Rants and comments on lifestyle, virtuality, software engineering and other worthy issues
After almost a decade trying to get it, yesterday I received a copy of After Man by Dougal Dixon. I got it from an Amazon.com seller, second hand.
I recall browsing through the pages of that book, back in the 1980s, and being mesmerized at the drawings and the stories within. Last night I browsed through the book again and I wasn’t disappointed. Quite the opposite; I am utterly impressed.
Today I skim-read Peopleware. I had read it already, maybe 10 years ago, but I needed to find some details so I grabbed it from the shelf for a minute and ended up re-reading most of it again. I am still impressed at how good this book is. It’s just a little pearl, so current and so insightful, especially the section on work spaces.
A few days ago I finished “Girlfriend in a Coma” by Douglas Coupland, one of my favourite authors. Awesome. I absolutely loved it. Romantic, powerful, gripping. Wow. Can’t say more. Go get it.
Have you read “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander? No? Get a copy now. Please.
It’s beautiful, useful and large. What else could you ask for?
Yesterday Isabel showed me one of her old text books from high school. It is tattered and torn and on the spine you can barely read “History”. I flipped through the pages, feeling the smell and the old-fashioned layout, and suddenly something caught my eye. Left page, inner column, midway from the top, in all-caps bold type: “VISIGOTH EPIGONISM”.
I immediately recognised the words. That wasn’t my book, but surely enough I used the same edition when I did history at high school. I will never forget the topic on Visigoth epigonism; I was 16, a curious kid quite well read for his age, and when I first stumbled against those words that I could not recognise, they got engraved in some engram at the back of my head.
I knew who the Visigoth were. I had studied history before and I had a rough idea of what they looked like in the pictures of the books. And I had watched a movie about them too! But “epigonism”… I had no clue about that word. I remember reading through the passage in the history book and being completely unable to infer the meaning of the title from the meaning of the text.
Some time ago I read the book by Jack Greenfield and Keith Short on software factories, and I liked the overall idea. I even got involved with a workshop at OOPSLA on this topic, kindly invited by Greenfield himself.
Since then, I have been reading papers, opinions and news related in various degrees to the concept of “software factories” as described by Greenfield and Short. A few days ago I attended an event where different Spanish government and corporate parties presented their ideas and objectives about software factories, and I was surprised to hear that everybody is into software factories now. Every single company talking at the event told tales about how they have created a software factory with 300 or 500 engineers in some low-tech, rural area of Spain. It was unclear why everybody used the term “software factory” to refer to a large building chock full with “engineers” developing software; we have always had that kind of place. It seems that development shops become now “software factories”, developers become “engineers”, and software development is not software development anymore but software manufacturing. So chic.
As I said, I am reading Joel Spolsky’s The Best Software Writing I. Actually, I’ve just finished reading it, and I like it. Of the collection of essays that Joel selected for the book, however, there is one that should not be there, in my opinion.
Joel says in the Introduction that he will poke his eyes out with a sharpened pencil if he finds another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine-year-old trekkie on Slashdot. Well, Paul Graham is no nine-year-old, but his behaviour in Great Hackers, the chapter he contributes to Spolsky’s book, is more or less that of a misinformed kid. I have read Graham’s Hackers & Painters and I liked it, although some chapters run along the same lines as Great Hackers does. Great Hackers, however, is surrounded by high-quality writing, and therefore sticks out like a sore thumb in its propaganda and prejudice.
I am going to dissect Graham’s Great Hackers bit by bit, and counter-argue each section to illustrate my point. Of course, my point is just an opinion, and my opinion is not more valid or superior to anybody else’s, including Graham, although I hope to be more objective and provide more backing to my claims than him. In any case, you draw your own conclusions.
I am reading The Best Software Writing I, an entertaining book edited by Joel Spolsky. In page 33, Adam Bosworth says “…porn seems to be an unpleasant leading user of technology”. Looks like Bosworth thinks that porn is bad, in some way.
A few weeks ago, I was listening to a talk at uni about web searching technologies. At certain point, the speaker wanted to find an example of a website that you don’t want to show up in your search result list, and he came up with porn: “so, in order to discriminate our target sites from those undesirable, such as porn, we can use […]”. It seems that this person also thought that porn is undesirable, bad.
Why?
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had bought Slow by Carl Honoré. I finished reading it yesterday.
I think it is a nice book. The best (and unexpected) thing is that the author explains everything as a personal experience, i.e. he has personally gone through each of the aspects of slowing down his life: slow driving, food, reading, sex, health…
The only significant weakness I can think of in the book is that, in the introductory sections, the author associated the slow movement with some traits that I don’t particularly agree with, such as the following: acoording to the author, Fast is controlling, analytical, superficial and quantity over quality, whereas Slow is careful, intuitive and quality over quantity. I disagree. One can be Slow and still be controlling, analytical and superficial. And one can be Fast and keep being careful and intuitive. And regarding quality and quantity, I don’t see why either of them has to be intrinsically “better” than the other, or why Slow must prefer quality while Fast tends to prefer quantity. I think the author has gone too far in making a well-defined (but poorly defendable) split between behavioural characteristics.
However, the book was enjoyable and, although not a revealing and mesmerizing source of insight, still an interesting read.
Nothing Ever Happens 2 