Blank slate

I’m a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes books, and there are a few things in them that talk about an enlightenment way of thinking that’s useful for a developer when gathering requirements (whether tomes, user stories, backlog ideas,etc), writing code or approaching debugging.

Today I want to talk a bit about A Study in Scarlet, and the early conversations between Holmes and Watson before their first case together, because they capture the essence of his enlightenment thinking very well.

Ignore Irrelevant detail

Watson tells Holmes that the sun rotates around the earth, as he is surprised that an educated man does not know this. In reply, Holmes says,
“That’s very interesting, I will now do my best to forget it”

It’s not an important factor in any of his cases, it doesn’t affect his work, so it’s not a fact he needs to record. He accepts it but has no way to act on that information, so he dismisses it.

It’s something that is often hard to do in requirements gathering and may need to be done retrospectively after you find out whether Andy from finance’s love for Richard Branson is just infatuation, or it means that every call to action across your site will need to be red.

It’s also something to apply more generally, choose what to ignore, don’t learn every new JS framework. Don’t expect to be an expert in everything. Be content with being T-shaped, and become an expert in solving problems and focusing on the right details.

The Book of Life

” it attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way.”

The truth is never simple. Whatever you build will be part of an ecosystem comprised of other software, of manual processes, of fallible humans, and the winds of fate.

Gather whatever information you can, in whatever detail you can. Organise it and understand the bigger context.

The Phoenix Project has a great understanding of this in the discussion of the SOX-404 audit, where the IT department are busy worrying about controls on software without understanding the manual processes surrounding the software and how that fits into the compliance picture.

Speculation

On their journey to their first case together, Watson is keen to speculate about the motives and means that led to the crime, extrapolating from what little information they got from the initial introduction.

Holmes quickly and sternly cut Watson off from that line of thinking. He was clear that he would also base hypotheses on the causes and consequences once he had evidence before him to narrow down the possibilities, removing the impossible.

Speculate make hypotheses on why the system failed, on what will improve sales, on what the performance bottleneck is really going to be. Without data or a way to test them, they are useless for reaching understanding. Sometimes the beauty of a forest can only be appreciated by the birds.

Remove your preconceptions and bias from judgement by understanding what they are. Follow the data instead of your gut.

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Software Development as a Christmas Story

Oh Tanenbaum

We decorated the house for Christmas. A smaller project than most of the software I’ve worked on, but a useful reflection.

The Cost of context switching

Sometimes, in the middle of one task, you need to do another. Either because you were interrupted, or because you weren’t prepared. Consider the tree, a tall tree, one you need a ladder to decorate. But you left the in the attic.

You don’t just have the cost of picking up the star, you need to get down the ladder, fold it up, carry it upstairs, open the attic, unfold the ladder, climb to the attic, find the star, then pick it up and unwind all the other steps just to get back where you stated before you can continue the task of putting the Star on the tree.

It’s just a minute to get the star…

Yak shaving

Sometimes it’s more than just one thing. Sometimes to get to where you need to go, there’s a cascade of other tasks.

You want to put the tree up, but it’s the first time you’ve had a real tree, so you need a new base. It’s bigger than last year’s tree, so your lights don’t fit. So you need to go to the shops. But you need to fill up your car. And the tyre pressure warning light comes on so you need to top them up. And you need to check the tread depth whilst you’re there, and so on.

Programming in a nutshell

Performance at scale

Our tree stood up fine when it was delivered. But as it scaled out and the branches widened, it pushed against the wall, making it unstable in the condensed space. It fell over.

Luckily no lights or baubles were using it at the time, but it’s an interesting challenge holding up a heavy tree in one hand, trying to adjust it’s position with the other hand, as I avoided the puddles of water in the floor as my wife mopped them up. If you’ve ever worked support, this may sound familiar.

Turns out that it was harder to stabilise than I anticipated.

The branches were unevenly partitioned, providing more load on one side, so I had to stabilise it against the wall. And the tree was almost a foot taller than expected, which turned it out to be 2 foot taller than the base was rated for.

We upgraded the base to handle the load. It’s bigger than we need.

Technical debt

I have some old pre-LED tree lights and they slowly fail so each year I replace the unlit ones from the packet of spares but I haven’t been replacing the spares. Eventually, they will run out, and the spares will no longer be available. I’ll have to throw them all out and start again.

The new led ones don’t let me replace them individually. But they last longer and are cheaper to run.

Which debt is easier to live with?

With a big tree, those old lights aren’t long enough. So, do I buy another set for the rest of the tree that doesn’t match them, or throw out the existing ones and buy a longer set? The latter looks better, but throws out the sunk cost along with the lights.

