Steve Rowe's Blog

Be Intentional

My old manager used to always say, “Be intentional.”  It took me a long time to comprehend exactly what he meant by this, but eventually I did and have come to appreciate the advice.  What he meant was to always make active, conscious decisions rather than just letting things happen.  It also means to verify things rather than assuming they are a certain way.  For example, if you don’t have enough time to do everything on your plate, think carefully about which items will not get done rather than just working on items in no particular order.  It should be your intent which specific items go undone.

This is a good principle to act by.  All too often people think about what they *are* doing but don’t consider what they *are not* doing.  It is just as important to be conscious about what you are not doing as it is to be aware of what you are.  If you don’t actively choose that which is not done, it is likely that the wrong things will drop off your plate.  It is easy to be busy working on something that is important to the detriment of something that is really important.  It is best to make all decisions, both positive and negative, conscious ones.  I’ll often ask my team when something goes undone whether that was intentional or not.  If there is only time to do 3 items and there are 4 that should be done, I’m fine with the 4th being dropped.  It is a poor manager who is upset when the impossible isn’t accomplished.  I do, however, hold my team accountable for that 4th item being something they intend to not get done rather than whatever just happened to be left at the end of the day.

I’ve seen this come up in testing features.  I recall a time when a report of mine was testing a particular feature with two aspects to it.  For good reasons he started working on the first part, a complex parser for device attributes.  Being complex, this took a long time to thoroughly test.  In fact, it was taking long enough that he was not going to be able to get to the second aspect of the feature at all.  I inquired whether this was really the right approach.  Did he think it was better to thoroughly test the parser and test the other part none or would it be better to test the parser to some level, then test the other aspect, and finally return (in the future) to cover the less important parts of the parser.  Upon reflection he decided it was a better idea to cover both to some extent than one fully and the other none.  The trouble here is that he wasn’t acting intentionally.  The test plan called for testing both aspects thoroughly.  The plan didn’t call for ignoring the second part.  It was just because of the unexpected difficulty of testing the parser that the second was going to be missed.  He needed to step back, re-evaluate, and decide intentionally rather than just letting events dictate what was going to be dropped.

This principle is also good to apply when dealing with other people.  Instead of just assuming that the other party will do the right thing, being intentional means specifically outlining expectations of them.  It is easy to think you’ve told someone what to do without them realizing that you did.  Being intentional means verifying that your assumptions were communicated and following up later.  It means being explicit when handing work to another person.  Make sure they understand that it is your expectation that they now have the action item before you clear it from your to-do list.

Five Books To Read If You Want My Job

This came out of a conversation I had today with a few other test leads.  the question was, “What are the top 5 books you should read if you want my job?”  My job in this case being that of a test development lead.  At Microsoft that means I lead a team (or teams) of people whose job it is to write software which automatically tests the product. 

• Behind Closed Doors by Johanna Rothman – One of the best books on practical management that I’ve run across.  1:1’s, managing by walking around, etc.
• The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike– Similar to Code Complete but a lot more succinct.  How to be a good developer.  Even if you don’t develop, you have to help your team do so.
• Design Patterns by Gamma et al – Understand how to construct well factored software.
• How to Break Software by James Whittaker – The best practical guide to software testing.  No egg headed notions here.  Only ideas that work.  I’ve heard that How We Test Software at Microsoft is a good alternative but I haven’t read it yet.
• Smart, and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky – How great developers think and how to recruit them.  Get and retain a great team.

 

This is not an exhaustive list.  There is a lot more to learn than what is represented in these books, but these will touch on the essentials.  If you have additional suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Some Programming Languages to Consider Learning

Learning a new programming language can affect the way you think.  While most modern languages are Turing Complete and can theoretically all accomplish the same things, that’s not practically true.  Each language has its own strengths of expressiveness.  For instance, trying to write dynamically typed code in C++ is possible, but a pain in the neck.  You would have to implement your own type system to do so.  Each language makes certain things easy and other things hard.  Learning different languages then exposes you to different approaches.  Each approach provides a different way of thinking and a set of tools supporting that way of thinking.  What follows are some of the languages I’ve learned and what I think they provide.  This list is limited to languages I’ve studied in at least a little depth.  There are many more languages out there that may be useful.  If you have additional suggestions, please make them in the comments.

