I’m a ThoughtWorker. ThoughtWorks is changing the way that enterprise software is delivered. And with that we take firm stances on heavily debated topics. In previous jobs I’ve tried to push test driven development, unit testing, code coverage metrics, continuous integration… all controversial ‘best practices’. Results were mixed.

A few weeks ago I was at a large web 2.0 social networking site working with selenium grid automation. They were great clients, fully receptive to automated testing. Next week I’ll be heading to another leading internet company to work triage:

1. Work on troubled teams whose code is poorly tested
2. Enable groups to test legacy code
3. Attempt to spread a pervasive test driven mindset.

I’m joining a senior team of ThoughtWorkers and in preparation I’ve thought of various arguments I’ve heard (or used myself) against testing code. I’ll be challenged working with these very experienced people, but I am eagerly looking forward to the experience.

Argument #1

Adding all these tests only makes more code to maintain, debug, and write. This can’t be good - I want less work, not more!

Rebuttal: Would you agree code and requirements often change? Would it be valuable if something could automatically and accurately catch bugs introduced with changes? How about if the original developers are no longer on the project? Testing can enable less work — in a dynamically changing environment. Immediately the work is greater, but over time it is less.

Argument #2

Ok, fair enough, there are some good reasons to do this. BUT, when I want to change something later, I now have two points of failure - the code I’m changing, and all the tests that depend on that code. I haven’t really bought myself all that much security, because if my tests don’t catch the problem well, I’m just as hosed as if I had no tests. ^{Source: first comment from here}
Rebuttal:

1. You get better and faster with tests the more you write them.
2. By writing tests you further understand the business domain and craft a better thought out solution.
3. Whenever making changes in the future you actually have 1 + n points of failure. That which you are changing plus the other interacting systems within the code. By writing tests you will automatically catch the interactions, as well as the initial point of failure. Sure the tests need maintaining, but now with two things to maintain, you catch (almost all) these failure points.

Argument #3

I generally think testing is a good idea. But I’m stressed out, I’ll get to it later… tomorrow I’ll add tests… as soon as I get this working
Rebuttal: Take a page from Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin.. He argues for refactoring but since the two concepts are so tightly entwined, I think the argument applies here:

“Refactoring is like cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. The first time you skip it, you are done with dinner more quickly. But that lack of clean dishes and clear working space makes dinner take longer to prepare the next day. This makes you want to skip cleaning again. Indeed, you can always finish dinner faster today if you skip cleaning, but the mess builds and builds. Eventually you are spending an inordinate amount of time hunting for the right cooking utensils, chiseling the encrusted dried food off of the dishes, and scrubbing them down so that they are suitable to cook with. Dinner takes forever. Skipping the cleanup does not really make dinner go faster.”

Skipping testing does not really make software development faster, because changes are guaranteed. (You’ll have to cook another dinner eventually). Without an easy way to baseline and build upon existing code, time is spent bugfixing that could instead be adding features or writing new tests.

Argument #4

I’m awesome. I don’t write bugs. So I don’t need tests.
Rebuttal: Great. I’m excited to be working with you. I’m sure I’ll be able to learn a great deal. I imagine you like fresh challenges. And in six months or a year this current project won’t be as interesting to you as it is today. In fact, you’ll be on to something more challenging and worthy of your awesomeness.

So that means someone else — possibly a junior developer — will be maintaining and working on this code. Without tests, they will be frequently seeking your assistance and guidance to prevent bugs. This is not what you want, is it? You want new challenges, not constantly being hassled by old code. So write the tests now to ensure your ego and intellect can move forward to bigger and better things.

Elaborating and paraphrasing, Neal Ford argued at eRubycon 2007:

Now I look at not testing as professionally irresponsible. I’m paid to create software, to deliver on a client’s business needs. If I don’t rigorously and automatically ensure I have accomplished this with the minimum amount of bugs — I am committing malpractice.

What arguments have you encountered, and how have you responded?

Thanks to Amit and the crew at Photojojo, I ran across this video / presentation from this year’s SIGGRAPH.

Rizr launched this for you to play with it as well. And here is the original paper: Seam carving for content-aware image resizing [20 MB PDF]

Very cool!

I just watched this webcast from Information Week and CollabNet. They assembled an impressive panel of thought leaders from technology, media, and the press for the distinct purpose of discussing what it really means for the world to be flat. What has changed in the two years since the publishing of The World is Flat?

Friedman’s take on how the world is even flatter now

Friedman recently gave a talk to the US Naval Academy. Upon returning home he had an email waiting for him from his daughter. She knew where he was giving his talk, because she just responded to a midshipman’s facebook friend request. After Thomas’ talk - in which he mentioned his daughter was at school in New Haven, CT - one of the men looked her up on facebook and befriended her.

“When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you” - Thomas Friedman

Thomas and his wife were on an eco-tour in Peru with Conservation International. The guide was sharing with Friedman a story of how a Peruvian merchant was selling his dish ware on the internet. Yet, that was not the startling part.

