One of the things that I love about Ruby is that it’s intuitive. If I don’t know the syntax for a particular thing, I can often just guess. More often than not, I’m right (or real close). That’s the mark of a great language. It behaves like you would expect it to behave.
Ruby==Love.
There’s an interview in the latest Make magazine with Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and many other cool things. It’s a good interview, and definitely worth your time to read it. One thing that stuck out was this quote on designing things: “I do very little research as to what the product should be … if you do “product research”, the product that you end up with will be similar to what already exists”.
I think this is why we see so many products that only get evolutionary upgrades, instead of revolutionary ones. People are stuck on what already exists, instead of being willing to throw it all out and start anew.
This reminds me of the ClearRX medicine bottle redesign. Pill bottles have looked basically the same for as long as I can remember. Now someone has come along and turned it on it’s ear. None of the changes required new technology to be invented, it just needed someone to think about the problem differently.
Ruby on Rails is much the same. Everything in there had been done before, but someone came along and said “let’s look at this problem differently.” And it’s turned the web development world on it’s ear. Even if Rails were gone tomorrow, it’s impact would live on for years to come.
What else is due for an overhaul?
Here’s my short list, off the top of my head:
What’s missing?
As I meander through the internet, I often find sites that inspire the wannabe designer in me. I’ve started collecting them, so that when it comes time to develop applications, I have a collection to go to for inspiration. In the event that I’m working with a designer, it gives me something to send them and say “I like stuff like this”.
Here are a few recent favorites:
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Wil Shipley is the author of several well known Mac applications, notably OmniGraffle and Delicious Library , and has a well-read blog. In a post here he asserts that “Unit testing is teh suck”.
Although Wil is a bright guy and very likely a better programmer than I will ever be, this is completely out of touch with reality. I suspect anyone that has done TDD, or even used a unit testing tool would agree with me.
Wil starts off with this statement:
I've NEVER, EVER seen a structured test program that (a) didn't take like 100 man-hours of setup time, (b) didn't suck down a ton of engineering resources, and © actually found any particularly relevant bugs.
Well, I think Wil may be exaggerating a bit with the 100 hours nonsense, but let’s assume he’s not for just a second. I’ve never written a single line of ObjectiveC code, but if OCUnit is anything like the other unit testing tools out there (NUnit, JUnit, Test::Unit), this is a ridiculous statement. As for not finding relevant bugs, I find it unlikely as well.
Next up is this statement:
It's actually provably impossible to test your program with every conceivable type of input programmatically, but if you test by hand you can change the input in ways that you, the programmer, know might be prone to error.Sorry, wrong answer. Anything you can do manually can (and should) be automated. Two reasons:
Summary: Unless you have a good set of unit tests, real regression testing is nearly impossible.
Next, Wil describes his testing methodology:
When you modify your program, test it yourself. Your goal should be to break it, NOT to verify your code. That is, you should turn your huge intellect to "if I hated this code, how could I break it" as SOON as you get a working build, and you should document all the ways you break it. \[Sure, maybe you don't want to bother fixing the bug where if you enter 20,000 lines of text into the "item description" your program gets slow. But you should test it, document that there is a problem, and then move on.\] You KNOW that if you hated someone and it was your job to break their program, you could find some way to do it. Do it to every change you make.
There amount of time it would take to do this on a program of any size is ridiculous. Although Wil may have the self-discipline to do this, the rest of us likely don’t. And again, it’s not a repeatable process.
Here’s the bottom line: Unit tests are important. Extremely important. And they don’t add time to a project, in fact in most cases they will reduce it. At first blush this doesn’t make much sense, but here’s the rationale:
Wil has forgotten one of the basic rules of software development: Catch Bugs Early. If you catch a bug when you’re just getting started, it costs nearly nothing to fix. Find that same bug after you have released it to the world, and it costs significantly more - particularly if you’re not talking about a web application.
On top of all of this, there are a couple of other points worth making about Unit Tests:
Summary: Unit tests == Awesome, and represent all that is good in the world. I certainly don’t think that they’re a panacea, but they’re certainly not “teh suck”.
I didn’t expect this to turn into such a rant, but when people who are respected and admired in the community make harmful and incorrect statements, they need to be corrected.
Steve Krug’s classic book Don’t Make Me Think has been released in a second edition. This book helped me understand web design and usability better than any other.
Jason Fried’s talk from O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference is up on IT Converstaions I’m only about halfway through, but it’s great so far. I’ve not seen Jason speak in person(Jason & Co, PLEASE schedule another Building of Basecamp in Chicago!), but I’ve heard several talks of his online, and they’ve all been great. This is no different.
5 years ago, I went from being a “doer” (ie, a programmer), to being a manager. This was not an easy transition. I suspect some people find this transition easier than others, but I think most everyone who makes the leap struggles in some way. If you’ve recently (or maybe not so recently) made this move, you may find an article by Dave Gray helpful. It’s entitled “The craftsman-to-manager paradox”. Dave defines the paradox as this:
As you move into management, the very things that made you effective as a craftsman are now deadly threats to your success as a manager. Your independence and self-reliance, which was an asset, is now a liability.
This is 100% correct, and I’ve seen it happen more than once; both to myself, and to the others around me who were promoted from the rank and file.
The article also includes a list he calls Ten Communication Commandments for Managers.
Number 8 is one of the things I struggled with the most:
Don’t avoid difficult conversations. As a manager it’s your job to initiate them when necessary.
I have often put off having those conversations, naively hoping that the issue would resolve itself. It never did, and putting it off only made things worse.
The other 9 items are equally valuable to anyone in a leadership position.
Another point to be made though, which Dave neglects to mention, is that great doers aren’t always great managers. It’s two completely different skillsets. I’ve more than once seen someone who was a really great developer/server administrator/router jockey get promoted into a supervisory position and then fail miserably. This isn’t a reflection on the individual, it’s more the fault of the person who promoted them. It isn’t that leadership and management skills can’t be learned, it’s just that some people just don’t have the aptitude (or often the desire) to do the job well.
KEXP is an amazing radio station out of Seattle, that simulcasts online. They don’t play much in the way of mainstream stuff, but if your tastes run more towards the eclectic/alternative, you’ll enjoy it. They also have an impressive collection of live performances, and now even have a podcast that highlights artists you may not have heard of.
Check it out, you won’t regret it.
After my last Firefox post, I found an application that alleges to tune Firefox automatically. It’s free, but appears to be Windows only.
In this post Robert asserts (as he has before), that “the thick client is coming back”. I’ll agree that some apps are best as desktop applications, but that list is dwindling quickly. Maybe you haven’t seen this, or this
Robert, you’re starting to sound a little like these guys.
Words and pictures by Larry Wright. A little bit of everything, mostly nerdy.