Let’s begin this typical courtship process, shall we?

Originally uploaded by goinonbro.

I can be pretty confident that a 100 KLOC system is bigger than a 10KLOC system. But if I’ve written the 100KLOC system in a year, and Joe writes the same system in 10KLOC during the same time, that doesn’t make me more productive. Indeed I would conclude that our productivities are about the same but my system is much more poorly designed.

 

Assuming an accurate FP [function point] counting system, if I spend a year delivering a 100FP system and Joe spends the same year delivering a 50FP system can we assume that I’m more productive? I would say not. It may be that of my 100FP only a 30 [sic] is actually functionality that’s useful to my customer, but Joe’s is all useful. I would thus argue that while my direct productivity is higher, Joe’s true productivity is higher.

 

But all of this ignores the point that even useful functionality isn’t the true measure. As I get better I produce 30 useful FP of functionality, and Joe only does 15. But someone figures out that Joe’s 15 leads to $10 million extra profit for our customer and my work only leads to $5 million. I would again argue that Joe’s true productivity is higher because he has delivered more business value - and I assert that any true measure of software development productivity must be based on delivered business value.

— Martin Fowler

During a recent trip to Las Vegas, we visited a junk shop, a.k.a. a Feng Shui emporium. My wife sketched out the floor plan of our house, after which the proprietor predicted — correctly — that the orientation of our son’s bed was making him stubborn.

See, I thought it was the fact that he’s 13 years old that was making him stubborn.

Probably a good tip for the up-and-coming Feng Shui professional would be to always predict that the client’s teenage children are stubborn. You’re not going to be wrong very often.

And always predict that the client has frequent disagreements with his or her spouse.

A manager says to one of the programmers, “You are the whitest Mexican I’ve ever seen. You need to get out and mow some more lawns.”

We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side. If you can’t state arguments against what you believe better than your detractors, you don’t know enough.

— Charlie Munger

The entry gate to our community is kind of screwy. It’s supposed to open and close automatically if you’ve got a transponder in your car, but sometimes it just stays open.

Last night, we were driving up to the gate when my wife hunched forward over the steering wheel and asked, “Is the gate open?”

Continue reading A Blind Woman Was Driving the Car

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.

“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

— Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

My wife, a non-native English speaker, asks, “What does ‘ambidextrous’ mean?”

My son says, “It means you’re just as comfortable with one side as the other.”

“So it means gay,” she says.

A friend of a friend has started dating a guy with a history of mental problems, including an in-patient hospitalization.

That should be exciting.

Some guys are boring. Me, for example. My wife tells me all the time how boring I am . . .

I remember a few years ago, a woman came over to clean our house — a white woman, which is unusual in Southern California. She was telling my wife that her alcoholic ex-husband was in jail, as a result of which, she wasn’t getting any financial support from him and had to take up house cleaning to make some money.

Now that’s excitement! You hook up with a guy who you don’t know if or when he’s going to be home, how drunk he’s going to be when he gets there . . . maybe he’ll end up in jail and you can spend your life cleaning other people’s toilets to keep your head and your kids’ heads above water.

Me on the other hand — like I said, I’m boring. I roll my ass out of bed every morning in a very predictable manner and head off to work. I come home directly afterwards without stopping off at any of the local watering holes. I provide a predictable income stream. On evenings and weekends, I’m available for family activities.

So I’m boring, but I like to think of myself as boring in a good way. Boring is not always bad, and exciting is not always good, particularly if it involves being institutionalized in some fashion . . .

Yang never drops its sword until death has made its decision who to take. Yin hopes that the other guy will die of a heart attack while he’s stabbing you.

— Stanley Bing, Sun Tzu Was a Sissy

I was driving my son to school one day when the following conversation ensued.

ME: Do you have any exams today?

HIM: No . . . and why do you call them “exams”? We have “tests” and “quizzes,” not [in a dopey voice] “exams” — or whatever they called them back in the 1800s.

If he thinks that comments like that are going to put me off my game, he must have me confused with his mom.

ME: Do you have any exams tomorrow?

[UPDATE: Macphoto1 has a better set of OC Fair photos than mine.]

A September 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Projects Fail Anyway” by Nadim Matta and Ronald Ashkenas (free summary here), says that the high failure rate of major projects — not just IT projects — suggests that either these projects are inherently unmanageable or else something is wrong with the standard approach to project management.

Matta and Ashkenas argue that the standard project management model is designed to control “execution risk” — the risk that designated activities won’t be carried out properly — by means of project plans, timelines, and budgets, but ignores two other equally important risks:

Continue reading Why Good Projects Fail Anyway

My son picks up a pair of my pants that I’ve tossed on the bed, puts them on, and pulls out the front of the waistband. Because he weighs 60 pounds less than I do, there’s a lot of extra room there.

“I lost 60 pounds by eating at Subway,” he announces. Then in a gangsta voice he adds, “You fat. You ain’t got the abdo-min-als like I got.”

“The word is pronounced ab-dom-inals,” I say.

“That’s in the real dictionary,” he says, still with the gangsta voice. “But what does Merriam Webster know? He a playa hater.”

A commercial for You, Me and Dupree — or maybe it was Little Man — comes on the TV and I say to my son, “That looks like a real jackass-o-rama.”

“Put a quarter in the swear jar,” he says.

We don’t have a swear jar.

“OK — first of all,” I say, “‘jackass’ is not a swear word. It’s the name of an animal. And second, where did you get the idea of a swear jar?”

“They’re available in catalogs.”

“What would we do with the money that goes into the swear jar?”

“Give it to me.”

Via Kathy Sierra, an illustration of Seth Godin’s “safe is risky, risky is safe” maxim.

A guy in Colorado goes rock climbing. Meanwhile, his parked car gets crushed by a gigantic — and I mean gigantic (you’ve got to see the picture) — boulder.

So much of our developers’ time is wasted by managerial fiat that some days they can’t get a damn thing done. One manager asked me in exasperation “Why can’t my people ever get through their work on time?” And my answer, after observing his organization for a while was that they couldn’t get through their work because most days they never even got to their work. They were too busy doing all the administrivia that he and the organization had imposed upon them.

— Tom DeMarco

I urge Nathan’s to allow canines to enter next year’s contest; then the world will see some real eating.

— Ayatollah Mugsy