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Lately, I’ve been rumi­nat­ing on require­ments and require­ments man­age­ment (also known as dis­as­ter con­trol). I was actu­ally typ­ing some­thing up on this, but Steve Yegge hit the nail on the head — then he rammed it through the board and into the house next door:

Any­way, there you have it: the slightly expanded ver­sion of the email I sent that CEO guy. Gath­er­ing busi­ness require­ments is hokum. Hooey. Horse­shit. Call it what you want, but it’s a sign of orga­ni­za­tional (or indi­vid­ual) clue­less­ness. If you don’t already know exactly what to build, then you’re in the wrong busi­ness. At the very least, you should hire some­one who does know. Don’t gather busi­ness require­ments: hire domain experts.

Also, FWIW, here’s the hack­ernews dis­cus­sion. Here is a link from one of the com­ments point­ing to some­thing Linus once said about specs:

they’re dan­ger­ously wrong. Real­ity is dif­fer­ent, and any­body who thinks specs mat­ter over real­ity should get out of ker­nel pro­gram­ming NOW. When real­ity and specs clash, the spec has zero mean­ing. Zilch. Nada. None.

I think one of the com­ments also added some­thing spec­tac­u­lar — not­ing that “build­ing some­thing for your­self” is why so many open source projects flour­ish. If you’re build­ing some­thing use­ful for your­self — there’s a high chance that some­one else is going to want to A>Use it B>Buy it — “build­ing for your­self” is also in some ways, “keep­ing the vision clear”

One of the key con­cepts which seems to be the under­cur­rent to what he talk about is vision. You need some­one who can stand up and say “this is what the prod­uct is, does and where it is going”. You need that vision­ary who can clearly out­line what itch you are try­ing to scratch. In open source — that’s the project “core” — in busi­ness, it’s the CTO or founder. It’s always the per­son that had the itch, they’ve “walked a mile in the shoes” so to speak.

That vision has to be the core of both the prod­uct, and all of the require­ments — this “clar­ity of vision” (some might say “sim­plic­ity of vision”) is what makes so many projects and prod­ucts successful.

Sure — as you grow you’ll add fea­tures: You don’t want to stag­nate — but those fea­tures have to make sense — they have to mesh with the core vision of the prod­uct. You don’t add a source code man­age­ment ser­vice to say, twitter.

Why? Because even if 1 cus­tomer thinks “that it would be AWESOME” — you’re going to spend $X hours of engi­neer­ing time glu­ing a volvo on the side of your bat­tle­ship, and unless those $X hours are com­pen­sated by the amount of money the cus­tomer is will­ing to pay (it never is) you’ve wasted time, and mud­died the func­tion­al­ity and phi­los­o­phy of the prod­uct. It’s about as use­ful as a screen-door on a submarine.

When you’re think­ing about require­ments ask your­self this: If at the start, you can not describe exactly what your prod­uct does in under a minute — you’ve already got a prob­lem. If adding this fea­ture makes it even harder to describe/encapsulate the vision and capa­bil­i­ties of the prod­uct you’re rapidly run­ning towards wronger-than-wrong.

If you your­self would not use the fea­ture: Does it really make sense? When a cus­tomer requests a fea­ture — does it make sense for any­one out­side of them? Would you be bet­ter served by pro­vid­ing an API and an SDK?

This is the beauty of things like a clean API — you can keep the phi­los­o­phy and core of the product/project clean and empower your users to build any num­ber of things they want on top of your prod­uct. Keep it sim­ple, keep it clean. Empower your users to “mashup” as they need or want to.

Think of it terms of cook­ing: If you wouldn’t eat it your­self, in all like­li­hood your cus­tomers won’t like it, at best it will be mediocre. The best chefs taste and con­sume what they cook.

Right now I’m wish­ing Brian Fitzpatrick’s keynote from pycon: “You *can* Fool All of the Peo­ple All of the Time” was online in video form.

See also: THE TECHNOLOGY OBSESSION by S. Lott

Lately, I've been ruminating on requirements and requirements management (also known as disaster control). I was actually typing something up on this, but Steve Yegge hit the nail on the head - then he rammed it through the board and into the house next door: Anyway, there you have it: the slightly expanded version of ...

I need to write a CERT paper for this —

• Name of Attack:The Abstract Chee­tos Attack
• Type of Attack: Pass­word Vul­ner­a­bil­ity / Local Exploit / Brute Force
• Known fix: Lack of Cheetos
• Attack Vec­tor: Food[1]/Social Engineering
• Exploit Details: It is pos­si­ble to deter­mine the most-frequently used let­ters on a given key­board on the target’s com­puter by pro­vid­ing the tar­get with a “friendly” pack­age of Chee­tos at some reg­u­lar inter­val, and then exam­in­ing, over time, the build up of dan­ger­ously cheesey residue on the target’s key­board. Armed with the most fre­quent key­strokes, it is pos­si­ble to per­form a reduced brute-force attack on the target’s account pass­word. Due to the reduc­tion in keys, it is pos­si­ble to grossly reduce the time and resources required to iden­tify the target’s pass­word. This attack also enables the attacker to deter­mine other per­sonal infor­ma­tion includ­ing fre­quency of hand-washing, like/dislike of said “Food” and fre­quency at which the tar­get cleans their clothes.

[1] Note that Chee­tos may not be clas­si­fied as “Food”

I need to write a CERT paper for this - Name of Attack:The Abstract Cheetos Attack Type of Attack: Password Vulnerability / Local Exploit / Brute Force Known fix: Lack of Cheetos Attack Vector: Food/Social Engineering Exploit Details: It is possible to determine the most-frequently used letters on a given keyboard on the ...

