less code, more software

I was driving along the A303 towards Gatwick last week and passed several stalls selling strawberries. It reminded me of an incident many years ago, before the kids were born, on the same road when Natalie and I stopped to buy some. We approached the stall. The only thing it sold was strawberries. It was a strawberry stall. Everywhere you looked here were open punnets of strawberries. With a twinkle in my eye I looked at the two young lads manning the stall and watched their puzzled faces as I asked "Have you got any strawberries?"

My bedroom looks out over the pictured field. Rabbits live along the far hedge so Natalie and I decided to borrow a pair of binoculars to get some close up views. The first time I tried them I just could not get a clear image. I fiddled for a while with no joy. Then I decided the binoculars were just fine and the problem was elsewhere. Thinking about it, I suddenly realized where - the house was built in 1897 and the bedroom still has the original sash window. The glass in the window is quite "curvy"! When I lifted the sash and looked at the rabbits directly everything came into focus nicely.

A while ago I decided my old business cards were rubbish and I threw them out. They were boring, and like many software applications, full of stuff that rarely, if ever, got used. Who cares what my business is called? Who cares what my "title" is. I think part of the problem is the phrase "business card" and in particular "business". The card does not get you any business! It's simply for making contact. So now I have Contact Cards. I read Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind a while back and in it he recommends drawing yourself in 5 lines. I found my attempt and used that. My friend Richard at Express Print in Taunton did all the rest.

Many years ago I noticed a problem with regular bookmarks. Quite often I'd open the book and waste some time trying to figure where on the page I'd already read to. One solution was to mark the exact place. That worked quite well but sometimes I didn't have a pen or pencil to hand. Then I realized there was a much better, much simpler solution. Use a post-it of some description and stick not to the top of the page but to the side thus marking not just the page, but also the line I'd got to. Simples!

I spotted the following three terms from the glossary of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. They could be straight out of a software glossary!

Learning: Any relatively permanent change in behaviour as a result of experience or practice.

Composition: An ordered relationship among the parts or elements of a work of art. In drawing, the arrangement of forms and spaces within the format.

Abstract Art: A translation into drawing, painting, sculpture, or design of a real-life object or experience. Usually implies the isolation, emphasis, or exaggeration of some aspect of the artist's perception of reality.

I'm self employed and work from home a lot. I have a small whiteboard stuck to the wall near my desk which my son Patrick enjoys writing on. So I bought another mini whiteboard for him. I hadn't planned it - but gradually the whole family has starting writing little messages on his whiteboard. As my children grow up (I also have two teenage daughters) they're leading increasingly independent lives and we seem to all be in the house at the same time less and less. The whiteboard provides a simple and direct way to chat asynchronously. And I think that helps them express themselves more freely. I also bought a divers slate so I could jot ideas down as they come to me in the shower. They've adopted that too!

Are all magic numbers bad? To give the classic consultants answer - it depends. Take zero for example. If the zero is being used as an index into an array then the zero is a zero because all arrays start at zero. That's internal knowledge; knowledge that is part of the solution and a reflection of something from the problem. There is no way you can conceive of a change in the problem causing a change to that zero. So it's internal. So it's ok. But all things are relative. It might still be a good idea to refactor - to a higher level expression of the iteration perhaps. But most numbers are not internal, they come from the problem. If numbers such as this are not named then they are indeed magic numbers; they are numbers that reveal nothing of their origin.

Magic isn't limited to numbers though. Far from it. A magic number is a number and a number is an expression. So a magic number is also a magic expression. And of course, all expressions lie on the same magic-code continuum; some expressions are very intention-revealing, they're not very magic at all - while other expressions are very cryptic and thus qualify as magic expressions regardless of whether they contain numbers or not.

Beyond magic expressions we have magic statements, magic functions, magic classes, you name it, if its part of the code it can be magic. I think it's time we pushed the word magic into greater service. It's time we had a better vocabulary for hard to understand things. If you see a hard-to-understand X in code how about calling it a magic X.

At the bus-stop on Frederick's Gate, Oslo, while waiting for the 151.

UML Use Case/Scenario ellipses look quite similar to cartoon speech bubbles. And each ellipse is of course supposed to be "spoken" by an actor. So sometimes when I'm coaching/training/etc I cut out ellipse shaped pieces of card and do some role playing.



You can have fun too. For example, developers often phrase their use-cases from the implementation perspective rather than from the actor's perspective. So when they write "Lend a Book" as the name of their Use Case, you can get them to actually try it. Pretend your inside a library, give them a book, and ask them to role play their use case. Like this... (the headband stops their arms from aching)



At which point someone role playing a Librarian can react like this...



...which makes everyone realize they should really have written this:

My good friend Olve Maudal of Tandberg did a talk about Product Development in TANDBERG for the Oslo Lean Meetup. His slides are online at http://bit.ly/cxNvjc and are well worth a look if you care about what it takes to make world class software.

Ellie's bike had a puncture today. I used some tyre-levers to prise the tyre off its wheel rim. Then I carefully pulled the inner tube out and was puzzled to see a large section had folded over on top of itself! How did that happen? A hurried previous repair? I attached a pump to the valve and pumped some air into the inner tube. Then I filled a bowl of water and plunged the inner tube into the water, shifting it along section by section. Suddenly a tell-tale stream of air bubbles revealed the source of an invisible hole in the inner tube. Right in the middle of an existing patch. More evidence of a hurried previous repair. I was struck by a few thoughts

The first is that air, like software, is invisible. To get the hole to reveal itself I switched to a different medium, from air to water.

The second is the importance of root cause analysis. Find the thorn and remove it. Otherwise you'll end up patching the patch just as I did.

Have you ever been in a washroom and failed to get any water out of a tap? Of course you have. We all have. It happens to me all the damned time.

The taps I hate the most are those stupid infra-red taps. The ones that are supposed to burst into life when you waggle your hands under them. Waggle to the left, waggle to right, in-out, in-out, doing the hokey-kokey. Your occasional random reward, if you're very lucky, is a short dribble of water.

The infra-redness is a ruse - it's fake - the tap is really part of sophisticated psychology experiment. Out of sight a white-coated clipboard-clutching technician is carefully monitoring your rising frustration. A favourite ploy is withholding water once you've dobbed a large blob of soap into your hands. And then watching as you fruitlessly search for a paper towel to wipe away the soap.

Another favourite is doctoring a clearly-full soap-dispenser into a soap-refuser. And of course, setting the force of the air-blower hand-drier to either barely-enough-to-fog-a-mirror or enough-to-lift-a-twelve-stone-man-clean-off-the-ground but never anything in between.

I miss the old-style taps.