CRYPTOCHAOS

The essence of sketching is selectivity. With forward sketching you rough out some issues in code you are about to write, usually discussing them with a group of people with your team. Your aim is to use the sketches to help communicate ideas and alternatives about what you're about to do. You don't talk about all the code you are going to work on, just important issues that you want to run past your colleagues first, or sections of the design that you want to visualize before you begin programming.

Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.”

A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.”

“Elegant”, that is an adjective that is often used to describe the Python language. The term elegant is defined as “pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner”. “Uncomplicated”, and “powerful” could also be great words to assist in the description of this language. It is a fact that Python is an elegant language that lets one create powerful applications in an uncomplicated manner. One may say that if you look at trends that are occurring within the computing industry today, Python can be looked at as the main objective. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of programming languages available today which each offer a different flavor to the field. Although there are many flavors, there is a similar objective for each of these programming languages...and that is to produce powerful and uncomplicated code that is easy to construct and maintain. Python does just that.

Interesting...

The requirements document that never got to the developers.  In the spring of 2005 I had the pleasure of visiting India.  While I was there I spent time at several organizations discussing with them how to become more agile.  Part way through the trip I spent some time with a gentleman who worked for an IT outsourcing service firm.  One aspect of his job was to take the large requirements documents provided by their American clients, which were typically hundreds of pages in length, and to summarize them down to something less than ten pages.  This summary was then provided to the development team, not the detailed requirements.  They did this because they discovered that no matter how well the documentation had been written the problem still remained that the documents were error prone, contradictory, and far too verbose.  This in turn led to the wrong software being developed.  Experience showed them that by giving the developers the overview document and then having them talk with the client on a regular basis, daily conference calls were common, that they could do a far better job.  In short, this CMMI level 4 firm discovered that a significant productivity improvement (SPI) strategy was to reduce requirements documentation, not increase it.  Granted, writing this document up front would hopefully have had the benefit that the client settled on a common vision.  However, they could still have achieved this same goal without having to write some much documentation (e.g. perhaps they should have just written the 10-page summary to begin with).

Based on an 80-year economic cycle, we are coming to the end of the information age. The remaining 15 years of the current cycle will produce astounding changes far beyond anything we can now anticipate. However, we should also be looking at what technology will become the basis of next 80-year cycle. Continuing to focus on computers will be like producing buggy whips for horse drawn conveyances when Henry Ford started mass producing the Model T.

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect.
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“At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.”

Although I don't always agree with Joel, this column is spot on...

Goldman reduced its exposure to mortgages “early,” Viniar said, “before most people had a view that the world was getting worse.” At one point before the magnitude of the problem became crystalline, Viniar thought that Goldman had become too bearish, and insisted that the firm’s traders reverse course somewhat. That decision later cost the firm around $200 million. “They were 100 percent right,” he said. “I was 100 percent wrong.”

Curiously, other firms did not follow Goldman’s lead and, in fact, during the first quarter of 2007 used the perceived weakness in the market for mortgage securities as an opportunity to double-down on their already huge long bets. This was the turning point. If Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and AIG had the same perception of risk as did Viniar and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs, there might have been a downturn, but there wouldn’t have been a meltdown.

I never get tired of reading this stuff.... Also, check out Liars Poker . I read the book back before I joined Salomon Brothers' Technology arm to help set up the 7 WTC trading environment. Good read.