“The Peruvian dish maker recently discovered he could manufacture his Peruvian dish ware in China cheaper than in Peru. He now sells Peruvian dish ware on the internet, that is manufactured in China.”

He was recently in Budapest, Hungary at a conference. His cab driver was returning him to the airport and asked “Mr. Tom” to give him any referrals he may know that could use a cab driver in Hungary. The cab driver proceeded to share with Friedman that he had a website in Magyar, German and English - with music - and it features services for diplomats, tourists, and more.

Brian Behlendorf says Open Source is fundamental to the flattening

Brian is CTO and co-founder of CollabNet, a software company with products including the source code collaboration tool, Subversion. He has also been involved in the Apache web server project from the very beginning.

Open source is a natural continuation of the trend that started 20 years ago in open systems, open standards, and now open source… [It] is a reaction of dissatisfied customers rebelling against poor software in the 90’s… People are working with each other, building off each other’s code, and adding real value.

One of the very prolific contributors of Subversion, Peter Lundblad from Sweden, has worked on the open source project for half a decade, yet is blind.

Tim O’Reilly on web 2.0 flattening

Web 2.0 is enabling more and more flattening of the world.

Web 2.0 is building systems that harness network effects so the systems get better as more people use them.

Other non-web places where businesses can look for web 2.0 innovation are vast databases, ripe for harvesting:

• How could a company use what their customers type in a piece of software to help automatically fill that similar information in for subsequent users?
• For mobile phone companies, how could they use your call logs and turn that inside out to a network address book that would help retain customers?
• How could credit card companies share with you your purchase information (which they already monitor) back to you in a useful way?lan
• Intut’s QuickBooks is doing this via a partnership with Google AdWords. They look at your inventory and list them using Google’s marketing tools. In TurboTax when you donate items, they look up the tax write off value based on eBay prices.

“What are we monitoring?”

“How can we get collective value out of that?”

What we saw in the open source communities (people submitting bugs, fixing bugs, contributing code) is also happening in other marketplaces. O’Reilly Media just hired a contractor who was a prolific commenter on Tim’s blog. That communication relationship transformed into a monetary relationship. Only a few years ago this never would have happened.

Devin Wenig on flattening 2.0

Devin is COO of Reuters.

Flattener 1.0 was companies moving from the US and western Europe to industrializing nations for simple wage arbitrage advantages. It was a clear cost cutting play. The Flattener 2.0 is a radical shift in the traditional roles of producers and consumers. Traditionally someone goes and produces [software, news, products] and then throws it over the wall and hopes people consume it. Now we are getting real time on the fly communication with customers… The roles of publishers are now as moderators. Co-innovation is 2.0.

He continues with the second wave of flattening, which is more about revenue growth, collaboration, and tight feedback loops. Real time feedback from customers and prospects.

Only two years ago “the story” was what a journalist wrote in the paper or on the web. Now with user contributed content, interactivity, and collaboration, the story is a discussion from all across the world.

Three things Friedman thinks enabled the world to be flat

1. The PC. It allowed individuals to become the authors of their own content, in digital form.
2. The Internet, browsers in the Dot Com boom. The world was over-wired with fiber optic cables. Now such a large number of people could electronically connect.
3. Software and transmission protocols. People could collaborate with others in their content.

In a provocative statement, Friedman sees the flat world as “net worried.” When Infosys is competing in a flat marketplace, so is Al-Qaeda. He later recants this and declares everything a very exciting and promising future.

Tim O’Reilly asks Friedman if corporations will become more important than nations in a flat world

Clearly, we are still very early in this flattening, says Friedman. Yet he does not thing sovereignty of nations will diminish in the importance of people. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he writes how the Olive Tree instincts: religion, society, cultural norms are still very strong, and won’t be overthrown by the Lexus… not just quite yet.

He then continues sharing his stance on free trade:

I used to be a free trade advocate. I am not any more.

Now I am a radical free trader.

No surprise here, Mr. Friedman.

Every employee is a volunteer

Today people do not stay at the same company for a lifetime. Many do not even stay for five years. Peter Drucker has said this before, and the panel takes off and highlights how in a flatter world employers must recognize this. When employers know those they hire are really volunteering, they will more aggressively seek to captivate, challenge, and retain employees.

Truly profound productivity only occurs when people are passionate about what they do. If you are an employer, how can you help your volunteers stay passionate? (Discussed more in The Mythical Man Month.)

The world is flat and education

So how does education change when the world is flat?

What is the new middle class? And what jobs will people be doing in a flat-world middle class?

How will learning environments need to change for children?

These questions and more are asked and some answers are touched upon. The conversation was very interesting to listen to and ruminate upon.

If you enjoyed this post, consider:

The following video between Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly at MIX 06 conference.

John Seely Brown is the Chief of Confusion at Xerox Parc and he has quite a few interesting papers and videos related to transforming Education in a flat, highly digital, world. Here’s one of his talks he gave at MIT on education in a long tail, flat world. Kathy Sierra also has a post about how awesome John Seely Brown is. Jim McGee covers one of Brown’s more interesting education papers.

