We made mistakes. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today: While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version No. 5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan–for months.
At the Dog Park
This is a picture of me, Lightning Epps, at the Irvine dog park. I love the dog park! Even though I’m not a puppy anymore — I’m almost 3 years old — I still like to chase and play a little bit.
The bigger dogs try to dominate me sometimes. Usually I can stop them with just a look, but not always.
The puggle in this picture, for example, kept blindsiding me and trying to climb on top of me. I chalked that up to youthful exuberance for a few moments, but when he kept doing it, I had to knock him down, leap on top of him, and sink my fangs into his neck. Not hard, just enough to reestablish the natural order of things.
I don’t instigate this stuff, but I don’t put up with a lot of nonsense either. You know what they say — it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, etc. . . .
— Lightning 
Fidel Castro Needs to Die Right Now
“Is Fidel Castro dead yet?” my son asks.
“No,” I say, “as far as I know he’s still alive. Why do you care?”
“Fidel Castro is the most Communistic Communist in the history of Communist Communism. And I have him in a death pool.”
“When do you need him to die?”
“Like . . . right now.”
“Do you have anyone else in your death pool?”
There is No Road
Is it all a dream, yes, perhaps a dream. . . . Death, its closeness. . . . Was I in prison once? I cannot remember. At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.
Girls Talk
Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain. We’re not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It’s a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.
According to Brizendine, thoughts about sex enter women’s brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.
Both numbers sound low to me. Sexy sexy sex sex sex . . . (sorry, thinking out loud) . . .
The Legacy of Waterfall
We are so unprofessional it is incredible. The legacy of waterfall is so dominant it is scary.
Names for Your Band
From Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn:
- You Fucking Mooks
- The Chocolate Cheeseballs
- Tony and the Tugboats
- Jerks from Nowhere
- Free Human Freakshow
- Bucky Dent and the Stale Doughnuts
Put ‘er There!
God forbid I ever have to have my arm amputated, but if I do, I hope they let me keep it. I’d like to stick it back up my sleeve and shake hands with children.
“That’s some grip you got there!” I’d say, when the arm comes off in their little hands.
A Rule of Thumb on Documentation
As a rule of thumb, I’d guess that 90 percent of what a team knows would be lost if they tried to write it down, and that 90 percent of what they wrote down would be lost when some other team tried to read it. But then, I’m an optimist.
They Call Me The Hammah
My son’s holding a gigantic inflatable mallet that he won at Dave and Buster’s.
“They call me The Hammah!” he announces in a loud ghetto drawl. “Do you know why they call me The Hammah? Go on, take a guess . . .”
The Semi-Gifted Students Academy
I’m driving my son to UCI this morning . . . he’s taking a couple of classes at the Gifted Students Academy.
“Only about half the students are gifted,” he informs me. “The rest are stoo-pid.”
“How can you tell they’re stupid?” I ask.
“I can just tell.”
“I mean are they actively doing stupid things, or they can’t answer questions?”
“Both.” Then: “Drive faster. Mom dropped me off late yesterday and I almost had to run to get to class on time.”
“That’s good. Your years of athletic training are finally paying off for you.”
“I said I almost had to run.”
“Oh. What happened next? You got to class and almost had to think?”
We’re No Geniuses
Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
It’s All My Fault
. . . it is utterly trivial to create a case (and to “prove” it, too) that pretty much anybody is pretty much to blame for pretty much anything. Since a causal link can readily be drawn from either of us to anything in our lives, we simply stipulate our own blame. This saves effort, reduces friction, disinvites defensiveness and promotes remediation. Of course I cause my own troubles. . . . If I am not the prime cause of my own circumstances, I am doomed to live in a victim’s world. That would suck so bad that I prefer personal accountability.
I Guess You’ll Do
But Can U Do This…
Originally uploaded by goinonbro.
Cannot Measure Productivity
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.
Advice for the Feng Shui Entrepreneur
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.
Racial Sensitivity at the Office
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.”
You Don’t Know Enough
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.
A Blind Woman Was Driving the Car
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?”