The Mythical Version 1.0

As a breed us hackers are perfectionists.  Tinkering away at that algorithm, worrying about the size of that switch statement, wondering about abstracting away some detail.  But always, always with the aim of improving our code base.

Many of our number are also a bunch of nit-picking, passive-aggressive, show-boating arseholes.  Although these traits are kind of endearing once you realise that optimus1337, who is currently comparing you to Hitler, is probably 19, his Mum thinks he’s a wonderful lad, and he helps his Gran with her shopping at the weekends.

However, there is an unfortunate consequence of these two character traits.  It can make it very intimidating about putting out your opinion or sharing some code with your peers.  We’ll hoard code, or practice at home, but not want to put something out there because it’s not perfect, or we won’t contribute to a project for the fear that we’ll be shouted down, or what we produce won’t meet some sort of arbitrary ultra-geek standard.

This attitude can be seen in the insanely conservative version numbers we give any code that we are brave enough to put out into the wide-world, ie – MyProject – v0.0.001.  For example, I’m a massive fan of the Nant project and have been using it to build my solutions for the last 4 years.  In that time the project has gone from version 0.86Beta1 to the recently released v.091.  In the entire 4 years I’ve been using it, it’s been as solid as a rock, and I haven’t had one issue with it, ever!

There’s no such thing as done

All developers implicitly understand that no project is ever finished, or any piece of code ever completely bug free, or that couldn’t be refactored.  Which makes a “done” project as rare as the legendary unicorn.

A few years back when projects started versioning themselves after the year/month they were deployed, ie Ubuntu 12.4, Office 2010 etc.  I was very cynical, thinking this is just a marketing ploy, to make us download/purchase the latest version.

However, I’ve lately realised that this versioning scheme has the benefit of indicating that this software is just that year’s version, or that month’s version.  It doesn’t say this software has reached mythical v1 status, it just says this is the stuff we think is good enough to release now.  The marketing aspect is just a fringe benefit 🙂

Conclusion

So don’t worry about joining the melting pot – jump right in.  Release version 12.3.09 of that idea you’ve been working on.  You can still conform to semantic versioning, and tell the likes of optimus1337 “Dude, relax. The code’s not done, it just the stuff I wanted to share, and BTW that’s not how you spell Goebbels ;-)”

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Agile punks – Go write an app

Last week I ranted posted about how some members of the agile community are engaging in pointless debates about complexity theory, kanban maestros & scrum blockades. I pointed to a post by Liz Keogh as an archetype of the genre (as I said to Liz, there’s plenty of other authors I could have used).  Liz asked for some feedback and was generous enough to agree that I had a point.

If we try to ignore the first commenter, who hilariously and spectacularly, misses the point by wondering if the issue is a “complex problem, possibly even chaotic”.  I think Liz has drawn all the wrong conclusions, about the state of the industry.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times

In my 14 years in the industry I’m confident that there has never been a better time to be a programmer or to work in IT.  But thanks to a community of well intentioned “agilists” many in the industry are flagellating themselves into believing themselves hopeless programmers.

I live in Scotland and there’s an old joke about the definition of a Scottish Calvinist:

“Someone who is paralysed by the fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying themselves”

Similarly the definition of a modern programmer could be:

“Someone who is paralysed by the fear that someone, somewhere, is doing BDD better than they are”

Many programmers are so obsessed with writing better unit tests, understanding the problem better, worrying about their kanban wall, working through Martin Fowlers pattern library, trying to be “masters” not “journeymen” that they’ve forgotten the basic joy of cranking out some code and solving a users problem, and are paralysed by the fear that they’re doing it wrong or poorly.

Ironically, it’s never been easier to write some code and get it downloaded and used.  Individual devs can create and upload apps to the App-store for a potential audience of millions.  Cloud computing means the home coder can create apps that can scale massively on demand for an initial outlay of a less than £20 quid.  While you’ve been worrying about your BDD adverbs the iFart dev just made $40,000.

It’s not that improving your skills isn’t important, it just shouldn’t become all consuming and derail shipping software.  Apart from my blog posts, there is no such thing as perfection, and guess what, you learn from your mistakes. And we certainly shouldn’t be putting up barriers to welcome all and sundry into the industry, it sure beats working at Tesco.  If you are a “master” your one mission in life should be to make it easier not harder for “journeymen” to improve (BTW I loathe this master/journeyman patronising nonsense, it just succeeds in making programmers more paranoid).

Are you as punk as Ward?

I like to think of Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, et al as the first punks in our industry.  Just like the original punk rock was a reaction to the complex and multi-instrumented prog music as epitomised by bands like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer.  XP was a reaction against the “analysis paralysis” caused by, as they saw it, the complex and formal software development methodologies of the day.  By turning things like TDD, Small releases, CI up to 11 they managed to break the deadlock and start rocking out the code.

XP was the forefather to agile, and sadly since those heady simple days of XP, we’ve slowly been adding the complexity back in – until I overheard someone say recently “I’m not sure I understand the definition of a story, properly” as if that were important.  We’re now in a state of “over-analysis paralysis”.

Anarchy in the IDE

I’m not the only one thinking like this, Jeff Atwood recently tweeted:

“all this process stuff at #ordev is boring. At Stack Exchange, we have one process: kicking ass and chewing gum. And we’re all out of gum.”

Zed Shaw sends up the agile community far better than I can using a tad more colourful language at Programming Motherf***ker

So I propose we need to bring back some of that original punk rock spirit.  There was a famous punk t-shirt which said “Here’s 3 chords, now form a band”

Similarly in programming we could do with something similar:

1. Here’s an IF statement
2. Here’s a loop
3. Here’s an editor
4. Now write an app

Or as Johnny Rotten said “Don’t accept the old order. Get rid of it.”