• C – This is coding very close to the metal.  Learning it promotes an understanding of memory, pointers, etc.
• Lisp/Scheme – Once you get past your parenthesis-phobia, it’s a very elegant language.  The big learnings here are treating code as data, metaprogramming (writing programs that themselves write programs), and recursion.  Lisp is also a dynamically-typed language.
• Clojure – A variant of Lisp that runs on the JVM.  In addition to what you can learn from Lisp, it adds persistent data structures and transactional memory.  Persistent data structures are ones that *never* change.  Once you have a “pointer” to one, it will never change underneath you.  This makes parallel programming much simpler.  Clojure also is more of a functional language than Lisp/Scheme.  It is not purely functional, but allows for the functional style to be followed more easily.
• Smalltalk – Much of modern programming originated in this language.  Modern GUIs are based on the Xerox Parc Smalltalk systems.  Object Oriented programming was first popularized in Smalltalk.  Extreme Programming, Agile, and Design patterns all found their initial formulations in Smalltalk.  In addition to learning about OO programming, Smalltalk is great to understand message passing.  This gives object-oriented code a different feel than the function call semantics of C++/Java/C#.  Smalltalk is also a dynamic language.
• Perl – Perl was once known as the duct tape of the internet.  It ran everything.  It has since been surpassed (at least in blogosphere popularity) by other scripting languages like Ruby and Python.  The biggest thing to learn from Perl is regular expressions.  They are built into the core of the language.  Other languages support them but often as a library.  Even those that do support them in the syntax do not usually utilize them so pervasively.
• C#/Java – These languages both solve the same problems in almost the same ways.  They are a great place to learn object-oriented programming.  It is built in from the ground up.  The OO style is one of function calls and strong interfaces (which distinguishes it from Smalltalk).  These languages also have the largest accompanying libraries.

Inbox Zero, Take Two

A year and a half ago I tried to get to “Inbox Zero” and failed.  This is the idea that you get your inbox down to zero mails every day.  I’m making another run at it and this time have been a little more successful.  I’m not perfect, but I haven’t fallen off the horse yet either.  Here’s what I have found to work.

• Let all interesting mail fall directly into the inbox.  Don’t use separate folders for stuff from your boss or an alias/list that is important.
• Move non-interesting mail into a separate folder by a rule.  I have rules to shunt off aliases I find merely interesting but not important into their own folders automatically.
• Read or skim every mail that is in your inbox.  For each, make one of the following decisions:
• Respond.  Read it and take the appropriate action.  If you can do this in a minute or two, just do it.
• Delete it.  You have the information or it wasn’t interesting.  Either way, you don’t need to keep it around.
• Archive it.  You may need to refer back to it later, but you don’t need to take any action on it.
• Mark it for further reading.  It’s not critical to act on it, but too long to read now.  Put it in a folder to read later.
• Mark it for further action.  It will take longer than you have to respond, but a response is necessary.  Put it in a folder for later response.

Following these rules makes my inbox look something like this:

• Inbox
• Action Required
• Archive
• Read Later
• Interests
• Various subfolders for the non-critical aliases I am part of.

I also have a rule to move all mail sent to: or cc: me directly to my inbox.  This way mail intended for my eyes won’t get filtered into an “interests” folder.

I have found this system simple enough to keep up with it.  It also means I no longer miss mails which got filtered into some folder I haven’t yet read for today.  I now see every interesting mail and am at least aware of it.  It also helps me keep track of the mails I really need to go back and respond to.  My old system was just to leave them unread, but this got unwieldy very quickly and I never made it back to most of them.

Don’t Worship at the Altar of Accuracy

Earlier today I found myself faced with a common management situation.  I had been sent an e-mail which showed that a piece of data we were using was inaccurate.  The specific issues was what percentage of a certain test run was automated.  We had said we were at 100% and it turned out there were a handful of tests that were being run on our behalf by someone else and those were not automated.  My initial response was to investigate how big the non-automated block of tests was, why it wasn’t included, etc.  Then I stopped and thought about it.  Even if the number were as large as reported, that number would be 10% of the total test suite.  That is almost certainly an over-exaggeration.  When we make the numbers more accurate, it probably slips to 1%.  Whether we are 90% automated, 99% automated, or 100% automated, does that change anything?  Is that number going to change what I ask of my team?  Probably not.  In all cases the items that are manual are intended to be that way.  I won’t stop running them or try to automate them.  All that I will gain by going through the process of making the number more accurate is a more accurate number.  Is there value in that?  I assert that the answer is no.  A number’s accuracy matters only to the extent that the difference will change behavior.  Within some range, different numbers won’t change behavior and so are not worth expending effort increasing the accuracy.

