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- Discerning quality
- Pizzeria Seven Twelve
- Sunday afternoon
- savelogs 1.90 released
- On responsibility
- Too much connectivity is a bad thing
- This title is self-referential
- Read this if you missed Veterans Day
- Correlation: unhappy people and TV
- Do NOT discard brain
- Reflections on a piece of pumpkin pecan pie
- Why I Ban Laptops in My Classroom
- Why One-Laptop-Per-Child Fails
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Bear with me here. It seems like I have to learn this every few months, but this time I’m going to write it down so carefully that I won’t forget. Probably. Anyway, I play table tennis at our local club most Wednesday nights. I learned (again) tonight that there nothing quite so powerful as playing joyfully.
Now, of course, joy cannot make up for lack of skill. You need the skill. But fear ratchets your skill level down two or three notches. When you do anything out of fear, you instantly turn the tables on yourself, and your opponent has the advantage.
Joy, or enjoyment, takes away fear. But not only does it take away fear and doubt, it also brings with it the confidence necessary to play with evenness and at the peak of your skill. You get the most out of your skill when you can play with confidence and enjoyment.
I used to confuse enjoyment with relaxation. They’re not the same. Coaches always say to a player who is afraid, “Relax!” But they should be saying, “Enjoy it!”
There is another level that I’ll call recklessness, which is playing with enjoyment untempered by care. Someone who doesn’t care can never produce anything of quality. When you’re enjoying doing something with care, you’re going to see your highest quality come out. Enjoyment is what allows you to be content with your progress and care is what makes you strive to improve.
Fear of failure, love of money, seeking prestige: all of these can also be motivators, but they’re inferior to joy and care. When you find joy in your work, whatever it is, you will have found your reason to be, and nothing is stronger than that. I think this is what Emerson meant when he said “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”
It’s the same in computer programming as it is with sewing as it is with cooking. Actually, it’s the same with just being. Those who find joy in what they do (and who they are), and care about what they do (and who they are), will be ever improving, and will always find satisfaction and produce the highest quality work they are capable of.
posted on Thu, 11 Dec 2008 at 00:03 | permanent link | view comments
Telling the difference between good quality and bad quality is sometimes hard. Having worked a few years now in the software industry, I can tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. I can tell because I’m in all of their code and I’m thinking “this is a well-engineered module” or I’m thinking “what a pile.”
But my skill in software doesn’t necessarily translate into other areas. I still can’t tell what makes a great painting, or a great film. I can tell a good book or article from a lousy one, but only because I have spent considerable time both reading and writing.
In general, you can discern quality when you experience it and only when you yourself have enough competency to tell the difference. (We’re going to assume you’re familiar with this study which discusses the problems with self-assessing competency).
For example, when I bought my most recent home, I couldn’t tell a good home from a bad one. So I asked my cousin (who has built many custom homes) for some advice, and he explained to me that you can’t easily tell a good home from a bad home, because when the finish work is applied, most of structural quality is covered up.
Of course you can look for a few signs of things you can see, and there will sometimes be obvious signs of poor quality (creaky floors and walls, cracks in the drywall, gaps in finish work), but in general, you can’t tell much about the home if the finish work was even marginally competent. In addition, it may just be poor finish work, which can be redone. So you can’t judge a home by the paint.
To tell a good home from a bad one, you have to watch the construction process itself: how well the foundation was dug and prepared, the quality of building materials used, how many roofing nails per foot, the squareness of the framing, the care with which the plumbing was done, and so forth.
In the end, it’s all hidden by paint and siding; if you weren’t around to watch the house being built (assuming you had the skill to tell the difference) only time will tell whether the quality was good or poor. With my previous home, I learned that nearly all of the plumbing was sub-standard and had to replace many pieces of it after only a few years.
It’s the same with software: in the end, it’s all hidden by an API. Those using it may notice certain irregularities, efficiency problems, or what have you, but when things work most of the time, managers and customers are happy. All software has bugs. It’s only months or years later when someone needs to dig in and make a change that you’ll know whether it was done right.
