разтегателни диваниA physicist may be described
(to first approximation)
As a simple prolate spheroid
Of infectious obfuscation.
Attempts to oversimplify
Reveal their odd propensity
To speak of spheroid cattle
Which are uniform in density—
Their perfect planes are frictionless;
Collisions are elastic;
They’re rarely seen acknowledging
The random or stochastic.
The chaos of the world outside
May leave them full of fears;
Such terra incognita
Might be filled with… Engineers!

I read this, and I am somewhat idignant:

Big Ball of Mud still seems to be the most popular way to design and architect software.

Just because something is ‘common’ doesn’t make it popular.   Your standard everyday cold is pretty common, but it is not popular.   Traffic jams are common, but I doubt anyone involved in them thinks that they are popular.  Wading through bureaucratic red tape is common, not popular.

Primarily, BBoM happens because cost-benefit analysis is time-consuming and difficult.   If programmers, architects and managers could measure and understand the longer-term cost of short-term poor decision making, we would get better decisions.    Remedy?  There’s no one magic bullet, but I suspect that a focus on code coverage and limited code complexity is a great place to start – I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a BBoM project with high code coverage and low complexity.     This may be correlation and not causation, but I think there’s a legitimate story for how forcing unit testing discipline and simplicity pays dividends in terms of architectural strength.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a long time, since  2004 if I’m not mistaken.  It’s been a constant and welcome part of my online experience.

Alas, apparently, they could not find a way to make money off of it.

Which is unfortunate, because I always thought that it would have been a fabulous corporate knowledge-sharing tool – a “private” Bloglines, within a company, that you could add subscriptions that others could use to stay up on important events and thought-leaders in your industry.   Saving and ranking specific posts so that they would potentially become more widespread – identify competitive threats and potential strategic opportunities.

I realize that this model is not without challenges (“We don’t want our employees visiting the web!”), but I’m sure there would have been some organizations with enough strategic vision to see the opportunity inherent in such “corp-sourcing”.    Enough, I would imagine, that they could have made enough money to keep the public site going.  Alas

Also, I see various mentions in the Blogline obituaries that suggest that the day of the RSS reader is done – that we’re replacing it with social link-sharing like Twitter or Facebook.  As someone who generally produces more of these links than I consume, I am puzzled – RSS Readers allowed me to review a wide assortment of feeds at my leisure – Twitter and Facebook are far more ephemeral and constrained to the strategies I use to follow people and to be followed in return.

Programmer who cares deeply about performance disagrees with claim that ‘Premature Optimization is the root of all evil’

Glenn Alleman, who is often critical of some of the less structured aspects of Agile  (not in a nasty or spiteful way) mentions a project he is working on:

I’m working a moderate ($300M) Army program through January

Moderate?  That’s a jaw-droppingly large amount of money, and IMO, it explains a lot of the friction between his perspective and a more classical “agile” perspective – agile projects are (in my experience) 100-1000x less expensive, with a corresponding lack of scrutiny/accountability/oversight from management.  Many of the problems/issues that agile was designed to resolve would never happen on a project that large, because that’s way too much money to be sloshing around without high levels of management accountability.

Anyways, I am endlessly fascinated by all the different ways that people can build things.