You know computers, can you look at this for me?

No, I can’t fix your tree. I can navigate a garden centre. I know enough physics to keep a tree upright, eventually, and safely put the angel on, but I’ve no Idea how to grow one, or what that weird stand with 17 gears you bought does, or how to assemble your plastic one. And I’ve no idea what that bug in the tree is.

Merry Christmas. Catch you all in the New Year.

Embrace bored

Be bored.

No news in Facebook news feed

Be at peace with your thoughts, and let them consume you. Put down your phone, disconnect from social networks.

Don’t seek stimulation just for the sake of it 

Think about your problems. But don’t dwell on them.

Boredom makes you brilliant. 

Boredom makes you more creative 

Procrastinate. It’s good for you. 

Not working will help you work.

☕

Grab a coffee. 

Smoke a pipe or three.  

In Praise of Boredom – Maria Konnikova

If you’re stuck, get away and think.

Give yourself time. 🕒 It’s a precious gift.

I’d rather be proved wrong than miss the chance to improve

One of my favourite books is Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. The setup for the sorry is an old astronomy professor who has won his planet’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize for proving that the six suns in his solar system would never set on his planet at the same time. And night couldn’t fall.

And then his students did some calculations and realized he was wrong, and for a time every few thousand years there would be night.

They didn’t want to tell him thinking it would ruin his life’s work and leave him feeling dejected and worthless.

He got angry with them because he didn’t want to miss the chance to learn something new, and the thrill of discovery had the opposite effect to what the students expected and renewed his enthusiasm in the subject.

Renewed enthusiasm

I’m not a Nobel winner by a long shot, but the professor’s attitude embodies the way I want to work. Doing the same thing and thinking there’s nothing left to learn would demotivate me.

I love mentoring because I love learning.

When I build a team, I want people who aren’t afraid to tell me I’m wrong, when I am, because that’s what makes the team stronger. I know not everyone is confident at this at first but if I can find people who are confident in their opinions, my job is to nurture that.

If I’m not being challenged, I’m not learning. I know my experience has helped me get where I am, but I need to know where me and my team are going.

Tasks for you

If you are a leader or a mentor, embrace the opportunity to learn that you get from being wrong. Be vulnerable, sometimes, so that everyone knows it’s ok to be wrong, if you acknowledge it and make amends. Keep learning.

If you’re not, embrace your mistakes. (Link – my mistake) Next time you find yourself in that position, you’ll call it experience. Learn by doing as well as by reading. The most interesting challenges you’ll face won’t have a manual. Keep learning.

Don’t let your career go dark.

NMandelbrot : running arbitrary code on client

As part of my grand plan for map-reduce in JavaScript and zero-install distributed computing, I had to think about how to gain user trust in a security context where we don’t trust the server. I couldn’t come up with a good answer.

Since then, we’ve seen stories of malicious JavaScript installed to mine cryptocurrencies , we know that JavaScript can be exploited to read kernel memory, including passwords, on the client, and I suspect we’ll see a lot more restrictions on what JavaScript is allowed to do – although as the Spectre exploit is fundamentally an array read, it’s going to be a complex fix at multiple levels.

I had ideas about how to sandbox the client JavaScript (I was looking at Python’s virtualenv and Docker containers to isolate code, as well as locking them into service workers which already have a vastly more limited API), but that relies on the browser and OS maintaining separation, and if VMs can’t maintain separation with their levels of isolation, it’s not an easy job for browser developers, or anyone running on their platform.

I also wondered if the clients should be written in a functional language that transpiled to JavaScript, to have language level enforcement of immutability and safety checks. And of course, because a functional style and API provides a simpler context to reason about map-reduce, by avoiding any implicit shared context.

Do you allow someone else’s JavaScript on your site, whether a library, or a tracking script, or random ads from Russia, Korea, botnets and script kiddies? How do you keep your customers safe? And how do you isolate processes you trust from processes that deal with the outside world and users? JavaScript will be more secure in the future, and the research is fascinating (JavaScript Zero: real JavaScript, and zero side-channel attacks) but can you afford to wait?

Meltdown and Spectre shouldn’t change any of this. But now is a good time to think about it. Make 2018 the year you become paranoid about users, 3rd parties and other threats. The year is still young, but the exploits are piling up.

 

Ddd.scot, diversity, and your career

I had a great day at DDD Scotland, thanks to everyone who came along for the discussions. Apart from the panel sessions I chaired and participated in, Joe Wright ran a great mob programming session, Gary Fleming led a lean coffee session, and we had a couple of great lightning talks about recruitment at Skyscanner and Becoming a Technical Lead From Tugberk Ugurlu of Redgrave.

