Exploration Through Example

The cost of the Iraq post-war is roughly USD2,000,000,000 per week (EUR 1,442,760,000 today). The population of the US is roughly 300,000,000. That means each person’s share of the Iraq post-war is about… $6.66, or one centiBeast. I would have expected the world to end a couple of years ago, when we reached a full Beast, but this numerology stuff never does seem to work out.

Seven bucks a week isn’t that much, and think of all we get for it:

Switching gears, there are around 27.5 million people in Iraq (July 2007 estimate). So the war costs around USD73.0 per Iraqi per week. Could we just pay them to do whatever it is that they’re supposed to do for the post-war to be considered successful? Well, Sarbast Mohammed works seven days a week at two jobs and brings in around USD120.0 per week. He might appreciate the little top-up to his income. Might win his heart and mind.

Of course, we’d have to get it to him, and we and the Iraqi leadership haven’t done so well at handling reconstruction money in the past. I know the man for the job, though: Karl Rove. He was in charge of the post-Katrina New Orleans reconstruction effort, and we all know how well that went. Since he resigned his job at the White House, he’ll have even more time to do an even better job in Iraq.

Sorry, I’m feeling bitter. I’ve sat in on enough product design discussions to know that it’s easy for the external world to disappear. In many companies, each person’s career depends much more on how she positions herself in relation to her management peers than on how the product is positioned in the marketplace. That’s how silly product decisions happen. The more captive the customer base, the easier it is for primate status games to take over.

Well, I’m a captive customer, observing from the outside, and it seems by far most likely that this post-war will go on until someone figures out how to end it without much risk of taking the blame. The media/government network is too inward-looking to break out of the dollar auction, especially since they can personally lose only status, not blood or money.

On the other hand, 33% of US citizens still believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks. Sorry, 33%-ers, but that’s… not sensible. I could grant you “unsure”, like 9% of your peers—more people should answer polls that way. But “yes” seems so beyond the published evidence that I’m flummoxed: either you or I are not paying anywhere near enough attention to have an opinion.

Yet people do, based (as far as I can tell) solely on artful juxtapositions of “9/11″ and “Saddam Hussein” in speeches. A whole lot of people make bad judgments about political matters based on what really amounts to habit and confirmation bias.

We can’t look at that poll result and ask the Democrats to risk doing anything about Iraq. The populace is not sensible. Yeah, so 64% of people say today that they want withdrawal within the next year. But half of them will be convinced in 2012 that Iraq was just turning the corner in 2008, that they knew that at the time, and that the Democrats went and turned victory into defeat.

We are so screwed.

In such a mood, I find configuring a version control / deployment environment (with Twitter and Jabber notifications from subversion!) strangely comforting: there’s an unending stream of glitches, each of which can be solved.

P.S. Because the above seems too self-righteous, I’m compelled to admit that I’ve had some pretty stupid opinions, both geostrategic and otherwise. For example, my opinions about exercising with ankle pain turn out to have been really, really stupid. I don’t mind that, since one of my goals is:

From Sajjadul Hakim

I staunchly refused Robert Biddle when he invited me to give a talk at OOPSLA. More than once.

I’m not sure when it’s scheduled, but my OOPSLA talk is titled “Actor-Network Theory: Nothing to Do with TCP/IP or Distributed Objects”

Today we agree that DNA is the template for inherited characteristics. But that agreement didn’t just happen the instant Watson and Crick published. Work still had to be done—lots of work. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a social science theory about the work done to reach and maintain agreement, particularly in science and technology. It’s my hope that understanding the techniques of ANT will help OOPSLA attendees understand why those Programs, Languages, and Systems we work on are simultaneously so change-resistant and so fragile.

• Every word in the example should be about what the example is trying to show.

• The intended audience is a human being asking first “How do I…?” and then “What happens when…?”

• Possibilities should be grouped so you can see them all at once.

I spent some spare time hanging out with sociologists a few years back. One result was a paper on Agile in a sociology book (The Mangle in Practice: look for it from your nearest Duke University Press outlet sometime “soon”.) The co-editor is going to do research in data mining and counterterrorism. He writes:

The dream of course would be to locate people who have actually written data mining programs related to counterterrorism. […] If that proves impossible, I would just be interested in interviewing people who have experience designing data mining programs for other applications.

If you are such a person, mail me, and I’ll put you two in touch. He’s a good guy. He spent time riding in police cars to domestic violence calls, sitting in court, talking to perpetrators, etc. Interesting stories.

The three seasons of Deadwood are an allegory of the history of Agile. Discuss.

For extra credit, identify which season we’re currently in.

User-Choices is a unified interface to configuration files, command-line options and arguments, and the environment. Here’s the beginning of the tutorial:

Suppose you have a command-line application that uses some number of, oh, let’s say “connections”. Most of the time, a user will want the same number of connections, so you’ll let them set a personal default in a configuration file. Sometimes they want to change the default. Maybe they’ll want a one-time change; for that, a command-line option is best. But sometimes they’ll want to make the change for an entire login session; for that, setting an environment variable is most convenient.

The User-Choices gem gives your code a unified interface to all those sources. Your code can obey the user’s choices without having to bother (much) about how she made them.

This version is derived from the one used in Part 4 of Everyday Scripting with Ruby. However, there are minor incompatible changes to the interface. Sorry about that. In return, you can now use YAML for configuration files, and empty argument lists are handled more gracefully when choices can also be made in the environment or a config file.

Agile 2008 will be arranged around the metaphor of a music festival. There will be a main stage for the big-draw speakers, the larger tutorials for novices, etc.

I was asked to do a stage about testing that wouldn’t help shunt people into silos. (It shouldn’t be “the testing mini-conference”.) I decided the stage would take seriously the usefulness of explicit, concrete examples—executable or no—in the thinking about, construction, and post-construction investigation of software-ish things. Hence the logo:

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The 2007 winners of the Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice are Naresh Jain, for his work establishing user groups in India and for the Simple Design and Testing conference; and Jeff Patton, for his work helping establish what User Centered Design means in Agile (including the agile-usability group) and for being an example of the usefulness of being fluent in two fields (programming and UCD).

We also broke from our charter to create a new award—the Ward Cunningham Gentle Voice of Reason Award—and awarded it to Dale Emery for what he’s done on the XP and other mailing lists, and in person; and also for his work creating environments where change happens (rather than, as J.B. Rainsberger put it, “inflicting change on people”).

Join me in a warm round of applause…

(P.S. The similarity between this award’s graphic and my own four missing values poster is unfortunate. The Pask Award design came first, and I loved the image of ringing out the news. I hope the similarity isn’t interpreted to imply any other connection.)

I decided to make up a poster reminding people of the four underemphasized values. Here it is:

If you would like one, send me mail. They are roughly one foot by two feet (30 by 60 centimeters). If you will be at Agile2007, I’ll bring one there for you to take back. (I’ll also have “An Example Would Be Handy Right About Now” stickers to give out.)

As always, the offer is good until I get tired of going to the Post Office or my inner cheapskate rebels.

I will mail overseas. I’m tickled that the stickers went to Europe, China, Australia, and elsewhere.