Soon Hui wonders why good programmers aren’t paid 10 times as much as bad ones are (comparing them to soccer stars). He says [sic]:
I think it has to do with the nature of software development. It’s not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It’s rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can’t measure by statistics or figures. But those who are able to command a high salary premium are those who can positively prove their worth, not those whose work can save the boss trouble later.
The productivity of good developers come from less rework, less debugging and less bugs.
original link (itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com)
I don’t come to the same conclusion that he does: namely, you can’t tell a good programmer from a bad one. I can tell, and I think most good programmers can tell, but you have to dig into the code. The real problem is that many managers can’t tell the difference, and they’re the ones doing the hiring.
Which brings me to the final point. Software management is one critical area where the industry has not made great strides. As a group, I think most of us agree that there is a wide range of competency among programmers, but we haven’t figured out what to do with managers yet.
Having done some time managing groups of people in various capacities, as well as having been managed (including under- and over-managed), I think I can tell the difference between a good manager and a poor one.
The best managers I’ve known are nearly all have experience doing what the people they now manage are now doing, and doing it well. They themselves are quality individuals and understand and care about not only the end product, but the pathway to that end.
In software, the great managers are all former quality programmers. They cared about what they did and it showed in their programming work and now shows in their work as a manager. When you find a quality manager, you will find quality people working for them.
Software shops with great variance in skill and caring is often an indication of uneven management at best; high turnover is also an indication of someone not doing a great job at recognizing or keeping talented workers.
In the Paul Graham spirit, I think the only way to ensure you get a great manager is to start your own company. Then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
I just had lunch at Pizzeria 712. Before I dig into the review, let me explain how I’m changing my rating system. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days and realized that I can simplify and become more honest at the same time.
First, I’ve reduced all the variables down to two questions:
Would I eat there again?
If “yes,” how eagerly am I looking forward to doing that?
There are of course other variables that are worth considering, but only after the questions are answered. Things like atmosphere, noise level, portions, service level, etc. are important components to consider individually, but only important when first taken as a whole. What was the entire experience like? I don’t know of a more succinct way to answer that than my Two Questions above.
And why is this more honest? I don’t want to fool anyone into thinking that a 5-star rating means a place is great. It just means I thought it was great. These questions make it clear that this is my own opinion of the establishment.
So, on to Pizzeria 712 (blog). The former Tree Room Chef cooked me up a braised beef with sweet onions, mushrooms and provolone panini sandwich. As far as panini sandwiches go, I can’t remember one better. I had a salad with it, but don’t remember what it was called now (it wasn’t on the menu). The service was good; one of those cases where I can’t find anything wrong.
Would I eat there again? Yes. How eagerly am I looking forward to doing that? I think I’d like to go back in two or three weeks.
I took this shot of Mount Timpanogos from our van just before we pulled onto the freeway.
I guess it would have been more impressive with a panoramic lens. Trust me, it was breathtaking.
Here’s a landscape view:
That’s the problem with photography: it’s a lie.
Something amazing and good is often made to look stupid and terrible, and vice versa. One of my favorite sayings in recent years goes something like this:
A picture is worth a thousand words, but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any meaningful sets of a thousand words can be adequately described with pictures.
Never mind this is the first update in over 4 years. This release features a couple of minor bug fixes and one major new feature: log groups.
Log groups let you apply different settings to groups of logfiles in a single savelogs run. This means that your days of forking too many process are over! (Probably.) You’ll have to see the documentation for details and adjust your crontab files accordingly.
Enjoy!
Tim Cook is Apple’s chief operating officer. He makes sure that their products are made as well and as efficiently as possible.
Tim Cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran—he’d worked for IBM for 12 of those years—with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.
“This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”
Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.
Original link (cnn.com)
What interests me about this story is not so much Tim Cook, who is obviously a spectacular leader. It’s Sabih Khan, who booked his flight to China and left without hesitation. I can’t think off the top of my head of a better story illustrating what it means to be responsible (in both senses of the phrase).
Too much connectivity is a bad thing
New York Times article: “Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing”
Here’s a great example of a study addressing the wrong concern with misguided results designed to reinforce further funding of the same. This is a $50 million project on “digital and media learning” and conducted by whom? By researchers in the Department of Informatics (UC, Irvine).
