From dan at thecsl.org Mon Jun 8 10:12:56 2009 From: dan at thecsl.org (Dan MacNeil) Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:12:56 -0400 Subject: [Cadre-politics] Party invite (06/13) Message-ID: <4A2D1C68.809@thecsl.org> We're very good at parties. Remembering to invite people, not so much. Time: 3pm this Saturday Location: 211 Wachusett St., Apt. 2 Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 (Boston) Rides from Lowell guaranteed.. RSVP to me & I'll update official evite tracker. We might ask for a free will offering to cover party costs. If we do it will be optional. If past parties are a guide, there will be much more quiche eating and Chardonnay sipping than naked, greased pig wrestling and war gaming. The biker contingent is unusually large this year so I could be wrong on this. The party should be rug rat friendly, though there will be no ponies or clowns. From dan at thecsl.org Sat Jun 13 12:26:20 2009 From: dan at thecsl.org (Dan MacNeil) Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:26:20 +0000 Subject: [Cadre-politics] status leftover lashup Message-ID: <4A33D32C.8000209@thecsl.org> INTRO THAT I WRITE KNOWING NOBODY READS INTROS FEEDBACK PAST FEEDBACK DO THE JOB RIGHT (unit tests/test coverage) JOY OF SCARCITY COMPROMISING QUALITY ALUMNI NEWS INTRO THAT I WRITE KNOWING NOBODY READS INTROS I have 10 partial draft status messages dating back to July of 2008. Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. Time for some left-over lash-up. I need to finish quickly and primp for this afternoon's party: http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/cadre-politics/2009-June/000692.html btw, "Primping" amounts to "find a clean tee shirt" and maybe "take a bath" FEEDBACK Tick the box, copy 'n paste the feedback into email to dan at thecsl.org ______ Just talk about children, puppies and kittens ______ more Asymptotics. ______ funnier jokes ______ software and scarcity are not joking matters. ______ Other (write below) PAST FEEDBACK Back in October 2008, I complied feedback. (3) You PROMISED unit tests (1) Shelter work is challenging. (3) More lab (4) "Inspiring" (1) "WTF" (summarizing) (1) no interest in unit tests doesn't equal "shallow and narrow" This status report, we're actually going to talk (in a shallow and superficial way) about unit tests. In hindsight, I could have seen that calling people with obesity related heart problems "fat slobs" wasn't going to be popular or seen as relevant to free software. To pick the scab, the original point was that we don't provide even very basic medical care to crazy, homeless drug addicts, because we see them as responsible for their own troubles, but we do spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on heart surgery for people who could avoid problems with diet and exercise. Another unpopular statement was saying people who weren't interested in unit tests were "shallow and narrow". I'm not sure what was up with that, I think I was just lashing out randomly and over-dramatically in reaction to past tramua from past bosses who boasted of their tech ignorance as they insisted on making stupid decisions. "Stupid" of course being defined as "not the decision I wanted" Overall, the October post: http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/cadre-politics/2008-October/000679.html ... inspired the same number of people it annoyed or insulted. The expression "Can't be all things to all people" is a distortion of scripture. A religious zealot like me, should be all things to all people. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+9:16-23 DISCLAIMER: TheCSL.org is not a religious institution, the vast majority of us are secular humanists, polytheists or bitter atheists and this is a perfectly fine balance against the Christian wack-jobs like me in the group. DO THE JOB RIGHT (unit tests/test coverage) Yesterday, I spent about 5 hours pair programming with Yash. We wrote unit tests to get 100% code coverage on ArgChecker.pm See the very pretty picture at: http://mvh.yash.testing123.net/cover/ We are now more confident this code lacks bugs. More important the work of writing tests that covered all the branches forced us to really, really understand the code. (really). We radically simplified the module. We had radical courage because we were mostly confident that our tests would catch any bugs we introduced. It feels really, really good to do the job right. (really) Did I mention we have about 730 unit tests and 300 integration tests right now? JOY OF SCARCITY If we were getting paid, we might not have done Friday's work. Working for a paycheck, we might have had to add a feature that somebody wanted to pay for. Until at least September, we will favor inner quality over money or even pleasing users. In theory taking the time to learn to do things right will build muscle memory [1], for when there isn't time for more than quick and ugly work. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory This might be a bad strategy for getting useful results. It didn't work well for mega millionaire free software guy, Mark Shuttleworth [2] See his blog [3] [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth [3] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/date/2003/11 On the gripping hand [4], see technical debt [5]: [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gripping_hand [5] http://jamesshore.com/Articles/Business/Software%20Profitability%20Newsletter/Design%20Debt.html COMPROMISING QUALITY Friday, we didn't go completely nuts with the quality. Our testing uncovered a bug in a documented feature of the module. Since this feature isn't used in the production code, we removed the feature and the documentation that referred to it. Things should be as perfect as possible, but no more perfect than that. ALUMNI NEWS Some of this is pretty old EB is taking computer science classes at umb.edu CM is a librarian at UPenn. EA is still doing the crazy startup. Last I heard he had translated his software into Japanese (which is easier than it sounds) JM is working at Brandis, living in Waltham and programing in Python. CS graduated and is working @ Lincoln labs.