Mark Roseman's Blog

Death of a President.

We watched the movie Death of a President yesterday - quite enjoyed it. Also watched Clerks 2 again, though admittedly the two don't fit together terribly well.

Wild Organic Way.

Pauline and I went for dinner last night at a place in downtown Guelph I've been meaning to try for a while - Wild Organic Way ("WoW"). It's entirely raw food, organic, and vegan - with no wheat or sugar used. Very much not used to a restaurant that I can eat more than one or two things on the menu; here almost everything was fair game. Pauline was a bit more restricted, given a nut allergy, and raw food uses a lot of nuts in things, but she still had around half the menu to choose from.

We had a fantastic meal, incredibly tasty and incredibly fresh; she had a taco, and I had a pizza. Great combinations of flavours and textures, and packed with nutrients. Even the desserts are wonderfully tasty and even good for you, plus no sugar buzz. We had a nice chat with Tom, one half of the couple that owns and runs the place. Outside of California, there aren't too many places like this, and closer to locally, just a couple in Toronto, so having one walking distance is great (and oh, so Guelph). It's not like we're going to convert to a raw diet or anything, but its opened our eyes to a few more options. And while we had a laugh at the idea of bringing some of our more steak-oriented friends there, I'd bet they'd actually like it and feel great afterwards, though they'd never admit it.

Open Source Rewards.

Matt Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress) posts about the rewards in creating a thriving open source eco-system, which have precious little to do with the get-rich-quick young tech entrepreneur story that everyone always wants to hear.

Thoughts on 'Dreaming in Code'.

As most people know, this book by Scott Rosenberg does the "embedded journalist" routine with the first few years of Mitch Kapor's "Chandler" project. Scott of course expected Chandler to be a bit farther along after by the time he actually had to submit the book, but in many ways it just highlights the point about software development and its struggles. As has often been noted, this book joins the ranks of other outsider-looking-in books exemplified by Tracy Kidder's 'The Soul of a New Machine', which I thoroughly enjoyed when I read it aeons ago.

This book has several different audiences, each who will get something different from it. For advanced programmers, it's a light but easy read, providing one in a series of warnings about our general ineptitude at creating large scale software, something it's healthy for us to be all periodically reminded of.

For newer programmers, or those immersed more on the pure tech side, it's a healthy look at how people and processes make a difference. It's also a good introduction to some recent history which is often sorely lacking, and identifies and highlights some key figures in the discipline (e.g. Alan Kay). The book has a few digressions away from the Chandler team that really do provide some broader perspective (e.g. where did the software crisis come from, software engineering vs. real engineering, how do other companies llike Google or 37 Signals approach development practices, and more).

One notable digression compared how people are taught in a CS degree vs. a fine arts degree. In the latter, students study existing masters, learn about the history of the discipline, and work, critique and rework their own creations. Not a lot of that in CS, which generally teaches techniques in a context-free vacuum, with little perspective, historical or otherwise.

Given so many developers don't regularly keep up with trends in software process (through books, blogs like Joel on Software, etc.), it's unlikely the people who would benefit from this will actually read it, but what can you do.

Finally, for interested and slightly motivated people outside the industry who you've tried to explain what you do at work (parents, spouses, etc.), it may go along way to some better understanding of what you do. Or why you come home so frustrated some days.

In some ways, this was an incredibly bizarre book to be reading — as a book. You always think of books as chronicling some after the fact series of events, providing that enlightened retrospective. With this project both recent and ongoing, it just feels weird reading a book about it. Whereas if it were a series of blog posts, ... McLuhan strikes again. Part of this is that like many others, I'd followed Chandler early on. Some of it was the people involved, many who I knew of or had heard speak, and partly was the promise of both the applications and infrastructure they'd produce, along with the potential improvements in existing tools like Wx that they'd chosen to use. Again like many, my interest died out as the project floundered, but given it's at the point where they're actually starting to release stuff, the book may generate some new interest for the project.

So all in all, while the book will be nothing earth-shattering for most people, it's very much a well written and engaging addition that stands up well alongside others in this genre.

BlackBerry Curve.

This newest BlackBerry looks not bad... their first "consumer" model (well, "prosumer" at the price of most BlackBerry airtime/email plans) with a full keyboard.

Obsolescence.

Reading through Dreaming in Code (more on that another day), I kept being struck by technology after technology and project after project that I'd at one time been interested in, followed, used, or whatever. None of which of course are relevant at all today. Not atypical in computing. The positive spin would be that to stay relevant, you're constantly learning, which is a good thing in so many ways. The other side of it would be that what you learn rarely builds on what you knew before, but replaces it entirely, leaving the old knowledge essentially useless.

The one area where things don't change quite as fast (or at least as drastically) is the development process and management side of things. But we all know how well we suck at that.

Imagine if professions like medicine or law behaved the same way, where existing knowledge needed to be replaced within some small number of years (not updated, not added to, but replaced). Any other fields as bad as, or worse than, computing in this regard?

Thinking Trails.

I find that for myself, going out for a bit of quiet solo hike is a great opportunity to mull over whatever problem I'm trying to tackle with work. When we lived in Westdale in Hamilton, we were only a couple of blocks from the RBG trails around Coote's Paradise, so that was a frequent destination. In Ancaster it was even better, with easy access to a wide variety of gorgeous trails on and around the Bruce Trail just minutes away — really helped with the post-TeamWave and early ProjectForum work. Waterloo wasn't as great, though there were some shorter trails around the Laurelwood Conservation Area a couple of minutes from where we lived. Guelph may be a bit tougher; we're a couple blocks from the river and the trail system there, but it's more urban and populated, less ideal for solitary thinking. Guelph Lake or Hanlon Creek CA may be possibilities, we'll see.