norms that people are expected to conform to when operating in a professional capacity.
If you're a programmer, engineer, or any generic office worker who doesn't have to deal with customers, then you can wear as much metal and ink as you want. It's generally accepted however that when you're in a business situation, you put on a clean shirt/suit/tie, take the junk out of your face, and do the uptight suit thing. Same as when you go to (most) job interview. It shows respect and that you take your job seriously.
Yes it's backwards and evil and makes no sense and how much stuff you have bolted to your face has no impact on the quality of your work.. but that's the society we live in, and anti-conformity for the sake of anti-conformity gets old.
I'm Canadian! We had something called "computer related studies" which was the programming (pascal at a fairly basic level) class.. and data processing which was basically a typing and word processing/spreadsheet class. Seemed pretty appropriately labeled.
So uh a business whose employees deal with customers on a daily basis in an industry where projecting an image of professionalism is very important has developed a guide to aid their employees? This just sounds like common sense to me.
43 pages sounds a bit insane, until you actually look at it. Large print, lots of diagrams, lots of whitespace/formatting not 43 walls of text. It actually looks pretty clean and readable.
Financial institutions are still one of the last places where we expect people to put some effort into their appearance. Even geeks like myself who cringe when they have to put on a tie tend to expect the people dealing with our savings to look the part. If the guy I’m greeted by has a nose ring, I’m out of there. Yay for double standards I guess.
Sure, although people do that here. You can get a phone, cable, and internet "bundle" through the local cable provider (Eastlink). All comes through one wire.
It has gone out (we had a hurricane a while back that knocked it out). People manage.. most people have a cell phone they can use in an emergency.
Cable operators will run a real risk of just turning into a dumb pipe that leads to content provided by others.
This is probably the biggest obstacle. The companies for the most part run the networks required by the other companies who want to cut into their television business. They either have to find a way to profit in this new frontier.. or dig in their heels and hold on as long as possible, and given the history in situations like this, I have a good guess which they'll do.
The fun thing is to watch an entire series over the course of a month or so.
The realization that you've just watched like _7 years_ worth of programming in a month is always awesome and scary at the same time.
Also watching episode after episode, you notice things (some good, some bad) that you wouldn't if there was a week between each episode. For instance Babylon 5 gets very depressing for like 2 seasons. I didn't notice it as much when I was watching it on TV.. but you watch it back-to-back.. and it's a completely different experience.
Is of course how long television is going to be around.
From my perspective, television offers no real benefit over the internet for transferring video. The same can probably be said about VOIP vs. POTS (aside from reliability I guess).
There are of course two obstacles:
Mass adoption (not _everyone_ has high speed internet yet.. ).
And the big one.. the “big guys” don’t want it to happen.
I envision a day when everyone has one line (and I hope to the fire cactus that it’s fiber) coming to their home.. from which their phone, tv, internet, and whatever else come through. But I envision being dead before it happens.. or at least close.
As much as I really love the idea of working at home, I think you miss out on the whole team aspect of things. I wouldn't mind working from home 2 days a week or something, but I think you still need people to physically see you on a regular basis.
I've heard lots of success stories.. so I guess it depends on the local culture. If everyone is working from home it would probably be ok.. but I suspect if only a few are working from home.. those few will not be as likely to get promoted / get the choice work, and will basically become the equvilant of outsourced labour.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed! Anyone who has _actually_ worked in an environment with heavy formal testing _and_ a QA department knows that when something gets kicked back by QA it tends to mean:
a) more work
b) paperwork
c ) schedule delays and the resulting hassles of that
d) coming in on weekends
e) pissed off *coordinators
Knowing that something I write is going to be tested at _several levels_ and if any of those levels reveals a problem it's going to be a shit storm tends to encourage me to write damn good code. I (and I think most people) don't treat this as a crutch, but more an obstacle.
high security applications
That's the key phrase. really. Facebook has a metric ass-tonne of private data.. but it is not treated as a secure application. The problem is that it's somewhere in between, and as much as I personally dislike facebook.. I think this kind of "continuous hack" development works well for this kind of site.
It's always a trade off. More process and more layers.. means less features and longer between updates. Great in avionics or banks or military software.. but this is a website! And really if everyone has full access to the live DB.. who needs a back door.. (a thought that would disturb me a bit if I had an account).
huge mistakes and have our customers be okay with it.
Amen! The amount of process and loopholes you have to go through to get code A into production system B tends to be directly proportional to the size of the shit storm which would result in said code being defective.
Facebook gets to be dynamic and "just do it live"-y because even if the whole site goes down it's not a huge deal.. much less some small feature.
That's not to say that some places don't have too much process or a large abundance of useless process.. but it's quite obvious to most people that the amount of process you have for a website (a popular website.. but still just a website) vs say a chunk of medical kit or a large scale order management system is going to be different.. and the same work approach is not going to be valid for both.
I’m personally not a fan of the whole “app” thing. Feels like we are going backwards.
You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.
