I started coding algorithms in PHP in order to beef up my coding knowledge. It’s been an interesting exercise so far because when I coded algorithms in college it was great using C pointers.
Blog
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The Code of Successful Websites
Hypothesis:
Coding is a free market enterprise. Wild-west coding or coding anarchy is more profitable and more likely to encourage progress than following any coding methodology. (I.e. waterfall, agile, extreme, pair coding, etc.)
I. This is shown by the source code of the most successful companies. The only commonality they share is that their most popular product feature was born of a non-methodological hack. It is only after the initial phase of success that a company brings order to the code.
II. The code that brings a company its first success is un-readable and un-maintainble.
III. Coding profitably is a result of breaking the rules and letting the market rather than the development process decide. Web analytics is vital.
IV. The consistency condition that demands coders code according to a design pattern or for the sake of maintainability is unreasonable because it either preserves an unprofitable coding methodology or obscures money making logic in the guise of readable code.
V. There is no coding method or technology however absurd or ancient that cannot be profitable. (My Space running on Cold Fusion w/SQL Servers as a back end.)
VI. There exists no code base that is capable of generating profit that is 100% in harmony with a given coding methodology. Many code bases are constituted by older technologies and older ways of making money; therefore a clash between methodologies is a sign of being wise and sensitive to changing markets.
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Part II of Hegel, Coding and Managers: Your boss and Hegel think it’s life or death but it’s not
DISCLAIMER: This article in no way is based on previous or current employers, and/or clients past or present.
I have great admiration for Joel Spoelsky who runs Fog Creek Software, because frankly, his advice has helped me in my career when I’ve run into tough situations. He has helped me thrive. In his, “Fire and Motion” article, he made it really clear to me what productivity means as a developer.
He’s been seduced by a certain Hegelism that most managers feel deep down to the core, and he expresses it really clearly when he talks about finding great developers.
In the last piece, I talked about how coders work under the false notion that coding will somehow make them better managers. Hegel expressed this in the Phenomenology of Spirit where the slave somehow through her work becomes free. Marx would later exploit this romantic delusion of Hegel’s and we are still cleaning up the mess from this lost cause. Mind you, I am in favor of returning Che Guevara’s stolen rolex to Cuba.
In this piece, there’s a specific prejudice that managers have that you can see in Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic. The one who becomes the master does so because she risked all:
[I]t is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won… The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. (s. 187)
Having risked all, the master is entitled to the enjoyment of the products of the slave and is the measure of the slave’s worth.
This sort of scrutiny and prejudice towards the slave can seen in the coder’s interview process.
Basically, you want a coder who can:
1) Do Smart Things
2) Do those Smart Things to Completion, i.e. Get Stuff DoneI’m not disagreeing with that at all, but let’s take the straw man of an example where Joel tells us not to hire the smart guy who can’t get things done:
‘People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time. These kind of people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts. For example, they will say, “Spreadsheets are really just a special case of programming language,†and then go off for a week and write a thrilling, brilliant whitepaper about the theoretical computational linguistic attributes of a spreadsheet as a programming language. Smart, but not useful. The other way to identify these people is that they have a tendency to show up at your office, coffee mug in hand, and try to start a long conversation about the relative merits of Java introspection vs. COM type libraries, on the day you are trying to ship a beta.’
There are two criticisms here against the manager:
1) The manager was pretty dumb in hiring a guy who is an academic. Theory is the work of the academic. In their minds, they have already gotten stuff done.
2) The manager labors under a false sense of urgency, the sort of urgency that makes the master so oppressive to the slave in Hegel’s version of the story.
3) A combination of both.You might be calling bullshit right now, but I know of a multi-million dollar company that would never call someone out on being too geeky like Joel did or brandish academic like a dirty word. That company is 37signals.
They did a unique experiment with a 4 day work week, and it’s turned out great!
Basically, they argue that urgency is poisonous:
One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.
Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.
When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.
If you’re a just-in-time provider of industry parts then precise deadlines and deliveries may be required, but in the software industry urgency is self-imposed and morale-busting. If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. Don’t plant it if you can help it.
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Part I of Hegel, Coding and Managers: The Blindness of Coders
This is a real rant from a techie who works for a company in San Mateo:
Recently our CTO (who also is a word class fool) promoted a guy to the position of lead product architect. I would like to mention that the product whose architect he has appointed has never contributed any work worth mentioning.
If you take a look at the only feature he has managed to make and he was the only resource assigned on that feature so I suppose he had all the options to take his decision and come up with a word class implementation, comprises of one file only. Yeah just one file and this one file contains tons of classes which have methods reaching 1K lines.
So you can imagine where the focus is. It clearly shows that this guy has never programmed under a good leadership. He is so worried about getting this fact disclosed that he managed to convince the CTO to not allow anyone to even see his code let alone suggest improvements. That’s one of the reasons I call the CTO a fool too 🙂
God knows what more is to come from this word class duo.
