Don’t Work on the Wrong Machine

Posted on August 28th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, Programming.

Fred Brooks: Build one to throw away

My version: Build every one to throw away.

Fred Brooks’ classic The Mythical Man-Month made this observation developing a new piece of software - inevitably, many of the problems that will need to be solved won’t be known until you try to solve them. The first try will incorporate many feelings of should-have and would-have that will be fixed on the second try.

Carter made a bench!

This is much like a journeyman craftsman building his or her first bench, or planting their first garden. The first try is a learning experience. There is no way around this, nor should there be - learning is often best by doing. The valuable asset is the experience of the builder, not the product.

But we don’t live in the Middle Ages, the age of guilds. We live in the post-Industrial Age. Factory owners don’t consider hoarding all the toys or cars or electronics they produce as an asset. Henry Ford’s genius was to redesign not just the golden eggs, but the machine that lays them.

As programmers, we are not working on a code base. We are working on a machine that produces code. The machine is made up of us, our experiences, the tools we build to make code (which can be made out of code themselves!). This is where results come from, and we should spend our time tuning this machine by producing more, not protecting what we have.

Does this mean that we should throw out old code? By no means! Old code is one of the most efficient resources we have for producing new code. But every process of manufacture in the past has been made into a more automatic and refined process. How could we consider ourselves any different?

Does this mean that we should code like crap? By no means! As was once said, “If you write the first one to throw out, you will end up throwing out the second one as well.” The point is, write good code, but be willing to write new code - the point is to make not good code, but a good code factory.

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The Tower of Babel Part Two: Science Again!

Posted on August 25th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Philosophy.

I was previously discussing a rather simple but unconventional idea: If Christianity has flaws that atheists reject, why not redesign Christianity (or any other religion) to correct for those flaws?

The last time we discussed this, the subject was the problem of suffering on earth. This time, we will address the question of science and religion.

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The Two Ways of Working

Posted on August 23rd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris.

  1. If you know what you want to produce exactly (a car, toaster, etc.) and have a precise plan that you can follow to produce it, you can hire and evaluate people by spreadsheet and monitor their efficiency.
  2. If what you want to produce is unknown (a strategic plan, a new product line), but know the sort of person you want to produce it, you can’t hire or evaluate by quantity. Instead, you need to create the right conditions for people and hope that they produce it themselves, as they will do, in the right conditions.

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Notes

Posted on July 28th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris.

1. Someday, students may choose to run their own classes.
Oh wait, that’s today.

2. Somewhere (I can’t remember where), I read that caffeine can reduce creativity because it increases focus, and creativity requires free association:

In psychology books, the talent for taking two unrelated concepts and finding connections between them is called associative ability. In his book Creativity in Science: Change, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist, Dean Simonton points out that “persons with low associative barriers may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience or that cannot easily be traced logically.” Read that last sentence again; it’s indistinguishable from various definitions of insanity.

-The Myths of Innovation, p.13

So imagine developing two drugs: One for sane people to increase their creativity by making them more insane. One for insane people to increase their sanity by making them less creative.

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