Comments on: I Can Outrun a 767

By: HEEL LIFTS

HEEL LIFTS — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:45:04 +0000

Excellent work. You have gained a new subscriber. I hope you keep up the good work and I eagerly await more of the absorbing posts.

By: Gewinnspiel

Gewinnspiel — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:53:53 +0000

OK, so what about the analogy, in other words, what is weather, terrain and surface in the software development world? Perhaps surface could translate to technology, e.g. mud is legacy code, a frozen river is a homogenous environment for which one very suitable technology exists, like Fortran for numeric code, and the outbacks represent a mixed environment? Perhaps the weather could translate to organisational/human aspects, with heavy snow meaning a lot of resistance and little possibility to see far ahead.

By: David Sands

David Sands — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:10:49 +0000

I have an interesting anecdote from a late friend of mine. Apparently, during the war they were loading bombs onto a plane. Alas one of them dropped onto the tarmac. Everybody fled the scene post haste. My friend was flat out in a jeep when someone overtook him on a bicycle!
Regards David

By: Mike Smith

Mike Smith — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:48:04 +0000

I can believe that of a thoroughbred overbred for short races, but is that true for a more normal working horse like cowboys ride?

By: Vichy

Vichy — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 09:46:55 +0000

“Itâ€™s like noticing that you walked to the corner store faster than you could drive, and therefore deciding to walk to Tierra del Fuego. Sure you could do it, and you could develop a million-lines-of-code enterprise system without source code control or unit testsâ€“but itâ€™s going to take you hundreds of times longer, and require a lot more pain and effort.”

Excellent!

By: Nikolas

Nikolas — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:39:02 +0000

Sweet

By: Joachim Zobel

Joachim Zobel — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:19:50 +0000

Actually the distribution of projects by size is in my experience very far away from being linear. The vast majority of projects are small. The Microsoft empire is built on this.

I disagree that the usefulness of source control is related to project size. It is more related to project duration (that bug has been in for half a year and nobody noticed).

By: Jonas

Jonas — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 11:33:57 +0000

As soon as unit testing enters a project there’s (or at least should be) two independent implementations of each interface …

By: Hallvard TrÃ¦tteberg

Hallvard TrÃ¦tteberg — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 08:53:47 +0000

I liked the analogy, too. E.g., I usually take my bike to work, it takes 4 minutes down and 6 up, while it takes at least 10 to drive and 17 to walk. However, there’s more to a travel than distance. A couple of days ago, we experienced the season’s first snow, and before I have changed the tyres (on both bike and car) it’s better to walk. When there’s a lot of snow and I have to wear a thick jacket, going uphill home is too exhausting, so I prefer walking. On longer travels in the terrain, skis are fastest (and often the only possibility). The fastest way of travelling by “foot” is using skates, but of course that requires a frozen and smooth river.

The point isn’t to make a perfect fit, but to see that distance isn’t the only important characteristic of a travel. The distance aspect leads to heuristics like “if you don’t know how long the journey will be, you should prepare for a longer one than what you expect”. However, including weather, surface and terrain in the analogy leads to a richer set of problems. If it’s realistic that it will both be rainy, snowy, windy, freezy etc. in the same project, how should you plan? E.g. we always pack extra food and bring a showel on trips in the snowy, Norwegian mountains, because a heavy snowfall could prevent us from going straight home. How far you can see from the start, how well you know the conditions (I’ve seen women wearing high-healed shoes in the Grand Canyon), how much change you may expect during the travel, may be just as important as the travel distance.

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:46:35 +0000

Learning advanced techniques for large programs while writing small programs makes sense in school as long as it is pointed out that the student is learning a technique and that it will not make sense to apply it in the workplace for small programs. School IS where you are introduced to advanced techniques, though the need to cover many of them in a short time doesn’t allow their application where they would be the most useful.