If you design a popular game that needs to be permanently connected in order to play, please start with an architecture that can handle enough user load at launch time.

Signed,

Someone who spent sixty bucks on some currently unusable bits

“Want to go to lunch?” I asked Munch, one of my cow-orkers. This fellow doesn’t have a car and rides exclusively, every day of the year (which is possible in Silly Valley).  He’s one of the best street riders I know.

“Okay,” He said. He handed me his spare helmet. “Let’s go.”

“Uh,” I had to think about it for second, “Okay.” I’d never been on the back of a motorcycle before.

We collected Jeff, another of the every-day riders in our group, and went to the parking lot. I’d seen their bikes out there, but hadn’t really appreciated them. Now I was going to get a much closer look.  Munch was riding a BMW K100 RT, a touring model, and Jeff had a smaller K75.

Munch supervised me as I put on the helmet. It fit okay. I didn’t know how to secure the D-rings, so he demonstrated. He then did some stuff at the handlebars which started the bike (I was surprised at how easy that seemed), got on and rocked the bike off its center stand. He turned to me with some instructions.  “You,” he said sternly, “Are like a sack of potatoes. You don’t help me and you don’t *not* help me, either. We’re going to lean, and you can’t fight it. Got it?”

I nodded. Nodding with a helmet on felt weird. I got on the passenger seat and found a place to hang on. I didn’t want to *hug* my cow-orker, so I found handholds behind me.

We headed to a burrito joint a couple miles away. I thought we’d take side streets out of pity for a newbie, but Munch got right on the highway. I hung into the bike, and every time he accelerated I thought I would fall off backwards (there was no danger of this, it just /felt/ like it).

The freeway exit, a nice sweeper, was exhilarating.

We ate lunch (“Burritos as big as your head” at a place where the staff barely spoke english) and talked about bikes.  I knew very little about them and I had lots of questions. When we finished, we visited California BMW just down the street, where I wandered, lost and curious, between the unfamiliar bikes while Munch and Jeff talked to the people running the shop.  Their business finished, we zoomed back to work. I returned the helmet to Munch.

When I got back to my cubical, I called the Motorcycle Safety Foundation and enrolled in a beginner’s training course. A couple months later I spent two weekends and two evenings learning how to ride. It was great fun.

It had been suggested in the MSF course that our first bike should be something we’d be happy with for a while, rather than something “small and safe” (since small doesn’t necessarily equate to safe), so I decided to get a medium-size bike. About a week after finishing the course, I had a bike, a Honda Transalp, 600cc.

After a few more weeks of practice riding (some with Munch, a lot more in the hills around Silly Valley), I took the DMV motorcycle test.  It was a cinch compared to the MSF training. When I finished, the examiner who had run me through the obstacles asked if I’d taken MSF.  I said so, and the examiner told me that the MSFers had a far easier time passing the test.

—-

Since then I’ve been through five or six bikes (mostly BMWs), and logged a few hundred thousand miles on two wheels, mostly in the hills and up and down the California/Oregon/Washington coast. For a few years I didn’t even own a car, I biked everywhere.

—-

Some other memories:

Jeff bought a new Ducati from a dealer in Livermore. Munch and I rode him over, and we took the bikes back over Mines road, up the back of Mount Hamilton and back down into San Jose; a nice mix of twisties and fast sweepers. During this ride, pieces of Jeff’s new bike kept falling off: A glued-on reflector here, some other widget there. By the time we reached the First Friendly Gas Station in San Jose, Jeff’s bike had lost the use of its kickstand, and he had to fuel while straddling the bike to keep it upright. Munch and I bid him farewell on his long ride up to his home in San Francisco; we didn’t follow him to pick up any more stray parts.

- – - -

One weekend we took a ride to Monterey, and returned on 101. Jeff was upset at all the freeway miles, so we turned west into the hills south of San Jose.  Jeff was on a new BMW K100RS, Munch was on his K100RT, and I had my Transalp. Pretty soon we started hitting dirt roads; I was in my element, but the K-bikes were having a hard time. A dog or two chased us. Finally we reached the top of a ridge and found paved road, where we parked and just doubled over in laughter. K bikes are not dirt bikes, but with a sufficiently good rider, they _can_ be.

