November 16th, 2008 by Jilles
Looking at this picture, I realized I was seeing a visualization of something I’ve been telling people around me: that it seems everyone in my social circle is having a baby. What you are looking at is one page of friends on a local social network in the Netherlands called Hyves.
There are 6 babies depicted, out of the 12 possible (if you do not count some of the adults as babies). In, as a should I add, a “random” screen shot. It kind of underlines, for me, what has happened in the last 12 months: I can count at least 25+ couples/individuals that have been pregnant. All of which luckily delivered without any (lasting) incidents!
Now I should not be surprised by this of course, statistics will have it that there are just not many 18 year olds that become pregnant, but still: it happens so fast!
I guess these are the beginnings of a mid-life crisis?
November 8th, 2008 by Jilles
Recently found a weblog (”Fractals of Change“) that occasionally talks about the finance world. There are some really great gems. For example, take this article explaining “the physics of money“:
The faster we spend, the more money there is available in the economy. Money we put in our mattresses might as well not exist as far as the economy is concerned even though it may be very important to us.
Another article outlines the positive aspects of the current financial crisis:
This correction from excess has been violent and in many ways harmful but it HAS cured many of the excesses; the goal shouldn’t be to reestablish them. We don’t want housing prices to boom out of reach again; we don’t want oil prices to go up or credit to be extended promiscuously; we don’t want a banking economy based on the third derivative of valueless debt.
Some of the other blogposts over there are interesting reads as well!
October 6th, 2007 by Jilles
Kyle Wilson wrote recently a really nice piece on why software development is so hard, which for me didn’t include new insights (I’m already convinced) but did a really nice job on quantifying the problem space. Something which I had not seen before so clearly articulated. If you’re in this line of business, it’s a must read.
The thing that makes this article so interesting is that for some reason Kyle has access to information about five large software development projects: Chandler (the OSS Exchange replacement), Myst Online, Fracture (a new game), the software that controls a F-22 fighter jet and the FBI’s Virtual Case File.
After describing some of the pitfalls the Chandler team fell in, he goes on trying to outline why Lines of Code (LOC) is a useless metric for determining the complexity of a software program. More importantly, he throws in some statistics of the aforementioned projects that really hits this home.
Short list of conclusions:
• LOC is useless as a means to describe either the complexity of the program or the amount of effort that went into producing it
• Project teams need an economic framework (in the broadest sense of the word) in order to be successful. Otherwise there is no forcing function for decisions (like design choices, feature sets and release dates).
• In theory the complexity of a well-structured program should be O(n), where n is the number of lines of code (each line only tightly coupled with the line preceding and after it). A poorly structured program would be O(n2), with dependencies on one particular line throughout the codebase.
Favorite quote, from the 1968 NATO Software Engingeering Conference: “We undoubtedly produce software by backward techniques. [...] We build systems like the Wright brothers build airplanes — build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again”.
And this one: “Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves” — Alan Kay (the father of Smalltalk).
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