September 2011 – rc3.org

Month: September 2011 (page 1 of 2)

Managing the complexity of your software development process

GitHub has one of the most interesting approaches to product development and software development of anyone in the industry. Zach Holman posted an overview of their process and talked about how they have maintained it as the team has grown. Toward the end, he writes:

This stuff doesn’t come easily, but it unfortunately leaves easily. Figuring out ways to streamline, to improve your process, to grow your company as you grow your employees is a constant struggle. It’s something that should be continually re-evaluated.

Just as it’s a lot easier to add features to software than it is to remove them, so too is it a lot easier to make software development processes more complex than it is to simplify them.

More on the victimization of the rich

September 28, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Yesterday, I linked to a Malcolm Gladwell piece that included the following sentences:

The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame.

It put me on the lookout for other examples of rich people whining about being victimized, and reminded me immediately of this week’s Economist cover story — provocatively titled “Hunting the rich.” Here’s how it starts:

THE horns have sounded and the hounds are baying. Across the developed world the hunt for more taxes from the wealthy is on.

Economist hunting the rich

This is important because the basic demographic to which The Economist appeals is rich people. (Before you argue with me, purchase a dead trees issue and check out the ads.) Clearly this is a message that they are confident will resonate. Fortunately, being The Economist, they are willing to engage with actual facts:

First, the West’s deficits should not be closed by spending cuts alone. Public spending should certainly take the brunt: there is plenty of scope to slim inefficient Leviathan, and studies of past deficit-cutting programmes suggest they work best when cuts predominate. Britain’s four-to-one ratio is about right. But, as that ratio implies, experience also argues that higher taxes should be part of the mix. In America the tax take is historically low after years of rate reductions. There, and elsewhere, tax rises need to bear some of the burden.

Second, there is a political argument for raising this new revenue from the rich. Spending cuts fall disproportionately on the less well-off; and, even before the crunch, median incomes were stagnating. Meanwhile, globalisation has been rewarding winners ever more generously. Voters’ support for ongoing austerity depends on a disproportionate share of any new revenue coming from the wealthy.

This is basically the argument I see most progressives make regarding taxes. Tax revenue has been going down for years and the gap between rich and poor has been increasing for years. Clearly US economic policy has disproportionately benefitted rich people the most, and they can best afford the tax increase. The article then goes on to endorse an Obama-like tax plan. Hunting the rich, indeed.

The wealth gap and the NBA lockout

September 27, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Malcolm Gladwell on the wealth gap:

It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame.

From a piece that defies summarization on how a real estate developer purchased the New Jersey Nets NBA team as part of a plan to acquire and develop a coveted piece of prime real estate in Brooklyn. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing.

Selected links

September 27, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Just a few random items I found interesting over the past few days:

People are being killed in Mexico for tweeting about the activities of drug gangs.

Enabling yourself to post links from the Wall Street Journal to your Facebook page involves giving them a lot of privileges.

Here’s a great list of do’s and don’ts for New York.

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera warns about the unfortunate likely outcomes of the Solyndra scandal.

Netflix founder and former employee Marc Randolph explains why Netflix chose to split up the company.

In the New Yorker, Atul Gawande writes about the value and history of coaching. I think that the ability to provide coaching is one of the biggest strengths anyone can bring to a leadership role in software development.

Why software patents won’t be voided anytime soon

September 26, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Tom Insam on why calls to invalidate software patents will continue to go unheeded:

So, with lots of handwaving, we can argue that this petition is asking the US government to unilaterally destroy $100bn worth of corporate-held property.

It’s always politically difficult to take valuable things from people who have the means to defend their right to keep them.

Managing my mistrust of Facebook

September 26, 2011 / Rafe / 7 Comments

Like a lot of people, I don’t trust Facebook. A lot of people deal with that by deleting their Facebook accounts, but I don’t want to do that. A lot of friends and family members post their photos to Facebook, so I need an account if I want to see them. It’s also the main way to keep in touch with certain people. That’s Facebook’s hook for the skeptical — they know you like other Facebook users more than you hate Facebook itself.

I have never liked it when you go to a page that’s not a Facebook page and it shows your picture and which friends have liked that page already. That provides no value to me as an end user, but it certainly provides value to Facebook. They track your activity using those buttons whether you click on them or not.

This weekend I learned that when you log out of Facebook, you don’t actually log out of Facebook. They still track wherever you go on the Web. That, for me, was the final straw. I logged out of Facebook and deleted all of my Facebook cookies manually.

From now on, when I want to visit Facebook, I’ll be using the private browser setting in whatever browser I’m using. For Google Chrome, that’s Incognito mode. For Firefox, you use Private Browsing. Safari supports Private Browsing as well. It seems like putting Facebook in jail is the only way to keep it from tracking you everywhere you go on the Web, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Update: Facebook has addressed the logout issue. You can decide whether it has been fixed to your satisfaction.

Where does blogging stop and republishing start?