OS integration and a few features like GPS and multi-touch are one justification, and there are certainly cases where it does make sense to have a specialized client vice a web app to view content from the web, however I think a lot of it has to do with money.
You can’t sell a subscription to a website (unless you’ve got some really damn good content), but you can sell a little app that pulls data off your website and displays it in a different manner.
We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.
You just end up with a cat and mouse game.
The pirates have an advantage that rapidshare is primarly something that is linked to from private forums. It's not something that users search. A pirate can call a file whatchawhig.rar, even encrypt it, then simply include the key in his post (along with the real title of the file). Sample post:
----
Hey guy's check out (some new movie and or song):
(rapid share url)/cooking_lessons.rar
Password is: ohnoes
----
It's not like youtube where the content has to be in a usable format, and the title has to be relevant (and where filtering works fairly well). Rapidshare is just a place to dump data.. with no need for random passerbys to be able to find or use the content. Any simple method would probably eliminate a large amount of the content that is currently there, and then become useless.
Agreed.
Philosophy has gone from something generally valuable to the community, to something that's pretty much only important within it's own academic community.
Would be nice to find a way to put the philosopher mind back to work on real problems, rather than as you said, debating the reality of a bottle of water.
Don't get me wrong.. constructive criticism is always good. I am fortunate enough to work at a place (in Canada) where managers not only receive criticism well, but also seek it out annually.
The problem comes when, and I think this is what's described in the article, people are criticizing for other reasons. Usually like I said in my post, it's because they have an axe to grind. They are usually very loud about it, and in fact often don't even direct it to management (where it might actually get acted upon), instead saving it for the lunch room/coffee break.
I do the same, and find it baffling when other cannot do it.
Guilty as charged. I find there is a limit to how much data I can keep floating around in my skull. I tend to do a lot of my design work in smaller chunks.. using massive stacks of graph paper as a kind of swap area. I literally just sprawl stuff onto the page.. numbering them as I go.. crossing out invalid stuff.. occasionally re-writing stuff when it gets too crazy.
Eventually when everything is "mostly there".. I clean it up on graph paper.. then eventually proceed to plug it into what can only be described as the most unintuitive and frustrating modeling utility ever created (as mandated by the customer).
That said I _can_ appreciate the guys who keep it all up in their heads for weeks.. then one day sit down and just dump it into the computer. You just give them larger more independant sections (so people arn't reliant on their work to continue their own) and let `em go nuts.
There are generally better channels for this.
I've worked with the kind of people the article is describing. Usually they are pissed of at management for whatever reason, and are taking out their frustration by bitterly and publically complaining about every minor mistake or indecision to anyone who will listen. They are experts at creating mountains out of mole hills. This can do a lot of damage. Having a guy around who is perpetually bitching about management takes all the fun out of work.. which kills productivity.
Managers make mistakes. If they are big and frequent, there are much better (and more discreet) ways of bringing this up.
Implementing a test suite isn't free.. nor is working testing into your process.
If he implements the wrong test methodology (I feel dirty using that work) he may end up spending 40% of his coding time satisfying test requirements, which ultimately only catch 1/4 of the bugs.
I would generally say some testing is always a good idea.. but too much testing can actually be a bad thing. Especially if it is very process and time intensive.
In other words, more analysis than "less bugs good" is required for something like this. Salary and dev time is definitely a factor, but there is a lot of other stuff to consider.
That's a little.. extreme. That kind of trust isn't assumed with credentials (at least not in my book) but builds over time.
Not only that but the boss may (and likely does) have a broader knowledge of the company and it's objectives, and any time you're talking about spending more money I would expect to have to at least show the boss a few power point slides or something. At the very least, having to convince management that an idea is sound is a good exercise, and may cause you to look at things you would have conveniently ignored.
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?
Are you sure that it will be?
but I'm sure that in the long run it would save time and money
How much time and how much money?
What you need here is hard numbers to back up your opinion. Specifically, and I hate to say the word, but you need metrics.
- How much do these bugs cost (these are a mixruee of hard numbers (dev time, etc) and "fuzzy" numbers (customer relations and so forth)?
- How much is setting up this test suite going to cost? How much is it going to cost to use it?
- How effective do you think it will be (look at existing bugs.. would they have been caught)?
That last one is especially important. Testing is good, but it doesn't solve all problems and there are other options. Really take a good look at whether previous bugs would have been found in your proposed system.
Once you have this information, the math then becomes pretty simple.
If your program is modular-ish .. it might be possible to do a trial. This is probably a good idea anyway. There are different ways to do testing, some of which are incompatible with certain development mindsets. Best to find that out early on a small piece vice the entire code base.
This thing sounds more synthetic than a lot of synthesizers.
Hitting the notes is only part of the guitar playing equation. Technique is just as important. Even implementing basic string muting would make a huge difference here.
Still cool though :)
however the solution is to use a fixed width font, and specify a page/character limit.
