Key on Caring

Our offshore coordinator asked this via Email:

What courses of technology would you recommend for your staff to take?

He had a list of classes (mostly specific to Microsoft Platform) in the body of email.

My answer. They shouldn't take any of those courses. They shouldn’t key on languages and platforms. They should key on learning to communicate, to think, and to work well with other people as well as to care for their craft. Once they have those, learning the languages and technologies become simple matters.

Reading principle-based books like Pragmatic programmer and Peopleware is by far a better start then blindly following those courses.

Subtracting = Simple = Better = Beautiful

Fresh from several years of computer programming, 137-year-old Sirius settles in the LA to finish his research on the behavior of computer programmers. But during his research he found most of the code written so far follows the Brownian motion that happens in physics. He was fascinated by a gentleman (Danash) who learns all the computer languages alphabetically…Ada, Basic, C, C++ etc. His research shows that people are always adding stuff and he thinks: “Kids should learn subtraction at school prior to learning addition”. He remembers in his dream while having fever, that a fat hand starts writing really bad code in solo. There is only one hand coding and the other one is missing. The hand then opens his mouth and starts drinking coffee and throw up almost instantaneously on the code. This goes on for the entire development cycle.

Over time, his disgust towards bad-code forces him into near-insanity, and finally Danash introduces him to a group of people who actually care about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. He anxiously study and searches for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

Their code was like a garden with a few things carefully selected and placed, simple, beautiful. Sirius realized that they also eat in smaller plates, pass the keyboard frequently to each other, laugh frequently, test like there is no tomorrow, and build their software 20 times a day. That was a turning point for Sirius’s research. There were no bad dreams and there were always 4 set of hands involved in any coding episode.

I should take my medicine, before this writing gets totally out of hand.

Sarbanes-Oxley

"When the cost of a new control is small compared with the legal exposure it covers, CIOs will implement the control. But this has always been true. Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't change anything. I predict that Sarbanes-Oxley will still be the law of the land 20 years from now. I further predict that it will have no effect whatsoever (other than causing a bit of panic in the first year or two) and will eventually be universally ignored. It will be like the blue laws still in existence in most states that prohibit a Wal-Mart from being open on Sundays, even though Wal-Mart is open on Sundays in all 50 states."

- Tom Demarco