- – - -

Munch was one of the best programmers I know. I worked with him for several years at Apple, and I when I moved groups I was always trying to get him to come to the group I was in (and later, to one or two of the startups I was at).

Once, he needed to make some tables for a 68000 disassembler. He decided to learn Prolog, and in a day or two he’d generated the code for the disassembler using a Prolog interpreter he’d found. Good programmers write tools. Great programmers learn new stuff at the same time.

- – - -

When I joined Apple in 1987, engineering samples of the new 21″ monochrome monitors were just arriving in various groups. Our group got one, and Munch got it. These displays were an unbelievably crisp white, and the amount of screen real estate was incredible; it reminded me of my hours on the Xerox Alto, only better. Remember your first time using two large monitors? Yeah.

Munch was a young curmudgeon, and used the “Kong” monitor in the following way: As a set of 80 by 25 line terminal windows, all stacked up directly on top of each other. He’d have ten or twenty of these, and just switch between them. To anyone watching it was frustrating, but Munch knew exactly what he was doing, and where everything was.

“I can’t believe we gave you that monitor,” said his boss, “The way you’re using it, it’s just wrong.” But Munch was incredibly productive, and nobody really complained that he didn’t make use of the screen space the way the rest of us would have.

- – - -

The weather in Seattle was absolutely perfect for motorcycle riding, and I was out in it today, reflecting on all of this.

Munch’s real name was John Paulson, and he died of cancer in March.  I just found out a few hours ago. I miss him.

“I wanna use maaaaaap! Why can’t I use map? Map map mapmaapmap.”

“Because this stuff runs in an interrupt handler, and is shared with thread-world code through a very carefully designed API involving a couple layers of synchronization. Many Bothans died to make this work well, and fast.”

“No map?”

“No map. Go read about NUMA.”

“What about streams?”

[buries head in hands]

tl;dr; It’s an idiot shield. Kids, get off the lawn

oh god my head hurts
just thinking of the evil that people do
in the name of a little convenience

i once asked a candidate what kind
of structure he would use to do
pagination in a word processor

he said frankly i dont give a shit
so i thanked him for his time and
showed him the door
it’s probably the most honest response
i’ve ever heard

“What can you get done in, say, the next ten minutes?”

“Huh?”

“There’s a status tracking meeting at four, and I need to report progress.”

“But we talked at ten this morning, and –”

“This is really high visibility, and we have to show we’ve done something since then.”

Ack.

He continues: “Or, we can give the project to Ralph. Ralph is good at reporting progress.”

“Ralph is a DBA. He doesn’t know which side of a curly-brace goes left or right.”

“But he gives good progress.”

“He thinks backslashes are the devil’s work. I’m not even sure he knows how to turn off his caps-lock key. Also, he doesn’t know C++.”

“You’re just being difficult.”

About five years ago I purchased The Bag from an old crone in a bad part of town. I’m not sure what’s in it, but a little bit of the stuff does wonders. I reach into my pocket, draw out a pinch and throw it in his eyes while muttering the charm.

He takes a step back, rubs his eyes and says “Ackblphltb?”

“You’re feeling on top of your game!”

“I am? I am!”

“You’re not being paid enough!”

“I’m so totally repressed and under-appreciated in this group. This sucks.”

“You’re going to interviewing, starting tomorrow!”

“I am so out of here. Maybe I’ll go to Google or Facebook.”

And that is how we do that.

So I stabbed him in the heart.

For instance, the shiny bits of Scrum are starting to wear off like the cheap paint from a fake idol, but there’s still time to dust off the crystal ball and toss some coins in the air. And based on what I’ve seen killed dead on the altar of Agile (and it ain’t been pretty) here’s what I think will happen next.

Remember all those burndown and velocity tracking applications The Powers That Be bought for Scrum? They’re not going to go to waste: Get ready for micrometrics.  Practically everything a team does will be measured, analyzed and acted upon by project managers. Going over checkins and having a thousand eyes on things is going to be horse and buggy stuff. We’re going to see utter exposure of everything that goes into the head and out of the fingers of developers, every cotton pickin’ thing will be timestamped, correlated to features, and graphed during reviews (which will happen in real-time).

