Offline can be liberating

Today I tried working from home to distance me from distractions: email, email alerts from ticket changes, IM, slashdot, co-worker's questions, co-workers a cube over, blogs, mailing lists, meetings, etc...

I found that while at home I was still being distracted by the electronic distractions. I wasn't being as effective as I wanted to be. So I packed up my laptop and what I needed, and left the house. I then worked the rest of the day with no connection to the 'net. It was liberating. Hours of work at a time without interruptions. I got so much done it blows my mind.

Being physically disconnected from everything wasn't enough, I had to be electronically disconnected as well. In an age when everything is online, it was a nice change. ;-)

Software rotations

After seeing how the medical community trains doctors, I wonder if something similar would work for software as well. Send "engineers on training" for 4-6 week stints in various "specialties". So you'll be desktop support, then a DBA, then a java programmer, then you're doing .Net, then QA, then you're PM'ing a project, ...

Do that for 2-5 years and expect people to get up speed in almost no time. How would that go? They do that with people's health (properly supervised and with slowly increasing responsibilities), why can't they do it with software?

By expecting people to get up to speed right away, I think that a lot of unnecessary process would quickly be cut out and best practices would quickly "cross-pollinate" across different sub-fields of software development. Best of all, people would understand the pain that other groups suffer because of actions done in other groups.

We've talked for a couple of years about rotating a developer into the maintenance group for a 3 month stint so we can fix the issues that cause pain over the course of the life of a project. I don't know if that will happen, but I think that it would be good to be able to see the side of things from different viewpoints. At the very least I think that it would foster better relations between groups.

I just think that by having people work in all of the different phases of a project and groups in an organization would help people see things from a system perspective. It's all about the big picture.

Most Honest

For the second year in a row I was on the winning team at our work charity golf tournament. And by winning I mean the people who go home with an award. And by an award I mean the "Most Honest" trophy.

I feel that the trophy is correctly named. We were playing best ball, but I don't think that we were that bad. This year we were +17 which is pretty good in my books. Last year the team ahead of us were fall down "refreshed" and they somehow did better than us.

Now I've got bookend trophy's, it's all good. ;-)

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

I was hiding at work today. In a fort made out of a whiteboard.

That's what it's come down to for me to be able to work on tasks "uninterrupted". Well, as close as I can get that is. People still come and knock on the "do not disturb" sign, which I find hilarious.

*sigh*

Buttons that don't "push"

Our new stove is really fancy. Buttons, knobs, blinking lights: it's got it all. My only issue is that the buttons are behind glass and just "sense" your finger (from heat I assume). There's about a second lag from putting your finger on the button to getting feedback. I used these buttons a lot for the first time yesterday and I found it a little frustrating and it was making my fingers sore. I was pushing the buttons which is totally useless. It's like pushing on a window.

I'm a huge fan of control interfaces with buttons that push, knobs that turn. All of which "click". It's really nice to get both the "touch" as well as the sound part of the feedback that what you've done has registered rather than just seeing the feedback on a screen.

Our microwave has a knob that pops out that you can spin it to set the time. I almost always use that to set the controls. There's just something satisfying about using that.

I've seen a laser keyboard interface where it projects a keyboard on a table and you're supposed to type on that. After the initial "cool" factor, I'd guess that would be a painful, gross way to type in. Not fun at all.

Give me buttons that push, knobs that twirl, levers that turn / pull. That's what I want in a computer interface.

Unintended benefits of CI

One cool unintended benefit of having a CI server going is that there is somewhere that has the latest code for all projects checked out in the file system. When issues that have come up that might be cross projects, I can just use find, grep, and other fun command line tools to quickly find effected projects. Then because the naming convention used in our CI server is tied to our issue tracking (thank god) I can quickly open up tickets for the teams to address the issues.

This doesn't help if a project is in prod and has been fixed since, but it's a lot better than not knowing where to start.

At some point, using good software tools has a benefit greater than the sum of it's parts. ;-)

Biking != Running

I've been biking ~ 1 hour, 5 days a week since March or April. I consider myself to be in "okay" shape.

Laura took me for a 30 minute run on Sunday and I am so sore. Biking is sooo different than running it's not funny at all. My legs are killing me yesterday and today. Oie.

I don't get it. Biking seems to be all about the legs and running seems to be about breathing. Why are my legs so sore??? Oie. This just sucks because I know I want to start running a lot more, especially with the weather getting colder and the opportunity to bike will go away with the snow.

No exercise seems to prepare you for another one. They all seem to use their own set of muscles. Now I think I just have to figure out 3 or 4 different things that I can do often that will help me stay in shape.