There were a few recurring themes that I want to highlight.

Diversity

This was a strong recurrent theme throughout the sessions in the community room. Whilst the focus was on gender due mostly to the makeup of the attendees, a few people pointed out the need to respect diversity for LGBT, age (graduates don’t have 5 years experience), family circumstances (single parents and others don’t have time in the evenings to do coding interviews), dyslexia and autism. To which I’d also add physical disabilities, skin colour, religion, any of which can and have been used intentionally or otherwise to limit the pool of candidates brought to interview, or created a hostile environment once in the job.

If you want to hire on merit, don’t just give the job to the white guy because he’s “a culture fit” and recognise that your recruitment may be biased. When I put an ad on Stackoverflow, all the replies were men, but working with a couple of recruiters we found a better mix of candidates, including the woman who we ended up hiring.

No problem at all, great to hear that people are keen to learn about it! The link for the next WiTS event is here. It would be great to see more of you there! https://t.co/BJvYmdNmbO #DDDScotland

— Becca Liddle 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@The_Liddler) February 10, 2018

Job hunting and moving on in your career

There was a scary graph that suggests that computer scientists are less employable that other graduates, and yet of all the STEM subjects, there are more vacancies in software (where the stem jobs are ).

Computer Science graduates can't get jobs, but employers are desperately looking for developers. What's causing the gap?

Trying to find answers at @dddscot #dddScotland pic.twitter.com/W498p0DNgy

— craignicol (@craignicol) February 10, 2018

The job market is broken. There’s a lot of smart people out there, and for my last 2 jobs I had no experience in one of the key technologies they were advertising for, so the job adverts in many ways are meaningless. I want to work with people who have the skills to evaluate the next JavaScript framework, not 10 years experience in Vue. Nothing I work on today existed when I graduated. No ASP.NET MVC, no REST, JavaScript was for image rollovers, no Swift, no Xamarin. But job adverts don’t care about ability to learn. They’re a checklist.

I know recruitment agents get a bad reputation, and for some it’s well deserved, but a good one will help you get past the keyword gate, because they can sell you on your potential. If a company isn’t interested in your potential, choose another one. If you don’t want to deal with an agent, you need to be bold, demonstrate what you can for the requirements, and find examples to help them see that you can learn the rest quickly.

But have examples. You don’t want to be the clueless braggard who can’t even FizzBuzz.

Culture of learning, and mentorship

If you want to continue to be successful, you need to learn. Some of it you can do on your own, some you’ll need help with. If you’re working for the right company, they’ll provide you with a mentor, but even if they do, it’s worth finding others to help, whether it’s a formal process, or just someone to discuss if all companies make you deal with that stressful thing that’s getting you down.

Write a blog, volunteer for projects outside your comfort zone that help you improve those skills you’re lacking. Seek feedback. Accept that you won’t know everything and the learning experience is littered with failures. Learn by doing. Pair, mob, spike ideas.

When you’re tired of learning, find a new job.

The first rule of dog training

(EDIT : whilst the below line is an old joke, part of putting information out in public is making sure your facts are correct. So, for the dog trainers out there, as Christiaan Baes  🇧🇪‏ @chrissie1 points out, the first rule is Be Consistent, which means I can’t break this URL, but I will leave this note in place.)

The first rule of dog training is : know more than the dog.

If you pass that level, you’re ready to give a talk. Have you used node.js on a real project, or evaluated it properly against another framework? Have you failed badly on a project that would serve as a warning to others? Did you learn something important from your mentor or boss that they’re happy for you to share? What do you know now that you wish someone had told you last year?

When I first gave a talk in public, I was very nervous. I still get that way.

My first talk wasn’t an original idea. At the first DDD Scotland, I saw Ben Hall talking about Red, Green, Refactor and took the ideas away to try it properly, without fully understanding it (sorry, Ben). The following year, at the next DDD Scotland, I did a live coding session entitled “TDD? I don’t have time” that revisited the highlights of that talk, then filled in some of the lessons I learned from applying it. There was a bigger audience, and lots of fresh faces who found the idea interesting, but I didn’t plan it enough and it was very rough.

I started giving talks as a way to improve my communication skills. And on my first attempt, I failed badly. And I had to make the choice. Do I write it off, and retreat, or do I keep doing it so I can learn to do it better? It was a talk about agile principles, so I had to take the latter route.

So I did some user group talks, 20 minutes, instead of an hour. Some pikka machu talks, 6 minutes. I’ve since done workshops and guided conversations, where I let other people talk. I’ve paired with others to talk. I’ve talked about technology, people, other talks I’ve seen and the near future. I learned some tricks along the way, but Scott Hanselman (check out the related links too) and Christos Matskas summarise them much better than I could.