Man­del­braut: Ren­der­ing Sausages.

These are the ideas I get when I’m cod­ing and think­ing about food.

Mandelbraut: Rendering Sausages. These are the ideas I get when I'm coding and thinking about food.

I’ve finally been given the “gift of time” to work on the pro­cess­ing mod­ule PEP — when I was review­ing the text tem­plate, I ran across this:

— Leave the lit­tle Emacs turd at the end of this file alone,
includ­ing the form­feed char­ac­ter (“^L”, or \f).

I should really switch to a turd-friendly edi­tor. I think VIM or Text­mate are scat­o­log­i­cally disinclined.

I've finally been given the "gift of time" to work on the processing module PEP - when I was reviewing the text template, I ran across this: - Leave the little Emacs turd at the end of this file alone, including the formfeed character ("^L", or ...

Before I give the links to the videos, I want to give the typ­i­cal disclaimer:

Dis­claimer: The opin­ions expressed here are my per­sonal opin­ions, views, dis­cus­sions, etc. Con­tent pub­lished here is not read or approved in advance by HDS, my wife or any­one else for that mat­ter and does not — in any way — reflect the views and opin­ions, positions/etc of my employer. This is my per­sonal, largely python-related blog. Not my employers.

That being said: A few months ago, I dis­cov­ered (much by acci­dent) that HDS (Hitachi Data Sys­tems) has started a viral mar­ket­ing com­paign involv­ing Mr. T — yes, the man from the A-Team (whose face graced my lunch­box as a child). Note that mas­sive “lulz” were attained when watch­ing these.

With­out pass­ing judge­ment or in any way stat­ing a direct opin­ion, here are the videos, in order of creation:

• Mr. T: The “T” in I.T.
• Mr. T: “T The Trucker“
• T3: MR. T — BATTLE FOR THE SMB

For addi­tional amuse­ment, I will direct you to the Archivas (before we were bought by HDS) viral/spoof/etc video that made it to youtube, here.

Before I give the links to the videos, I want to give the typical disclaimer: Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions, views, discussions, etc. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by HDS, my wife or anyone else for that matter and does not - in any way - ...

10 Great Tips on How Not to Be the Obnox­ious New­comer in Your New Work­place: “You’ve just joined a new com­pany and are all fired up to change things—stat. While your enthu­si­asm is com­mend­able, you might want to pro­ceed slowly at first. It’s too easy for your help­ful (and very pos­si­bly dead-on) obser­va­tions and sug­ges­tions to be seen as crit­i­cisms and demands.”

My ques­tion: Can they do a fol­lowup, “how not to be the embit­tered cyn­i­cal old coot” or “How not to eye­ball new tech­nol­ogy with dis­may, dis­trust and a long sto­ries about how “you used to have declare vari­ables in the con­struc­tor back in the days and you loved it””?

(Via digg.)

10 Great Tips on How Not to Be the Obnoxious Newcomer in Your New Workplace: "You've just joined a new company and are all fired up to change things—stat. While your enthusiasm is commendable, you might want to proceed slowly at first. It's too easy for your helpful (and very possibly dead-on) observations and ...

Speak­ing of the Hobo:Visitor Design Pattern.

Speaking of the Hobo:Visitor Design Pattern.

(Iron­Python pre­sen­ta­tion, dis­play­ing access­ing the CLR fea­tures in Python mak­ing win­dows and things in the UI)

Pre­sen­ter (Microsoft Employee): “What’s you’re favorite color?“
Peo­ple: “Blue Blue Pur­ple Blue… etc“
Pre­sen­ter: I’ll use green
Per­son in back (para­phrased): “Typ­i­cal Microsoft response to Cus­tomer requirements!”

Another Quote
Pre­sen­ter (Microsoft employee): The rea­son we called this CLR is because we… Oh, I’m being taped aren’t I? Uh, we used a cer­tain search* engine and found all ref­er­ences of Python + CLR pointed to IronPython.

* GOOGLE.

(IronPython presentation, displaying accessing the CLR features in Python making windows and things in the UI) Presenter (Microsoft Employee): "What's you're favorite color?" People: "Blue Blue Purple Blue... etc" Presenter: I'll use green Person in back (paraphrased): "Typical Microsoft response to Customer requirements!" Another Quote Presenter (Microsoft employee): The reason we called this CLR is because we... Oh, I'm being ...

I won’t go into all of apple’s new offer­ings that came out yes­ter­day — if you missed them, then you have to have been in soli­tary confinement.

I am really excited about the intel lap­top (mac­book pro) — I’m under­whelmed by the name, but I am excited about the specs, and most of all, that if I can get my paws on one of them, I’ll be able to prob­a­bly com­pile a lot more Unix/BSD/Linux appli­ca­tions, and I think that long term, we’ll see a rise in vir­tual machine sup­port (and Wine sup­port) for the platform.

As a Developer/QA per­son, I’m really quite happy with the tran­si­tion. This might make get­ting more OS/X Python bind­ings and libraries into the core Python dist eas­ier, and actu­ally open quite a few doors.

Well, that and it has awe­some specs, and will play World of War­craft 100x bet­ter than my cur­rent box.

Mean­while, I saw this switch video on giz­modo. I spit coffee.

Lord Jobs… RISE!

I won't go into all of apple's new offerings that came out yesterday - if you missed them, then you have to have been in solitary confinement. I am really excited about the intel laptop (macbook pro) - I'm underwhelmed by the name, but I am excited about the specs, and most of all, that ...

These peo­ple named a new­born Google. Google-Kai. wtf, over.

These people named a newborn Google. Google-Kai. wtf, over.