— source an anonymous lead engineer in San Mateo
The first thing that struck me is this. Why is this guy telling me this? Why isn’t he telling the CTO? One of the mythologies that Hegel pedals is the idea that the status quo is a result of a life and death struggle with the result being a great inequality. The time for talk has passed long ago, and what we have is this:
[O]ne is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is the master, the other is the slave. (Phenomenology of Spirit, s. 189)
Hegel’s way out for the slave is the work that the slave does on things. Hegel characterizes work as “desire held in check, fleetingness staved off… It is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own… having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self-will, a freedom.” (s. 195 – 196) Through service and discipline the slave makes herself stronger. The slave working on her work sees herself as essential and the master as unessential. This sets the stage for the slaves escape to freedom or possible domination of the master. In Marx, this is when the workers rise and take over all ownership of the means of production. The unessential, i.e. the owners, are done away with or made into workers themselves. Nobody is any longer master nor slave.
On the PHP Meetup list, I asked the question, “Have there ever been coders who have coded their way to freedom?”
I was given two examples, neither of which answered the question, and show that yes, a lot of coders do falsely believe that coding leads to freedom.
1) John Gilmore, a founder of the EFF which is an organization I support with donations.
2) Richard Stallman.
I’d say neither is free because although Gilmore made a fortune at Sun, coding didn’t lead to that freedom as a necessary condition. There are coders as good as Gilmore who don’t have that cash. The fact that EFF had to be founded points to the un-freedom of coders.
As far as Stallman goes, I admire his work. I use a lot of GNU software. However, I don’t have enough fingers to count the companies that close source GNU software and try and re-sell it as their own.
So, as you can see coding isn’t enough. Yet coders feel their coding makes them qualified to call CTOs fools. Ya, I can see that putting 1000s of lines of code into one file can be dumb. I can also see that promoting a bad coder is a bad idea. Good coding allows you to see this, but this guy in San Mateo has bought into the idea that he can’t talk to this CTO, that somehow the solution to the problem is technical, i.e. better code.
If you’re a coder, my advice to you is that the time to talk isn’t over. It hasn’t been settled in a Hegelian life and death struggle where the inequalities are currently fixed. If you talk, you still have a chance. Email your gripes now, and you might even be surprised.
In my next post, I talk about the prejudices that managers have towards coders.
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Hegel, Coding and Managers
DISCLAIMER: The comments here in no way reflect the work situation of my current employer, Dogster, or current clients, or any of my previous employers or clients.
I’ll share two secrets with you: Coders dislike their managers. Managers dislike their coders.
According to the 2007 Goldman Sachs survey of employee job satisfaction, most workers want out of their jobs, and tech work ranked in the top 5 of jobs with the least satisfaction.
I am concerned with coders and managers who don’t have the work situation I have, and I think that there are certain mythologies that coders and managers have that prevent them from having job satisfaction.
I think Hegel is the instigator of these mythologies.
I found these mythologies that coders and managers base their gripes on within what Hegel calls the Master-Slave Dialectic.
I encourage you to read the wikipedia entries.
I will follow up with two posts.
Part I: I talk about how coders use mythologies that prevent them from seeing their work situation for what it is. Although these mythologies originate in Hegel, they pervade media, e.g. Dilbert.
Part II: What do managers say about coders? To get to this information, you have to go behind the scenes. It isn’t at all pretty the sorts of prejudices managers have towards their coders, and if they could free themselves from these, they would enjoy management much more.
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Update your To Do List from Your Cell and Share Flowcharts with Everyone
To make flowcharts Web 2.0 style check out Gliffy.com.
Looking for a To Do list that works off-line as well as on-line? Do you also need to send your To Do items via SMS from your cell phone?
I love Remember The Milk just for this sort of thing.
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Sun Breaks MySQL’s Source Install
I was supposed to go to Medjool to meet up with the Zappos crew, but instead I ended up helping a pal with a MySQL database upgrade problem with version 5.1.24-rc.
The upgrade was a cluster fuck!
These steps for upgrading MySQL have served me well for the past 9 years.
tar cvf backup_data.tar /usr/local/mysql/var/* gzip backup_data.tar cd /usr/local/src/mysql-5.1.24-rc ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysqld-user=mysql --with-ssl make make install scripts/mysql_install_db
Then I’d just run ‘/usr/local/libexec/mysqld –user=mysql &’ and I’d be on my merry way to happily computing on the web.
But now wiith version 5.1.24-rc of MySQL, I’d have to ask what the heck are they doing at Sun to MySQL?
When I started the server, I noticed that the state files were running in /var . Big fail there, since the prefix is defined as /usr/local/mysql .