This isn’t to say numbers don’t matter at all.  They do—but only when decisions will be made based on them.  Effort is not free.  Spending energy refining a value that is accurate enough means not expending that same energy on something that might bring more value to the team.  It isn’t hard to find something which brings more value because the value an increasingly accurate number brings is zero.  This is especially important to note as a manager.  A manager typically does not spend a lot of effort making data accurate.  He or she merely asks others to do so.  In this way the costs are hidden and thus the tradeoff not as apparent.  Beware the cost of obtaining accuracy for its own sake.  I know it is in our DNA as engineers.  Suppress your inner urges and don’t worship at the altar.  Get to good enough and stop.

Simple Management Tip: Tracking 1:1 Conversations

Here’s a quick tip I’ve found very handy.  When doing 1:1’s with your team (you are doing these regularly, right?), take notes to keep track of the conversations from week to week.  I currently use a 5-tab notebook with one tab for each direct report.  Each person has their own section.  Each week when we meet, I take notes on the next page in their section.  This makes it really easy to refer back to last week’s notes and follow up on any ongoing issues.  Each week I circle the items I need to follow up on the following week.  This makes it trivial to pick them out.  Having one section per person means the previous week is only one page back.  I tried just keeping a continuous set of notes on everyone, but then finding the last time we talked could be difficult. 

Another advantage of having each person in their own section is it provides a space for next week’s agenda.  During the week as things come up, I jot them down on the next week’s page.  Then when it comes time for the 1:1, I already have a list of items to follow up on.  This also helps stop my subconscious mind from dwelling on these items (ala Getting Things Done) because I know they will be handled.

I have also seen OneNote used successfully for this purpose, but I prefer not to have a laptop between myself and the other person in our meetings.  It is a matter of taste.

Becoming a Manager: Learning to Rely on Data

Having been a manager* for a while now, I’ve learned more about what it means and what changes it requires in thinking.  This installment of the “Becoming a Manager” series covers the increasing reliance on abstract data that is required as you move up the ranks.  Everyone who is an IC knows that upper management demands lots of charts and data.  Sometimes this makes sense.  Other times we know it distorts the reality which is apparent on the ground.

When I was a lead I managed by walking around.  I didn’t pay much attention to statistics.  Instead, I would regularly touch each of my team members.  I would have 1:1s, regular scrum meetings, and hallway conversations.  This allowed me to have a strong sense for what was going on in my team.  This worked great with 6 reports.  When I became a manager I tried to continue this same method of staying on top of what my team was up to.  The problem was, however, that I now had 20 reports.  It’s not possible to touch all of them regularly enough.  It is also a lot harder to keep the issues at play in 20 peoples’ daily work in one’s head.  Finally, most of these 20 had leads which stand in the org chart between myself and them.  Trying to manage by walking around undercuts these leads because now their reports have 2 managers, not one.  This is confusing for all involved.

What about just touching my direct reports and getting a sense for the product from them?  This would seem to work, but is not terribly effective.  Each person reports differently and normalizing the information coming from each is difficult.  It becomes worse when people use the same words to mean different things.  When I try this technique, I almost always later find out that while I’m getting the same information from each, the results on the ground in each team differ greatly.  How then to get a normalized view of what is going on at the IC level in each team without going to each person to ask?

The answer lies in gathering data across the team.  I’ve come to rely on the dreaded charts for much of my knowledge.  I have learned to take advantage of tools to track how the team is progressing in getting its work items done, how many bugs are active, what our pass rate is, etc.  This allows me to get a view at a glance of how we are progressing across several key metrics.  As long as I am gathering the right data, I can have an accurate view of how the team is doing.  Based on this data, I can know which areas are doing well and which ones need more personal attention.

The key here is choosing the right metrics to measure.  The team will optimize for whatever it is I am measuring.  A wrong metric will distort behavior in undesirable ways.  I have found it is important to track only a few items.  A small number of items can be understood by all.  These do not describe everything about the team, but they can act as the proverbial canaries which point out trouble early.  I make sure everyone knows exactly what I am tracking.  Every one of my leads knows the queries I use to monitor things.  This allows them to point out flaws in my methodology and gives them transparency so there are no surprises.  It is also important to keep the metrics stable over time.  A different chart each week gives people whiplash.