Sorry, but the Department of Informatics is run by technology loving geeks (it’s a sister department to computer science). These are not the people you want to be studying the effects of technology. It’s like turning the keys over to the maximum security prisoners and asking them to make sure everyone behaves.
The original concern about teens on the Internet (according to the researchers):
Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown.
and:
It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media.
Okay, I can accept the idea that stranger danger has been overblown. I’ve never thought that the world is full of creepos waiting to devour my children (there are a few out there, but those few get all the press, distorting our world view).
But the idea that “kids are wasting a lot of time” is still an unresolved concern for me. The study concluded that teens were not wasting time because:
their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.
Yeah, technological skills. Really hard to come by. I think your average 12-year-old could pick up some of these skills over a weekend. And learning how to get along with others? What we’re raising is a generation of people who don’t know how to interact face to face, who can’t read body language, and who would prefer to IM someone than walk down the hall and talk to them in physical proximity. These aren’t social skills, they’re anti-social skills.
People you never see aren’t real people: with a word you cut someone and you never see the results. You miss visual and auditory clues that you’re going the wrong way with your conversation.
Let’s talk about the “literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world.” Never mind that this is the new literacy (taken from the study):
hey … hm. wut to say? iono lol/well I left you a comment … u sud feel SPECIAL haha.
I’ve said before, that computer literacy does not consist of learning how to put up a MySpace page: the job of people who work at MySpace is to make putting up a webpage as easy as possible. I stopped listing “can operate a toaster” on my résumé when it finally became easy enough to do without reading a manual or spending years of study to do it.
Heck, the entire goal of the informatics industry (without regard to its effects on society) is to make technology easy for people to use. This is not literacy any more than watching TV is literacy.
Finally this statement:
There’s been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online. Mostly, they’re socializing with their friends, people they’ve met at school or camp or sports.
Sounds like a great use of time to me. Whether in the real world or in the digital world, “hanging out” certainly fills a social need, but to say that constant connectedness is a need? Here’s a quote from a 15-year-old boy participating in the study:
“As soon as I get home, I turn on my computer,” said a 15-year-old boy who started his MySpace page four years ago. “My MySpace is always on, and when I get a message on MySpace, it sends a text message to my phone. It’s not an obsession; it’s a necessity.”
A necessity? I think someone needs to teach this poor boy the difference between needs and wants. Of all the students who participated, only one tried to withdraw from the Internet to provide a control group. She only lasted a week without her Internets:
“It didn’t work,” she said. “You become addicted. You can’t live without it.”
So no control group for the study either. That’s great research. Constant social connectedness only reinforces the “cult of me” that’s prevalent enough already. Sorry, given the data, I don’t come to the same conclusion as the researchers on this one.
We don’t need even more biased studies telling us how great technology is. The progress of technology will likely continue without question and without any inhibition from society. What we need is more people after the pattern of Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others who are brave enough to at least raise a voice of caution: technology giveth and technology taketh away. It’s important to learn what we’re losing when we toss out the old for the new.
posted on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 at 08:43 | permanent link | view comments
This title is self-referential
People who know me well understand and accept with only minor complaint my penchant for self-referential humor. I don’t know why the bootstrap problem intrigues me so much, but it does.
Well, it appears to be rubbing off onto at least one of my children. Tonight as I unpacked our new label machine, Brooke (my 10 year old) said, “Dad, make a label that says ‘label machine’ and stick it on the labeler.”
sigh
Read this if you missed Veterans Day
This story is worth reading.
Acevedo’s story is one that was never supposed to be told. “We had to sign an affidavit … [saying] we never went through what we went through. We weren’t supposed to say a word,” he says.
The U.S. Army Center of Military History provided CNN a copy of the document signed by soldiers at the camp before they were sent back home. “You must be particularly on your guard with persons representing the press,” it says. “You must give no account of your experience in books, newspapers, periodicals, or in broadcasts or in lectures.”
The document ends with: “I understand that disclosure to anyone else will make me liable to disciplinary action.”
Original link (cnn)
posted on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 at 08:28 | permanent link | view comments
Correlation: unhappy people and TV
What’s not clear is whether unhappy people watch more TV to feel better, or more TV watching causes people to feel less happy. Or some other unknown causal factor.
Original link (livescience.com)