September 24, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Blogging is mostly about pointing to interesting stuff and, for some people, commenting on it. Whether you’re paid to blog or not, one of the real ethical conundrums involves walking the line between quoting or summarizing enough of the work you’re commenting on to interest your readers and providing so much detail that there’s no reason to visit the original piece.

For sites like Business Insider and the Huffington Post, that’s no dilemma at all. Their business models are based on essentially republishing other people’s work, as explained by Ryan McCarthy on Felix Salmon’s blog. I found that post through Marco Arment’s first-hand account of having his work reliably published on Business Insider’s site as though he is one of their authors. It’s also worth checking out Business Insider’s response to Marco, in which they argue that Instapaper and Tumblr are essentially in the same business as they are.

Ideally search engines would return links to original material ahead of aggregated material but that strikes me as a really tough problem to solve. Until that happens, aggregating other people’s writing is going to be profitable. And as long as it’s profitable, publishers are going to keep doing it.

Writing code other people can understand

September 23, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Brent Simmons writes about how wrong he was to assume that nobody would ever see code he wrote, and how coding with the assumption that other people will eventually work on his code makes him a better developer:

But now I write code with the absolute certain knowledge that it will end up in somebody else’s hands. I could be wrong, yes, but I’ve learned that it helps me write better and more-maintainable code if I just assume from the start that somebody else, most likely a friend, will end up working on that code base.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this approach. There are very specific coding habits that solo developers tend to pick up, and the longer many developers work solo, the worse they become.

FourSquare is actually a useful tool

September 22, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, a medium-sized city that I know like the back of my hand. I downloaded FourSquare last year and started using it, but I found it mainly to be a toy. You check in at the places you go and maybe you eventually become mayor. It was kind of fun, but there was no obvious utility.

This weekend I went on a trip and rather than planning where I wanted to eat, I decided to rely on FourSquare to pick restaurants, and it turns out that it’s very useful indeed and becomes more useful the more you use it. You start out by using the Explore feature to show you restaurants that are popular on FourSquare within a certain radius.

Once you’ve started checking in at various locations, FourSquare can tailor its recommendations based on the places you’ve been, providing a pretty good guide to stuff that might be interesting to you around the neighborhood. The tips people use on FourSquare are often useful as well when deciding what to order.

I find that FourSquare works best when combined with other restaurant reviews. FourSquare can tell you what’s popular but not necessarily what’s good, so when choosing it helps to consult other sites like Zagat to get a second opinion on where to eat. Overall, though, I found FourSquare to be significantly more valuable than I would have guessed.

Actually getting involved in politics

September 15, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Matthew Yglesias answers a question from a reader about what to do to contribute to political change in this country. As the reader points out, reading political blogs, watching The Daily Show, and chatting about it with your spouse is not really going to get it done.

Matt offers two suggestions: write Congress and promote your views out there in the world, among people who may not agree with you. I second both of those recommendations. I can say first hand that I have changed the political views of some friends and family members through sheer persistence and a willingness to be annoying. I would also point out that I have had my changed on some subjects by engaging with people who disagree with me.

I would also add that there are two more organized venues that you can become involved with if you want to create change — activism and campaigning. Getting involved with activism involves joining organizations that advocate for a specific policy or principle and then working on that cause. Amnesty International, the ACLU, and, for that matter, the NRA are national activist organizations. There are activist organizations focused on local issues everywhere as well.

Campaigning is another option. Organizing for America already has volunteers phone banking to recruit even more volunteers and registering voters. We also have a local election in October. When you campaign, you forget what you know about the insufficiency of the President’s jobs plan or the fact that we escalated the war in Afghanistan, at least while you’re volunteering. You’re there to make sure that the least bad viable candidates get elected. I realize that this is offensive to ideological purity, but it is essential work.

Whatever frustrations I have with President Obama or North Carolina governor Bev Perdue, the truth is that they are both infinitely better than John McCain or Pat McCrory from where I sit. Obviously liberals need to pressure elected officials to support the policies that are important to us, but Democrats are more amenable to pressure from liberals than Republicans are. The long term goal has to be to build a progressive political organization strong enough to elect truly liberal candidates rather than moderate ones. To do so, we need liberals to show up and help build the party.

Obviously not all of these options are for everyone, but if you’re frustrated with the state of things, you should choose one or more and throw yourself into it. I volunteered during the 2008 Presidential campaign, but I didn’t really get into it until 2010. It was August 28, the day of the Restoring Honor rally that Glenn Beck was throwing, and I was just incredibly frustrated by the whole thing. It occurred to me that wandering around the house being angry at Glenn Beck wasn’t going to do anything to create a world that resembles my ideals more than it resembles his, so we went down to the local Democratic headquarters and started volunteering.

In closing, I’d urge you to read this post by Ta-Nahesi Coates, which explains as well as anything I’ve read that creating change is the responsibility of the people who desire that change. Being disappointed in President Obama or frustrated with the Tea Party is a waste of time. The only thing we really control is the amount of effort we put into getting what we want.

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