One point about using data to monitor a team:  you need to stay flexible in the use of the data.  The data is a rough facsimile of a real thing that needs to be done.  The data itself is not the goal.  I have seen too many managers confuse the data with reality.  This causes them to push for clean metrics even when this causes undesirable distortions in behavior.  If the data is showing a different state than reality, fix the metric, not the behavior.  Align the data with the team’s actions, not the other way around.  It is important to note that data hides a lot of things.  Relying solely on data is a surefire way to fail.  I still get out and walk around to validate the conclusion I’m drawing from the charts.  The data merely helps me know which areas to spend my limited time digging into deeper.

It takes a while as a manager to become accustomed to viewing the world through the lens of spreadsheets and charts.  Just as it is difficult to learn to trust others, it is difficult to learn to trust data.  It is even more difficult to learn when not to trust the same data.

 

* Manager means having leads report to you.  A lead is someone who has only individual contributors reporting to you.

I'll be posting on Twitter occasionally

As I surf the net I often run across articles of interest.  If I feel they warrant a comment, I'll post them on this blog, but most don't rise to that level.  I've decided to try using twitter as an outlet for such items.  If you want to see the articles I think are most interesting, feel free to follow me on twitter:  http://twitter.com/steve_rowe.

Review: Peopleware

The book, Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, comes highly recommended by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood over at the Stack Overflow Podcast.  It is probably most famous for its repudiation of the idea that cubicles make a better work environment for programmers than offices.  There is a lot more to this book than just an attack on cube farms, though.  The book dates from another era of the technology industry.  It was first written in1987 with an update in 1999.  Most of the content ages very well though.  It carries a lot of sage advice that managers today would be smart to read.  Alas, the book appears to be out of print at present.  Check your local library.  That’s where I got mine from.

The book begins with a discussion of people and shipping quality software.  Among the insights are that you can’t squeeze more than a certain amount of work out of people.  If one demands a lot of overtime, people will slow down, do more of their own things on your time, and otherwise use up the time that was supposed to be gained.  The authors make the argument that quality, if allowed to be driven by the team, will be higher than if driven from above.  Peoples’ innate sense of quality is probably higher than the user demands.  Based on these statements, the authors refute the notion that the only way to get work done is to set tight deadlines.  The idea that work grows to fill an allocated space is—they say—false.  I’m not sure I fully agree.  Work does expand to fit the allocated space.  The solution is not, however, to set insane deadlines to squeeze out the work.  Instead, the solution is to set a rational deadline and keep track of progress via frequent checkpoints (ala scrum).

My favorite section is that one which talks about people.  The authors assert that great people are born, not grown.  That’s not quite true.  They are born with innate talents and then grown to greatness.  The key point though is that those born without the right abilities will never be great.  You can’t teach everyone to be a great programmer.  Sorry.  Because of this, and the difficulty in getting rid of someone once hired, it is important to set a high hiring bar.  It is better to hire and then retain the right people than to hire the average person and try to grow them into above average performers.  It’s also important to retain stars.  Invest in them. 

Beyond individuals, teams are important.  The authors spend some time talking about what makes great teams work.  Unfortunately, they don’t give a formula for creating one.  No one seems to know how to do this.  Maybe some day we’ll figure it out, but for now the consensus seems to be that they just happen.  Managers may not be able to create a well jelled team, but they can certainly prevent one from happening.  The authors calls this “teamicide” and give several examples of behavior that causes it:

• Defensive management – Managers must trust their teams.  Attempts to succeed despite their failure only poisons the environment.
• Bureaucracy – Paperwork and policies that are arbitrary and disrupt the work flow.  If management is more interested in paperwork than results, the team notices.
• Physical separation – People interact better when they sit near each other.
• Fragmentation of time – Give people only one top priority at a time. 
• Quality-reduced Product – Management cannot demand a shoddy product or the team will stop performing.
• Phony deadlines – Deadlines should be real (and realistic).  Fake ones to force out more work just cause people to check out.
• Clique control – Let people group up.  It’s called a team.

There’s a lot more in this book.  If you can find a copy, get it and read it.  There’s a lot here for every technology manager.

Spotting the "Uncoachables"

Interesting article from Harvard talking about how to spot people who can't be coached.  The author gives 4 symptoms to look for, but they basically boil down to one.  Does the person want to change?  If someone isn't interested in changing because they don't sense a problem, are burned out, or think everyone else is to blame, no amount of coaching will get them on the right track.  The author advocates walking away from these people.  That may be an easy option for a consultant, but it usually isn't for a manger.  Sometimes you can fire the person or encourage them to move on, but this isn't always possible.  Sometimes it isn't even desireable.  The uncoachable person may have high value in another aspect of their personality.  What then? 

