I think I first heard the phrase “the first bite is with the eye” from a TV chef, but it applies equally to the software creation process as it does to cookery.
A user’s interaction with a piece of software or web site is as much emotional as it is functional. Compare the soft, warm, fuzzy feeling you get when first interacting with a product from 37 Signals, say, to the stomach churning reaction you get when booting up Lotus Notes, for example.
This immediate emotional response will pervade the whole of a user’s long-term impression of a product, imbuing their relationship with whatever feeling was conjured up in those preliminary interactions. They say that in most job interviews the interviewer makes up their mind within the first 5 minutes. The same is equally true for software.
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My most recent project was helping a major online retailer to mature their build process as part of a wider effort to improve their IT effectiveness through the injection of development best practices.
When we came onboard manual intervention was needed for any of their builds or deployments to work and so it was rare for more than a couple of builds or deployments to be completed successfully in a day. Now we often have up to 1,000 builds running every day - what’s more the majority of them now pass!
This article looks at a few of the techniques we’ve had to put in place to enable this transformation and what we’ve learnt along the way.
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February 10th, 2008
10:50 pm
coding
Discussions have been flying around the ThoughtWorks communication channels on balancing the risk of dynamic languages against the pain of static languages. This got me thinking about the similarities between what makes teams work well and what makes for good code and object interactions.
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With Google measuring the efficiency of their code in the amount of gigawatts required to serve it to millions of people, optimizing applications can actually have a positive impact on the world.
Logicalis have put together some advice on how to reduce the impact of IT on the environment. The suggestions range from reducing hardware requirements through virtualization and other consolidation techniques to old favorites like double-sided printing, video-conferencing, electronic forms and turning off your desktop at night.
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We’ve had some discussions recently about best practices when creating Ant scripts, so I thought I’d write up a few of my favourites.
Managing Ant target dependencies
“depends” are great, until your build file gets bigger than a couple of screenfuls. You can end up with a crazy spaghetti monster of dependencies very quickly. On a few builds I’ve worked on we’ve had a basic rule:
Targets can either have depends or a body, but not both.
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Coding really is become child’s play. This recent BBC news article points to some of the ways kids are being introduced to programming.
The good people at MIT have put together scratch a visual tool allowing kids to do drag-n-drop coding. The help screens give a good idea of how it works. Basically differently shaped blocks are put together (lego style) to form programs: a loop looks like a capital C and holds all the nested statements; booleans are pointy ended and only fit in pointy slots - likewise numbers are round and only fit in round slots … a nice simple introduction to strongly-typed languages. It actually fits pretty closely with how I visualise blocks of code, so it looks like a great way to introduce children to the coding mind-set. The welcoming colourful blocks are non-threatening and simple to understand.
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I had an interesting meal last night with the ThoughtWorks delegation to JavaOne. They were in town in support of the news that Mingle is going to be launched on JRuby.
I’ve seen some demos of Mingle and it looks great, but of equal interest to me is the choice to release it on JRuby. This seems to be another step along the road of Java moving down the stack. Java was selected as the delivery platform because corporate IT understands how to deploy, integrate, support and optimize it; Ruby was chosen as the development language because of the productivity and expressiveness of the language.
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I’ve often found that it’s much more effective to show clients what their problems are, rather than just telling them. Recently I’ve ended up using GraphViz as a great tool for high-lighting complexity that needs to be addressed.
At the client I’m currently working for the complexity of the build scripts was getting out of hand. I wanted to goad the customer into prioritising some simplification work. So I turned to GraphViz to depict how complex the build was. The build we’re using is a large, centralised, Ant script that builds about 10 different applications. It manages everything through the process of compile, test, package and deploy.
I found the handy ant2dot.xsl tool that uses XSL to transform an Ant build file into a DOT format graph representing the flow and dependencies between the various build targets.
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I’ve been looking at the Getting Things Done process for organizing all your tasks and projects for a little while now. Though I’ve only just bothered to pick up the book, rather than just guessing what’s in it via hints from other websites.
I’ve been trying to apply some of the principles to how I deal with work emails and have come up with a technique that’s been working pretty well since January, so I thought I’d share it.
A posting on Getting Things Done with Gmail started me off thinking about this. At the client I’m working for at the moment they use Outlook (I’ve used it for many years and am intimately familiar with the good and bad in it) so I’ve had to work with the tool in hand. I much prefer working with gmail, or before that the Opera mail client, which was probably the best I’ve used, since they have a simpler ability to tag / label mails in multiple ways, but if you combine a few tricks in Outlook you can get to a reasonable solution.
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So I’ve finally resurrected my site and moved to a new hosting company. I’ve transferred over some old information including my various TiddlyWiki implementations.