There are good reasons to speak at user group events, or conferences, or in your office. Don’t be afraid of being noticed. And if you want any more advice or encouragement, leave a comment or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

And don’t forget, DDD Scotland is back. Submit.

User Experience : A quick introduction for developers

The following is an internal summary I wrote for a team that no longer exists, summarising a number of references from UXScotland, various book and blog posts. It extends the thoughts from my Pecha Kucha talk. For more details, please refer to the links throughout and the references at the bottom. The context here is consulting and long-term B2B projects, but some of these discussions are more widely relevant.

User Experience : Project considerations

User experience is about making sure we are solving the right problems in the right way. It is the intersection of design, users, and context. Context here is a combination of one or more of the device in use, the user’s location, any social cues such as nearby friends, and anything else that may be available from sensors or historical information.

In many cases, the requirements we have are assumptions (e.g. what users want is Facebook integration). Where the benefits of a requirement are unclear, we should treat it as an assumption to be tested. Embrace data, and analyse it.

At the requirements stage, we need to make sure we are solving the right problem (pretotyping : “building the right *it*”), and that our chosen design helps the user to solve the problem without frustration (i.e. prototyping the design, rather than the implementation, with wireframes/sketches).

In user testing, particularly in an agile development, we can refine those ideas by seeing how well the implementation solves the problem, by testing with users. We can also test deployed code by analysing heat maps and http logs to see what users are doing to inform further tests and the assumptions that feed into further design cycles.

In a Lean/Agile project, we need to be explicit about our assumptions about the user and test them at every stage of the development to ensure that we always meet user needs.

How does UX fit in our process?

Stakeholders

A system that supports user’s need effectively will need to understand that the user is a Stakeholder in the process. Whilst the users themselves may not be directly involved in the generation or review of design artefacts, there should be a user representative, either a super-user on the customer side, or a 3rd party researcher who has determined user needs, and has authority to verify any proposed solution and high-level requirements against those needs.

Functional Requirements

Personas / Typical Users

A persona is an abstraction of a system user. In a simple system, there may be only one type of user, but more sophisticated systems will typically have users and administrators, and may have multiple classes of each. A persona is defined to encapsulate the types of tasks a specific user may wish to perform, and any limitations that may be imposed (for example, administrators may be able to install specific browsers or client software, but members of the public using the system must be supported across multiple browsers at multiple screen sizes).

User Journeys

Each persona will have one or more tasks they wish to perform in the system. A User Journey describes the tasks as a series of steps that a specific persona will follow in order to achieve that task.

Consider the tasks that a user wants to perform. See also BDD – design from user in.

E.g.

User wants to process a case:

• User logs in to the system
• User selects case from their task list
• User reviews latest document
• User finds agent for case, and calls to discuss
• User adds comments to case
• User saves case and returns to their task list

This process may identify a new use case (“Display task list”), and specific actions that need to be defined within a use case (“Display latest document” and “Display agent contact details”)

The User Journeys provide the context between the Stakeholders (and User Types therein) and the Use Cases. Each User Journey will link to one or more Use Cases, but some Use Cases may not have an associated User Journey (nightly payment processing, for example).

User feedback

If the solution is replacing or improving an existing system, the best source of information on the current system are the users. The requirements capture process should take into account both the tasks that the users perform and gather feedback on any areas of frustration. The prioritization exercise should consider these improvements as well as new functionality.

Testing

As well as testing the Use Cases for functional acceptance, the FAT/UAT process should also test that the final system supports the User Journeys defined up front.

On-going support

Where projects have regular support meetings, the input of users has been valuable in identifying problems areas and possible changes. When on-going service delivery contracts are defined, SDMs should consider whether ongoing user feedback is appropriate as part of the planning and scoping of releases within that framework.