The only viable approach when someone doesn't perceive a reason to change is to modify their attitude.  You have a reason you want them to change.  Get them to recognize it.  Note, however, that their worldview is not necessarily yours.  What motivates them may not be what motivates you.  If someone is overly sure of themselves, telling them their actions offend other people probably won't help.  They won't care.  However, telling them their actions put in jeopardy a promotion or their project or their ability to make an impact may.  Determine what their motivating factors are and couch your discussions in terms of those values.  Then, once you have convinced them there is a reason to change, work on the change.

Review: The Effective Executive

I read The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker because it was highly recommend on the Manager Tools podcast.  Despite what its name may imply, it isn’t written to company executives.  Instead, Drucker defines an executive as anyone with decision making ability.  This certainly includes all managers within a modern technology company and most of the frontline staff as well.  Drucker outlines 4 major areas of concentration for becoming more effective.

The first is your time.  Here the advice boils down to measuring where you spend it.  Time is the one thing everyone has in the same quantity and you can’t get any more of it.  If you want to make effective use of your time, know where you spend it.

Once you know where you spend your time, how do you decide where to apply it?  The next piece of advice involves making a contribution.  Determine where you can most make a unique contribution to the organization and spend your time there.  Ask yourself, “What can I contribute?”  For the rest, try to delegate to others.  Set the bar high and determine what active contribution the position should be making.

Next up is building on your strengths.  This is very similar to Now, Discover Your Strengths.  Drucker advocates hiring and rewarding people for their strengths, not their weaknesses.  I think he dismisses weaknesses a bit too cavalierly.  A significant weakness can overwhelm someone’s strengths.  It can make others view them negatively which can create a negative feedback loop.  However, his advice to focus hiring on strengths instead of a lack of weakness is on point.  People will accomplish a lot more in their area of strength than in a place where they are merely not weak.

Finally, Drucker talks about making effective decisions.  Toward this end he recommends concentrating on only one thing.  Have one focused initiative at a time.  Clearly define what the “boundary conditions” are.  By this he means understanding the specifications the decision must satisfy.  Build action into the decision.  A decision without action has no impact.  Measure the effectiveness of the decision.  This ensures not only that the decision was right, but that it stays right.  He also dedicates a whole chapter to making decisions not between right and wrong but between two courses of action neither of which is clearly right or wrong.  His advice here is essentially, argue both sides.  Don’t make the mistake of jumping on an early decision.  Instead, thoroughly vet each of the alternatives.

Overall I found this a good book.  Perhaps not as good as the hype, but useful.  I found myself doubting the reviews during the first part of the book.  The advice seemed solid, but obvious.  The second part which discussed decision making, however, was much more useful.  I truly enjoy the last three chapters.

E-mail Is Not A Good Motivator

Another conversation I find myself having over and over is telling people that e-mail isn’t a sufficient mechanism for communication.  I already discussed how e-mail isn’t a good medium for handling disputes.  It also is not a great motivator.  In today’s world where people get hundreds of messages a day, it is too easy to ignore.  Receiving an e-mail saying “Please get this done” sometimes doesn’t work.  This is especially true if there is no inherent power in the sender.  A manager’s mails less likely ignored, but those from a peer often are.  People are busy.  It’s going to take more than just 1/100th of their inbox (much less in some cases) to prompt action.

Too many times I’ve experienced aa conversation that goes something like this:

Manager:  “Why weren’t the widget’s waxed by 5:00 for the presentation?”

Report:  “I asked <other person> to do it.  I sent mail several times.”

Report seems convinced that they are absolved of responsibility because they asked.  In e-mail.  More than once.  Isn’t that enough?  What more should Manager expect?

If it is truly important that something gets done by <other person>, mail just doesn’t cut it.  As I said, it is too easy to ignore.  A different tactic is necessary.  One that expresses the importance by the level to which Report is willing to go to get it accomplished.  “Escalation?” thinks Report.  Maybe telling <other person>’s boss about it?  No.  Not yet at least.  Escalation ruins relationships and should be used only as a last resort.

The solution is as simple as it is old.  In today’s world, it is also more unique than it should be.  Try an analog approach.  Pick up the phone and call.  Walk down the hall and stop by <other person>’s office.  It takes some effort, but it will likely garner the hoped for results.  Amazingly enough, most people react differently to human contact than they do to an impersonal e-mail.  Personal contact creates some level of relationship.  It tells the person you care enough to expend the energy.  This might communicate that you care about them as a person or it might merely tell them that you care about the work.  Either way, they are more motivated to get the job done.  Two more benefits are that a personal visit is a lot harder to ignore than an e-mail and you know the message was received.

