Clarke Ching - Split Infinitives and Beyond.

Must watch this ...

Sent using my BlackBerry Bold - the thinking man's iphone. www.clarkeching.com +44(0)7920114893 Clarke Ching - Author of "Rolling Rocks Downhill" ... a business novel about software development; coming soon from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Sunflowers ...

I'm off to find a child friendly (and wower averse) flowering plant for my daughters.

The paradox of being a husband

Are all husbands incompetent?

[Warning: some of the "facts" below may be true]

I don't drink much.  I don't socialise much.  On Wednesday I did both.  It was only 3 pints and 2 friends and 1 night, but it was fun.

I needed a drink, frankly, because I was in much, much trouble at home with my wife and 2 daughters because while mowing the lawn (in the words of my 3 year old) I "sucked up the sun flower plants".  My daughter grew them from seedlings at nursery, planted them in the back garden by the fence and watering them every day for the previous 6 weeks.  It was an honest mistake.  I was vacumming - ah, mowing - the high weedy bit next to the fence and I didn't see the sunflower plants because they ... well, they looked like weeds.  

My daughter forgave me rather quickly after I bribed her with chocolate.  My wife ate the chocolate but then accused me of deliberatly using the lawn mower incompetently just so that, in future, she'd feel compelled to do the mowing herself rather than risk me killing something else important.

I wish I'd thought of that, but I didn't.  I'm not incompetent (see the last paragraph for proof), but I'm not clever enough, either, to pretend to be so incompetent that I can avoid work.  

I pointed out that I wasn't as "competent at being incompetent" as she was accusing me of being, but then she reminded me of "learned helplessness [wikipedia]" which is something she learned about in psychiatrist school.  Apparantly it's the reason why men can't have babies, or something; I wasn't really listening.  I was thinking about the beer I knew I'd be drinking a few hours later.

I mentioned this little incident later on to my two friends: X and Y.  Twice: the first time because I found it mildly amusing;  the second time because I'd had a pint by then, they'd had a pint each by then, and suddenly it was very amusing.

It turns out that I'm not the only husband whose wife thinks is incompetent.  As Y put it "my wife and children can hardly believe that anyone actually pays me to work for them".  

Aparantly, the only use Y has in his house is to fix computer things.  Y, btw, is a very good software developer - very good - and people pay him to do it.

X's only use, aparantly, is to fix computer things too.  

Me too,come to think of it.

Oh, and we're good at setting up the Humax PVR* to record things.  X even managed to upgrade the standard hard disk on his Humx PVR to a 500 Gig version which, in my books, classes him as a God, but it wouldn't score him any brownie points with his wife, or my wife, or Y's wife.  X manages a team of people who design computer chips, BTW, and people pay him to do it.

* (if you're poor then you probably have TIVO or Sky+ -  the Humax PVR is just like them but cheaper and it only works on the free channels) 

During the evening the 3 of us figured out (based on a statistically significant sample of 3) that husbands are generally hard-done-by and under-rated by their wives.  We formed a support group and spent half an hour finding a url - see http://batteredhusbands.com though, this being Scotland, we're worried about deep-frier and fish-and-chip jokes. We chose a T-Shirt colour and Y came up with the funniest slogan.  The T-Shirt was yellow ... but I can't for the life of me remember the slogan.  Which is a shame 'cause it was not only hillariously funny but it would fit on one side of a t-shirt (in red, Comic Sans font).  

And it had a double meaning.  Or course.  One of which was rude.

So I enjoyed the beer.  

And finally, now you'll understand why I've spent the last 4 years telling my wife all about my blog in excrutiating detail and asking her to read it to the point where she point-blank refuses to listen or read it.  I've been training her to not read it.  That's why she'll never read this ... and I can embellish the truth as much as I like.

My competive disadvantage: my name?

I recently googled myself trying to find an article I wrote some time ago and discovered that my website is listed on a site about Chinese medicines and herbs.  I feel honoured.  We Chings know a thing or two about such things.  

[If you're new to my blog then it might help you to know that I'm from New Zealand, my wife is Irish, I live in Scotland and the surname "Ching" originally came from Cornwall in England, not Asia.  It's great for causing confusion, getting upgraded on Cathy Pacific, making jokes about my Great Grandfather inventing the cash register ... but it has it's downsides.]

And then today I read about some interesting research in the Irish Times.  It clearly shows that in Ireland, at least, having a foreight sounding surname is not good if you want people to read your CV.  I've often considered doing the experiment they've just done, but with my own CV:

For their experiment, researchers sent pairs of matched CVs in response to 240 job adverts in three sectors. In each case the two fictitious applicants had equivalent qualifications, skills and expertise – all gained in Ireland – but while one candidate had an Irish name, the other was Asian, African or German. The result was that job applicants with typical Irish names were twice as likely to be called for interview as those with minority names – an odds ratio that was high, though not unprecedented, by international standards. A Wolfgang Schröder – or a Constance Markiewicz – has only half the chance of a Patrick Murphy of getting an interview.

There is good news for me if I ever move back to Ireleand.

A striking feature was that, unlike in many other countries, the odds of being called to interview are very similar for applicants with African, Asian and German names

I don't think this is racisim though ... I think people just stick with what they're familiar with.  In fact, that's exactly what the research folk said:

[They]  interpreted this as a positive desire among employers to hire Irish people as opposed to a dislike of hiring foreign workers.