Questions to ask

• Have the requirements been tested on users? If not, why not? (Are these the right requirements?)
• Will users be given the opportunity to provide feedback on these through the development? (And if so, how, when and where?)
• What user outcomes are we trying to achieve with the release? These may not be requirements that we put a cost on, but an expectation that we can measure against to show improvement – we would need to communicate this appropriately.
  • E.g. minimise clicks to access the 5 main functions
  • E.g. reduce time-to-complete for function x, y and z by 10%
  • E.g. Align existing UI with iOS and Android norms
  • E.g. Increase usage of function z by 5%
  • E.g. 99% AAA compliance
• Who represents users on the project team?
  • How many user types do we need?
  • Can normal users and administrators share UX, or are their goals divergent? – different apps, different ASP Areas, different branding, …
• What platforms and form factors need to be supported/tested?
  • Does each platform need a native UX? If native app, probably yes, if web app, maybe.
  • If mobile, do we need to adapt to context : location/orientation/communication with nearby devices/…
  • If social, do we need to adapt to context : can I approve my own work?/who’s online/recommendations/who’s nearby/…
• Do we, as developers, have any input to the UI design? If not, why not?
• Have the designs been tested on users? If not, why not? (Does the UI fit user expectations?)
• Do we have appropriate guidelines for the appropriate platform, and are they listed in the requirements and estimates?
  • iOS : Mobile Human Interface Guidelines
  • Android : Design principles
  • Windows

Potentially useful resources

 

• Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
• Steve Krug presentation : Usability – One more thing you don’t have time for
  • Also check out his books, including Don’t make me think
• UX Scotland
• UX Professionals communities
• UXPA-Scotland (mainly Edinburgh)
• Government Digital Service (Agile, UX and a few other real-world discussions)
• A List Apart
• .net magazine
• Ask Tog
• HTML5 Rocks
• Color Me Impressed: 3 Tools For Effortlessly Finding Beautiful Color Schemes For Any Project

Clockwise : suggestions for managing your time

• Plan ahead (with contingency)
  • Whatever works for you – personal JIRA, Trello, stacked sticky notes, dead tree notebook
• Stay focussed
  • Specify windows to check your email (e.g. first thing in AM and after lunch) and ignore emails until that window
  • Rather than letting new tasks distract you, write them down, then continue on your current task – and have a time to review and prioritize those tasks during the day.
  • Avoid context switching – humans are very bad at multitasking and your brain is highly prone to disk-thrashing, especially if you think you’re good at multitasking. See this TIME article for a summary of the research.
  • Some people work best with time-boxing : concentrate on a single task for a fixed period of time. Read about the Pomodoro technique.
• Say No if you need to – or you’ll disappoint
  • If someone asks you to do something, get a deadline for it to help you decide if you have time
• Track as you go
  • 6 minutes are a good building block of time to decimalise your day, especially if you’re filling out timesheets.
  • If you’re working on more than 1 project, you’re going to forget very quickly what you’ve done by the end of the week
• Review your time – find ways to optimise
  • Personal retrospectives. Are you spending your time on what you should be spending it on?
• Learn when to delegate, both to management and within your team.

Flightplan : How to run a meeting

Usually, you don’t need a meeting to make a decision. If you can do it with a quick discussion and a single follow-up email to confirm, do it.

Kick-off, stand-up and retrospective meetings are important to:

• introduce team members to each other;
• plan work and review progress; and
• set tasks for improvement.

Avoid other meetings if you can, but a well planned meeting is preferable to a long, winding email trail.

Cut your meeting time by 90%

The only goal for a meeting is “to decide and commit.” No other objective is worth meeting for.

The Acid Test

• Pick a red marker and search your agenda for terms such as “discuss,” “update,” “review,” and other non-decisive verbs. Cross them out and see what is left.
• Then put any remaining item through the following three-question test:
  • What will we do differently if we succeed in this meeting?
  • Why do we need to meet to accomplish this?
  • How will this help us further the goal of the team?

I bet that 90% of your meeting time goes away.

General tips

• In my experience, people who have met in person are far more likely to talk to each other – kick-off meetings should always be in one room (no phones, no VC, plenty of tea and biscuits) unless you have a very good reason not to.
• As short as possible, but no shorter
  • If you’re chairing the meeting, don’t be afraid of telling people to shut up, or to defer the discussion until after the meeting.
  • Book some contingency time. For a 30 minute meeting, plan for 25 minutes, for a 60 minute meeting, plan for 50, so there’s time to summarise and re-schedule for further discussion if necessary.
  • If you get through the agenda early, finish the meeting early. Respect everyone’s time.
• Have an agenda
  • And stick to it.
• Assign tasks
  • There’s a risk everyone will see a task as somebody else’s problem. If it turns out someone can’t do a task for whatever reason, it can always be re-assigned.
  • Don’t expect people to volunteer.
  • If there’s no tasks to be assigned, there’s no point having a meeting.
• Provide feedback at a specified future date
  • This is a lot more important than I expected – especially with retrospectives
  • Where the actions aren’t immediate, keep the actions visible and explicitly tick them off at the next meeting
  • If there is no next meeting, because there’s no further decisions, schedule an action to feedback results to the attendees
  • Record actions and feedback where everyone (including potentially other projects) can refer back to them so they can see when and why decisions were made.