This effect works equally well with reports as it does with peers.  If something is truly important, say it in person as well as e-mail.

10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read

I’m always on the lookout for good reading material.  Michael Feathers over at ObjectMentor has served up a great post entitled 10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read.  I intend to.

Now, Discover Your Strengths

This is the title of the follow-up to First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham.  The first book was brilliant and really challenged the way we think about what makes someone successful at their job.  Now, Discover Your Strengths attempts to follow up on that with an in-depth discussion of “strengths.”  Strengths are a combination of knowledge, skills, and what the authors call talents.  A talent is “any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.”  Basically, it is your innate ability to do something.  If you aren’t born with a talent for, say, public speaking, no amount of training will make you Steve Jobs.  If you don’t have a talent for abstract thinking, you’ll never make a great programmer.  Sure, you can become competent at either, but you’ll never make it into the elite of your career discipline.

This sounds about right, but the authors don’t do a lot in this book to justify the position.  There is some talk about the way our brains develop neural pathways.  This may be the reason but the evidence in the book is not sufficient to really make the case.

The core of the book revolves around the premise that you will become much better if you focus on your areas where you have talents (these are your strengths) than if you spend a lot of energy trying to remove your weaknesses.  There is a lot of good anecdotal evidence for this in the stories of Tiger Woods, Cole Porter, and others. 

Unfortunately, the book spends a lot of time on StrengthFinder which is a questionnaire consisting of 180 questions, the answers to which will reveal which of the 34 identified strengths you possess.  The questions felt a lot like those you would find on a Meyers-Briggs test.  With the purchase of the book you can take the quiz once.  It will then tell you what your top 5 strengths are.  I was unimpressed with the test.  While Meyers-Briggs usually aligns well with how I view myself, this one didn’t.  It had elements I think are pretty far from my strengths and didn’t have things I think are.  Either I have a very wrong view of myself or the test is flawed at least in my case.  I suspect the latter.  Maybe I wasn’t able to understand what the questions were asking well enough.  There were several that could be interpreted in very different ways.  Whether or not the test is accurate, the information about the strengths themselves is paltry.  Each gets about a paragraph describing it and a page telling managers how to deal with someone who has it.  I’d like to see a lot more discussion for the individual what to do with their strengths.  This was almost wholly lacking.

The end of the book asserted the case that organizations should focus on strengths instead of skills.  An example of this is hiring for strengths and not specific knowledge or skills.  This may be a good idea, but I don’t feel the case was made strongly enough.  It was more assumed to be true than truly justified.  Even if true, it will be very hard to implement.  Should an organization make each interviewee take a test before being hired?  I’m sure the owners of the test would love that, but it sounds impractical.  It also ignores the ramp-up time someone with only strengths and no present skills takes to become productive.

The overall theme of the book—to pay attention to strengths and not weaknesses—seems right.  I’m persuaded that this is true, but more because of preconceived notions than because of the book.  The follow-through seemed weak.  This is disappointing because the first book in the series was truly eye-opening and much better justified.  Overall, I can’t recommend this book.  Borrow it from the library and read the relevant portions in a day or two. 

Check Out Stack Overflow

I’ve recently become quite addicted to the website stackoverflow.com.  It is a joint venture between Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  There is an accompanying podcast if you want to hear about the creation process.  The site itself is a question and answer site for programming questions.  Want to know how to do a simple Perl hash equivalency comparison?  Ask.  Want to find the best book on C# for experienced programmers?  Ask.  There is quite an active community and most questions are answered in short order.  You don’t even have to sign up to ask your first question.

If you want to stick around longer than one question, you can answer questions and earn reputation for doing so.  Greater reputation means more abilities on the site.  At one level you can change the tags on questions.  At another level you can vote to close questions.  Still more reputation and you can actually edit the text of questions.  Reputation is granted by users voting for the best answers and questions.  It’s amazing how addicting it can be to try to raise an arbitrary score.

The site has only been open for  a few months and already it is a treasure trove of knowledge.  Joel recently stated that the site gets something like 2 million uniques a month.  As I write this, there are approximately 90,000 questions that have been asked.  Almost all have answers.  This is crowd sourcing at is best.  Once people start linking to it in large numbers, expect to see it shoot up the rankings of programming-related searches.

There are downsides to Stackoverflow’s popularity.  Questions don’t stay on the front page for long.  I suspect they will have to create sub-pages for different topic areas the way Reddit did with its subreddits.