Virtual Thought

The Strange Rumbler played a hand in this one:

Fuckin’ sweet.

Hooray for Paul Graham. Neat essays by a guy who is sometimes The Man and sometimes really arrogant. Have you also read Hackers Are Nothing Like Painters?

I just re-read How to Do What You Love and it’s pretty inspiring. Go read it… it’s not just for computer geeks like me. My big problem with the essay comes about halfway through:

Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.

Bullshit. Of course people write papers for fun; it’s called structured thinking. This is akin to English majors who look at the CS majors and think, “No one writes programs for fun!” Thinking without structure (be it programs, essays, journal entries, music, discussions with friends… basically, medial expressions) is, well, wanking.

Other than that bit of anti-intellectualism, the essay is a great expression of my goal of answering the question, “And what do you do?” with a big ol’ smile.

So I’m reading through this Slashdot troll fest about coding and someone posts this neat article about the shuttle group’s coders at NASA and how their software is zero-defect. Surprisingly, according to the article, the group may produce what is the most expensive-per-line program in the world (420,000 lines with a $35 million dollar budget) with impressive stats like ”...[t]he last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors.” I mean, wow. That’s pretty cool. I really respect the hell out of NASA, gotta admit.

Read the article. This group uses what sounds to me like a waterfall approach: lots of up-front planning, lots of documentation, rigid process… and it’s totally working for them. What does that mean for us agile folks? Are we totally wrong?

Nah. I’m very much a “tools that suit the job” kind of person instead of a “this is the best tool ever” kind of person. But it is interesting to point out when people insist that waterfall doesn’t work. Huh.