In the new world of micrometrical software, no sparrow will fall without a burrowcrat getting on someone’s case about it.

How long did it take you to fix that bug this morning? What source code did you call up? How many steps did you take in the debugger, and what did you look at? What unit tests did you actually write and run?  Did Joe, the dev next to you, fix a similar bug in less time, with better quality? How much email went back and forth about the issue? Do you often mis-spell keywords? Do you hit backspace a lot, or change your mind about function names or parameters? Does it appear that you know exactly what you’re doing?

What percentage of your keystrokes and mouse clicks and minutes of your day can be mapped to a product feature?

My guess is there are shops already doing this, where fractal attention to detail has become a recursive ass-covering game, and everyone has forgotten why they started writing software for a living.

Has it been that long? When was the last time you enjoyed making a hunk of code work?

Please, have fun every day.

Except . . . I have this new irrational fear of vacuum cleaners.  Umgekehtervacuumenspiderenwhooshenobia is the phobia that a vacuum cleaner will experience a sudden polarity reversal and spray several years worth of very much alive and probably quite vexed poisonous spiders around the room. Hilarity ensues.

- – - -

In the software industry, the practice which is most like saving up poisonous spiders in a big bag for a later, less convenient time is the creative denial we call Bug Triage. It’s got other names, such as Managing Customer Expectations, Meeting the Quality Bar, or Getting the Fucking Project Shipped, but it all comes down to one thing: Stuffing defects into a bag (a “backlog” or similar purgatory) and getting the stupid collection of bits to paying customers without the bag or the customers suffering a catastrophic reversal of fortune.

The dirty truth of software is: It’s buggy. From the crappy hacks that run your toasters and flatscreen TVs to the expensive professional-grade stuff that keeps nuclear reactors from running amok and spewing out gigantic radioactive spiders, if something’s got a couple kilobytes of code in it, chances are it’s also got some pretty tasty bugs. We’re just not good enough as a species to put together a gadget with a few thousand parts without risking something blowing up.

Most of the time we don’t see them. Or if we do, they are minor annoyances — who cares if your smart toothbrush crashes?  However, occasionally there is a howler.  Some ship team’s pure, distilled denial lets something through that should have been an easily identifiable must-fix bug.

The truly pernicious bugs are the ones that don’t actually look like bugs. You think you’re happily slinging code around, and one day you wake up and realize that you’ve filed sixteen TFS reports in the last day, all about the same simple problem. You think harder and discover that other groups — people that you’ve never even heard of — have been holding daily war meetings about this bug. Six PMs and three managers are asking about status. (The actual issue? It’s a cosmetic thing affecting the color of a button in an error message, a one-character fix where a less-than should have been a greater-than).

The system has eaten itself, and you’re mired in a toxic, icky pool of process. You’ve become a living part of the bug. Your job? To keep the bug handling system alive by making more bugs. The bug-handling ecosystem has evolved to florish on the bug-making process, and if there aren’t enough bugs, it will make up some of its own.

My advice is: If it gets this bad, either get promoted so you can start lobbing hand-grenades into the machinery, or do something else.  Trust me, the system won’t miss you.

“I’ve got a great idea.”

“Shoot.”

“You know how old programmers are usually overrun and crushed by the young turks? These kids are fresh out of college and can crank out C and C++ faster than us experienced old farts. I’m sick of that.”

“Me, too. That last intern who re-wrote the kernel page management…”

“Worst review of my life, yup. So, why don’t we design a new language, all whizzy and structured and garbage collected and stuff, and — get this — utterly isolated from the OS.”

“Like BASIC?”

“Right! So they can’t do anything real in it.”

“I get it. It’s a teaching language.”

“No, we sell it as if it was a real language, too. That way colleges are sure to teach it. And it’ll cripple our competitors once they latch onto it.”

“Neat.”

“Now the kids will come out of college knowing essentially nothing about processors, or memory systems, or I/O — hell, they’ll never even have heard of exclusive-OR — and they’ll go into companies thinking they know everything. And in ten or twenty years . . .”

“We keep the castle safe for us. They can’t touch the kernel. We give them a miserable excuse for a native call layer, use blocking I/O everywhere, and give them X-Windows style graphics for user interfaces. Yeah. I like it.”

“What should we call it?”