Problem is a lot of these fonts, while working great for code, are hard to read in narrative forms. If they are printing these out, they probably want to use a font that doesn't "look weird" for the sake of the people who have to read all this shit.
I'm impressed they actually restrict it based on printed width. I've seen a _lot_ of form type apps where it'll let you enter the data, and then just cut it off when it gets printed.
Fairly poor “top 10” list. Nothing on this list was particularly extreme, and not really “geek” oriented.
I guess the problem with this kind of list is that _everything_ has an extreme. Pick something you like, and some millionaire probably has an obscenely expensive version of it. This list was mostly the extreme versions of things I have no interest in.
Often with these extreme versions they’ve just taken something existing and covered it in gold/diamonds/rare metals/rare woods.. which isn’t all that interesting to me either. I remember there was some vodka (touted as the worlds most expensive) that was basically just garden variety high-end vodka with a column of diamonds down the center.
The only thing on this list that really held any interest for me was those speakers, but at that cost it’s totally not worth the novelty, and they probably look terrible close up (as this kind of stuff tends to look great at a very specific angle but look ridiculous from everywhere else).
Ah well, can’t spend it all on philanthropic interests.. I guess after a while you run out of shit to do with that much money.
Oh calm down.. this has nothing to do with prejudices..
Yes, in the ideal world everyone would be free to express their finely honed sense of self image at all times in all situations. In the real world we have norms that people are expected to conform to when operating in a professional capacity.
If you're a programmer, engineer, or any generic office worker who doesn't have to deal with customers, then you can wear as much metal and ink as you want. It's generally accepted however that when you're in a business situation, you put on a clean shirt/suit/tie, take the junk out of your face, and do the uptight suit thing. Same as when you go to (most) job interview. It shows respect and that you take your job seriously.
Yes it's backwards and evil and makes no sense and how much stuff you have bolted to your face has no impact on the quality of your work.. but that's the society we live in, and anti-conformity for the sake of anti-conformity gets old.
I am surprised they don't specify a particular one.
Different knots look better on different people (neck size has a lot to do with this) .. and with different shirts.
I'm Canadian! We had something called "computer related studies" which was the programming (pascal at a fairly basic level) class.. and data processing which was basically a typing and word processing/spreadsheet class. Seemed pretty appropriately labeled.
So uh a business whose employees deal with customers on a daily basis in an industry where projecting an image of professionalism is very important has developed a guide to aid their employees? This just sounds like common sense to me.
43 pages sounds a bit insane, until you actually look at it. Large print, lots of diagrams, lots of whitespace/formatting not 43 walls of text. It actually looks pretty clean and readable.
Financial institutions are still one of the last places where we expect people to put some effort into their appearance. Even geeks like myself who cringe when they have to put on a tie tend to expect the people dealing with our savings to look the part. If the guy I’m greeted by has a nose ring, I’m out of there. Yay for double standards I guess.
Much as I hate apple.. I hate flash more. And it wouldn't surprise me if what you described _is_ actually less resource intensive than flash.
I have a higher-end quad core i7 and 12GB ram .. playing a flash video makes all 4 cores work and uses a rediculous amount of ram.
Sure, although people do that here. You can get a phone, cable, and internet "bundle" through the local cable provider (Eastlink). All comes through one wire.
It has gone out (we had a hurricane a while back that knocked it out). People manage.. most people have a cell phone they can use in an emergency.
Cable operators will run a real risk of just turning into a dumb pipe that leads to content provided by others.
This is probably the biggest obstacle. The companies for the most part run the networks required by the other companies who want to cut into their television business. They either have to find a way to profit in this new frontier .. or dig in their heels and hold on as long as possible, and given the history in situations like this, I have a good guess which they'll do.
The fun thing is to watch an entire series over the course of a month or so.
The realization that you've just watched like _7 years_ worth of programming in a month is always awesome and scary at the same time.
Also watching episode after episode, you notice things (some good, some bad) that you wouldn't if there was a week between each episode. For instance Babylon 5 gets very depressing for like 2 seasons. I didn't notice it as much when I was watching it on TV .. but you watch it back-to-back .. and it's a completely different experience.
Is of course how long television is going to be around.
From my perspective, television offers no real benefit over the internet for transferring video. The same can probably be said about VOIP vs. POTS (aside from reliability I guess).
There are of course two obstacles:
Mass adoption (not _everyone_ has high speed internet yet.. ).
And the big one.. the “big guys” don’t want it to happen.
I envision a day when everyone has one line (and I hope to the fire cactus that it’s fiber) coming to their home.. from which their phone, tv, internet, and whatever else come through. But I envision being dead before it happens .. or at least close.
As much as I really love the idea of working at home, I think you miss out on the whole team aspect of things. I wouldn't mind working from home 2 days a week or something, but I think you still need people to physically see you on a regular basis.
I've heard lots of success stories.. so I guess it depends on the local culture. If everyone is working from home it would probably be ok.. but I suspect if only a few are working from home.. those few will not be as likely to get promoted / get the choice work, and will basically become the equvilant of outsourced labour.