Not sure if it's important or what I can do about it.  Just makes me wonder ...

Farquar Forrest Fruits

I'd like to find the clever clogs who decided to name the character on my daughters sqeezy yoghert thing "Farquar" and then get him/her to explain why my 3 year old is now going round telling her Mum that Dad said the yoghert is called Fucker.

No newts

My 6 year old daughter was sick yesterday (and recovering today) and I've been looking after them. Yesterday, I took them for a picnic at "The Pineapple" which is a little-known historic building,half way between Stirling and Falkirk; it has a very large few-hundred-year-old pineapple on its roof. There's a pond there that advertises its newt population. We stood there for 5 minutes looking for newts. There were no newts. We were okay about that. We assume they were good newts, none the less.

Sent using my BlackBerry Bold - the thinking man's iphone. www.clarkeching.com +44(0)7920114893 Clarke Ching - Author of "Rolling Rocks Downhill" ... a business novel about software development; coming soon from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Best Job in the World?

Some energetic and enthusiastic English fella just won The Best Job in the World.  He gets some money, get's to work a few hours, and gets to live on an Australian holiday island.  It was a rather clever marketing gimmic put together by someone in the Oz holiday industry. It certainly got them some great free promotion here in the UK.  

What would your "best job in the world be?"

Mine would obviously involve TOC and Agile - that's the hybrid engineer-manager in me.  It would invovle helping others understand them and how to use them to get better and happier, though not in a zealotish way.  I'd work with ordinary people, rather than rocket scientists; people who want to work 9 - 5 and have hobbies other than Agile.  I'd have time to write but I'd also have responsibility to deliver.  And I would deliver.  I enjoy "thinking" but I need to deliver to feel good.  

Leave a comment and tell me about yours "best job".  Please - I'd like to know.

Getting Lucky ... patterns

I found a 5 leaf clover this morning.  In fact, I found a bunch of them all growing from the same plant - it must be a mutant.

I did the same about 30 years ago - when I was 9 and at primary school in New Zealand.  I found a plant growing on the side of the road I walked on the way home from school.  I bet the plant's still there.  It was bigger than today's plant and at any one time I could find a half dozen 4 or 5 or (occasssionally) 6 leaf clovers.

Call me odd, but when I was at school I developed a bit of a reputation as a "4 leaf clover finder".  My mind became so attuned at spotting them that I could walk into any field with clover in it and find a 4 leaf clover within a few seconds.  Try it; it's not easy.  I can't do it nowadays (which is probably a good thing) but this morning's discovery did make me wonder if I still have the "gift".

These day's I spot different patterns.  I find myself drawing evaporating clouds in my mind during conversations, for instance, and I'm always on the look out for bottlenecks - especially when they're holding me up.  Once upon a time, I could see things in code that just didn't look right - some of my programmer friends call these things "smells" because they don't smell right. I guess we train ourselves to see patterns like that.

So tell me ... what patterns do you see which no one else does?

Twitter = Empty Calories

I've just given up on twitter. Why? It was a distraction - empty calories - and while it wasn't taking all that much of my time, I honestly think it was affecting my concentration and diverting my attention from more important things. That's a personal decision, really, not a reflection on Twitter so much as on me. 

Recipes ... Scrum as Bread.

I've been writing loads lately about the difference between inventing a recipe and cooking a recipe. I've been doing that while rewriting the 50 page "light bulb moment" in RollingRocksDownhill. I won't go into the details here but the recipe analogy is very useful when thinking about software development.

Just today, I've realised that the recipe analogy also explains why many agile implementations fail.

I restarted using our Bread Machine a month or so ago and it's been fantastic. My children think I make the best bread in the world, but they don't realise that I follow a very simple recipe and the machine does all the hard work.

One thing I've noticed is that I must always "babysit" the bread machine through its first few cycles - the one's where it mixes the flour, water, yeast etc into a dough. It doesn't seem to matter how careful I measure the ingredients when I load them into the machine, the dough is always either a little too wet or little too dry and I have to fix it by adding a little more flour or a little more water. I'm no baker, but it's always obvious - if you've cooked bread you'll know what I mean - when I should stop tweaking, step away and let the machine follow it's course. The dough either looks right or it looks wrong, simple as that.

A friend of mine, Brian Swan, just wrote to me, saying:

"More and more I'm seeing "Agile" being implemented as the Scrum ceremonies (planning meeting, standups, sprint demo and retro), missing both the business focus on releasing something early and the technical focus on quality. In some cases this form of "Agile" is actually worse than what was there before."

Brian is, in my words, saying that they following the recipe, but they don't know how to tell if the dough looks right or wrong.  If you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like then oftentimes you’re gonna cook shitty bread.

That’s blindingly obvious isn’t it?

There's a lot of the bitching and moaning within the Agile community these days about Scrum (mostly from very clever XP folk who don’t see the irony in thinking everyone should be extreme). 

But, the problem is not with Scrum itself, the problem is that Scrum looks easy (take some flour, some water, some yeast) and it looks like it should be easy to do-it-yourself. But it's not. Scrum is really hard work.  It might look easy, but it's also easy to screw up if you don’t know what ScumDough is supposed to look like.

That, I’ve realised, is what people like Brian and I do for a living.