Frank Carver's Punch Barrel

This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details

Frank — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:56:06 +0000

A nice analysis of the effect of detail choices on overall usability (of cat feeders in this case) from Jeff Atwood.

Coding Horror: This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details.

Want Car Wars On Kickstarter?

Frank — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:38:01 +0000

As some of you may know, I have a soft spot for games – tabletop games rather than computer games, mostly. One of my all time favourites is Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games. Originally from the 1980 it hit the sweet spot of being both a fun battle game with your friends and a geeky challenge trying to come up with the best vehicle designs between games. It’s not a card game, but it beat the “deck building” collectible card game trend by over a decade.

It’s hard to get a good game of Car Wars these days. The most recent version, from 2002, had a lot of problems and was never fully supported, which turned off a lot of players. Happily, there may be light at the end of the tunnel for Car Wars fams.

Following the astonishing success of Steve Jackson’s crowd-funding of the “big box” revival of his classic game OGRE, Steve is considering working on a new version of Car Wars. If you join the OGRE kickstarter program to the tune of $23 (USA) or $30 (rest of the world) you can help us send a clear message that we want a Car Wars revival and a decent new version. Plus, you get an exclusive T-shirt that says so.

“Decisions, Decisions” a great presentation about software design

Frank — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:23:17 +0000

Following a recommendation from Jon Woods, I just checked out Decisions, Decisions, a recorded QCon presentation. Well worth watching, and thinking about, and putting into practice.

I don’t want to spoil it, as he has a fun, interactive, style of presentation, but if you have any experience in software development you will get his point very quickly, and it might just change some of the opinions you didn’t even know you had.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle

Frank — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:32:04 +0000

I just ran into a fascinating presentation giving a whole new way of thinking about software development, and careers in general. It also includes some eye-opening software demos.

Watching this video felt a lot like one of the better TED talks. Although it is a bit longer than typical TED talks, it is well worth watching all the way though.

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle on Vimeo

via Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle on Vimeo.

Build pipelines with Jenkins

Frank — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:14:33 +0000

Continuous Integration is a great idea, and usually pretty simple to implement for simple projects. However, these simple projects don’t really exercise the “integration” aspect of the idea. As he build and test process for a project grows in complexity, it almost always grows in duration, too. Typical enterprise Java projects, for example, might fetch dependencies from maven repositories, compile several code modules, copy, move and transform various resources, run unit tests, assemble and deploy jar files, start servers and run integration tests, and so on. All of this can take quite a while, even on a fast build server.

(cartoon from the great xkcd)

One big problem with growing build times, is the effect it has on feedback. If a developer has to wait 10, 20, 30 minutes or more for a build cycle to complete before test results are available, it usually leads to one of three outcomes:

Every small change requires a concentration-breaking delay to see if it works before moving on to the next change. Development slows to a crawl, management cracks the whip and tries to ban casual web surfing, private email and facebook.
developers give up waiting for the CI results and press on with development anyway. The code base fills with bugs and issues. The CI process becomes largely irrelevant, as builds are almost always broken.
Developers hold off from checking in small code changes for fear of having to sit and wait for CI to catch up. As check-in size increases, so does the frequency of code clashes and the difficulty of merging different strands of work. Team culture shifts from collective ownership to silos and hoarding.

What’s needed is a way to get fast feedback, even when a full build takes a long time. Almost every team I have worked with in recent years has tried to achieve this, usually using the open source “Jenkins” (or its fork-parent “Hudson“) build server. So far this has never quite worked.

The main problem seems to be the monolithic nature of a Jenkins build. A build runs to completion (or to a fatal failure), accumulating build data and test results. Data and results are only available at the end. A more useful approach might be if build data and test results were made available as soon as possible, even while further build activity continues. Better still would be a way of adapting the build process to emphasise early feedback, preferring build steps which give feedback to those which are merely useful for further processing. That way a trivial compilation error or test failure in a stand-alone part of the code might give almost immediate feedback. This is not only useful because of the speed of feedback, but because of the effect it has on development habits. Faster feedback would come from code with less coupling and fewer dependencies – any developer wishing to progress more quickly would be automatically encouraged to write (or refactor towards) small, loosely-coupled, independent, well unit-tested, re-usable code.

Although I’m tempted to think that this kind of really effective continuous integration would best be based on different build software, there are a lot of people working to improve things with Jenkins. A recent blog post from “Antagonistic Pleiotropy“: Implementing a real build pipeline with Jenkins. looks interesting, but shows just how tricky even a relatively straightforward build pipeline can be to configure.

Has anyone got any better suggestions on how to achieve effective feedback while building complex systems?

TEDcember Day 08 – jaw-dropping poetry

Frank — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:56:46 +0000

I can honestly say that I was astonished by this. A continual, unrelenting, stream of rhythm and rhyme for over two minutes which weaves in and out of a fantasy scenario of mockingbirds as recording devices while making references to a slew of TED talks from the same conference.

Of all the talks I have watched so far, this is the only one I want to watch again, straight away. I can’t offer higher praise than that.

TEDcember Day 07 – 3 things I learned while my plane crashed

Frank — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:41:54 +0000

Definitely back to the kind of talk which TED is famous for: Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed. Ric gives a razor-sharp view of his near-death experience, and the things he took from it. They are the same kinds of things that often occur to people facing their end, but it still feels as if we all need to be reminded. Savour every moment, don’t put things off, there’s no room for negativity, and be the best parent you can..

TEDCember Day 06 – Ze Frank’s nerdcore comedy

Frank — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:02:49 +0000

This was a bit of a surprise. Among all the worthy talks I didn’t realise that there are also comedy routines, songs and other stuff in the TED archive. I found Ze Frank’s stand-up routine pretty funny, although not really as “nerdcore” as it could be be – there is typically more nerd comedy in an episode of “Big Bang Theory”.

In this case reading the comment stream did not seem to add much. Many of the commenters don’t seem to like his humour, and unlike some of the other talks there’s not much development of the ideas in the presentation to be done. Fun, but not thought-provoking.

TEDcember Day 05 – The neurons that shaped civilization

Frank — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:24:37 +0000

I’ll admit I am doing a bit of catching up here, having missed a day or two, but I’ll be back on track soon.

For day five I chose VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization. This talk introduces the idea of “mirror neurons”, elements of the brain which trigger when observing other people’s behaviour, and goes on to imply that the existence and sophistication of this brain biology is what enabled the spread of human learning and the development of culture. As far as that goes I generally agree. Later in the talk he gets a bit metaphysical, deducing from some mirror neuron behaviour in cases of amputated or anaesthetised limbs that all people are linked.

TEDcember Day 04 – Adam Grosser and his sustainable fridge

Frank — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:09:45 +0000

Today’s talk was another short one, this one about 3.5 minutes. The idea was interesting – a relatively low cost cooling unit that “charges” itself in a cooking fire, then can be used to keep a big drum container cool for 24 hours.

Pitched at storing vaccines away from power, and also preventing food decay and disease it seems to address a need, but (as the comments point out) there are economic and financial issues as well as an apparent lack of progress in the intervening four years. This idea may not be a “go-er” after all. Shame.