Also, I noticed that when I ran scripts/mysql_install_db there were more path errors:
FATAL ERROR: Could not find /fill_help_tables.sql
Then the biggest source of fail occured when I ran this:
/usr/local/libexec/mysqld –print-defaults
/usr/local/mysql/libexec/mysqld would have been started with the following arguments:
--port=3306 --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock --skip-locking --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=1M --table_cache=64 --sort_buffer_size=512K --net_buffer_length=8K --read_buffer_size=256K --read_rnd_buffer_size=512K --myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M --log-bin=mysql-bin --server-id=1 --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --port=3306 --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp --language=/usr/share/mysql/english --skip-external-locking --bind-address=127.0.0.1 --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=16M --thread_stack=128K --thread_cache_size=8 --query_cache_limit=1M --query_cache_size=16M --expire_logs_days=10 --max_binlog_size=100M --skip-bdb
Once again, path errors, and –skip-bdb is an option that doesn’t even exist for mysqld!!!!!!
Here was my fix for the scripts’ install:
./scripts/mysql_install_db --no-defaults --port=3306 --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock \ --skip-locking --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=1M --table_cache=64 \ --sort_buffer_size=512K --net_buffer_length=8K --read_buffer_size=256K \ --read_rnd_buffer_size=512K --myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M --log-bin=mysql-bin \ --server-id=1 --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid \ --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock \ --port=3306 --basedir=/usr/local/mysql --datadir=/usr/local/mysql/var \ --tmpdir=/tmp --language=/usr/local/mysql/share/mysql/english --skip-external-locking \ --bind-address=127.0.0.1 --key_buffer=16M --max_allowed_packet=16M \ --thread_stack=128K --thread_cache_size=8 --query_cache_limit=1M \ --query_cache_size=16M --expire_logs_days=10 --max_binlog_size=100M
Here’s my fix for how the server must start from now on:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --no-defaults --port=3306 \ --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock --skip-locking --key_buffer=16M \ --max_allowed_packet=1M --table_cache=64 --sort_buffer_size=512K \ --net_buffer_length=8K --read_buffer_size=256K \ --read_rnd_buffer_size=512K --myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M \ --log-bin=mysql-bin --server-id=1 --user=mysql \ --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid \ --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --port=3306 \ --basedir=/usr/local/mysql --datadir=/usr/local/mysql/var \ --tmpdir=/tmp --language=/usr/local/mysql/share/mysql/english \ --skip-external-locking --bind-address=127.0.0.1 --key_buffer=16M \ --max_allowed_packet=16M --thread_stack=128K --thread_cache_size=8 \ --query_cache_limit=1M --query_cache_size=16M \ --expire_logs_days=10 --max_binlog_size=100M &
All that just to start a server, so now, I’m totally telling my friends to use PostgreSQL instead. Sure it’s slower and doesn’t scale as much by a factor of 4 compared to MySQL, but hey, maybe it’s time for something new.
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What’s Your Favorite Open Source Project?
I’m a big fan of OAuth, because they’re coding a way of sharing your private data between different websites without having to give any 3rd party your password.
What’s your favorite open source project and why?
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Keeping It Real On Social Networking
I un-friended 50 people today and it feels good.
I applauded Twitter’s decision in July of 2007 to change “friend” to “follow”. It took one more falsehood out of the pile of lies that is the Internet.
I had to look at my Twitter followers and who I was following. I did the same with Facebook. I saw quite a few spammers, posers, users, and those who were a combination of all three.
figure 1. It’s easy to fake friends.
There was one person, who shall remain nameless, that really used me and hurt me. This person has managed to “friend” the top people in the Web 2.0 industry and has made it appear like s/he was the friend of all these top people thanks to carefully placed comments and strategic friending on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Upcoming.
Imagine my embarrassment when I showed up at a function with this person and my real friends revealed that they didn’t know this person at all.
Anyway, one of my goals is to keep my Twitter and Facebook connections real and I won’t hastily add “friends” anytime soon.
It’s a sad thing that nobody reads Book 8 of Aristotle’s Ethics anymore.
Here are two quotes that serve as a commentary of our age of easy friending:
“Those who quickly show the marks of friendship to each other wish to be friends, but are not friends unless they both are lovable and know the fact; for a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.”
“Those who are friends for the sake of utility part when the advantage is at an end; for they were lovers not of each other but of profit.”
And what am I going to do about it?
I’m planning on making a social network where it’s actually difficult to friend people. The idea is that you can’t be someone’s friend unless you complete a task that shows your friendship for someone and have that verified.
Crazy?
Yes.
Doable?
Definitely.
Let me know if you want to work on this project.
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What’s the Oldest Program You Have That You Wrote?
The oldest piece of code I have that I wrote is a text-based poker program.
Here’s a screenshot:
I wrote it for my first college computer programming class in 1995.
To use the code on a unix machine:
tar zxvf Poker-1.0.tar.gz
cd poker-1.0
make
./pokerWhat’s the oldest program you have that you wrote?