FundRace.org - a mashup of political campaign spending and contributions with your locality. TheyWorkForYou is in the UK and it shows how every parliamentary member voted (and if they voted), so now more are needing to show up because people are monitoring their activity through this website.

And other ideas: how can you use government data and mash it up with say google maps and create a participatory democracy where voters can see and drill down through how their tax dollars are spent and how bills influence their communities.

How can India -in a flat world- export not natural resources, but intelligence and innovation?

What would a world look like where our best friends were in other countries?

Another book that may intrigue you is Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel.

What if a device existed in your phone that could scan products at a store and it would show where it has been. How would information of the manufacturing facilities, worker conditions, or carbon permits involved in this product change buying habits? That idea was explored are discussed in the How The World Works column on Salon (I didn’t find that exact post).

The flat world, Thomas Friedman says, will be a right brain world. Everything left brained will be done by a computer faster, or an Indian cheaper. (No offense intended for my Indian friends, I just share this from Friedman). Interested? You might like this book: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

In college I was fortunate enough to fly - and float - on NASA’s “Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program” (R.G.S.F.O.P. for …short). Basically you get in an airplane and climb and dive from 24,000 to 34,000 feet. The peaks of this roller coaster ride create weightlessness… watch the video for an explanation and more.

Yes, this is a little off topic from my usual investing podcast. But isn’t this NASA program awesome? We showed this video to several hundred students in elementary and high schools. I think inspiring students to study hard, technical topics is a wonderful thing for any country’s educational system.

-JAW
I’ve been wanting to upload this for a year now, and I finally got to it. If you like what you see.. leave me a comment. I’ll post more videos. (-; And thanks to NASA, our many, many, many, sponsors, as well as Professor Tan!

I went to the ACM Reflections Projections conference this weekend. There were top speakers, including the co-founder of Paypal, Max Levchin and the co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim. Here are some highlights from their talks.

Max Levchin: co-founder of Paypal.com and current CEO of slide.com

Millionaire Before Graduation: Entrepreneurship in the Post-Post-Bubble Internet

Speaking to an audience of undergrad and graduate students at UIUC, Max stressed if you’re an entrepreneur:

“You should start a company right now.”

But what is an entrepreneur? And what if I don’t have an idea yet?

“An entrepreneur is someone who desperately wants to start companies. He or she doesn’t even care what they are about, or which one.”

The important thing is starting. Max says you’ll never get it right the first time. So start now. Fail a few times while you are young. Paypal was Max’s fifth company. He started his first in his Junior year in college, and every one that wasn’t successful taught him what had to change for the next time.

When you start, the idea is cheap. It’s okay to be mostly interested in starting the company. Some people say in starting a company it is 90% hard work. No, says Levchin:

• 40% is hard work.
• 50% is having a great team

When you start a business, start it on the web. Why?

• It’s really cheap
• You get really fast feedback

However, don’t start selling something to enterprises. Enterprise sales cycles are slow, expensive, and require loads of salespeople. (You don’t want salespeople on your team early on either. Just tech people.) Make things work, and satisfy your direct-to-consumer audience.

Once you’re up, you need to record metrics on everything. Obsess over all of your data. You’ll discover the pages people actually use is different from what you expected them to use. Iterate. Bring what people use to the front. If you’re still in school, take lots of stat classes. It makes the metrics easier.

Remember you will fail.

Failure is your true test. It’s really good to fail in the beginning… If failing anytime is good: now is best. [So get to work and take risks so you’ll fail, so you’ll learn, so you’ll succeed!]

Tenacity is number one. You must be willing to fail 10 times for success in the 11th.

When you’re succeeding and you need to monetize, Levchin has three strategies:

1. Advertising - with Google Adsense, and other ad networks
2. Premium Subscriptions - this is tough though if your competition has these too, and you end up competing on price
3. Memberships - monthly, yearly, etc.

Jawed Karim: co-founder of YouTube and current masters student at Stanford

YouTube: From Concept to Hypergrowth

Jawed is the 2004 UIUC CS graduate who, after a 5 year tour at Paypal, co-founded YouTube. 19 months after launch, YouTube is one of the most-visited sites on the web.

• More than 100 million videos are served daily.
• A new video is uploaded every second
• The average user spends 30 minutes on YouTube per day

Prior to YouTube, what did video sharing look like? FTP uploads to a private website [or peer to peer] was the best way to share a video. People without websites and technical savy couldn’t share. Downloaders would have to download the full file, have the right codecs, and finally be able to view the clips. Discovering other related videos was not easy, and there was no way to post comments about a video you enjoyed. In 2004 the “Bit Torrent effect” emerged, which was scalable - but it lacked social aspects, simplicity, and was mostly for hard core geeks.

In 2005 Jawed and friends decided to create some sort of video sharing app inspired by Flickr and hot or not.

On Feb 14, 2005, work began.

We launched the site with a bunch of “stupid videos” … except no one one used it but ourselves. We pitched it to our friends. We wrote to all the Wired reporters (no replies). We talked to lots of VC’s (they didn’t call back.)

By May 2005, it was very frustrating. 50-60 videos were uploaded. They had an idea:

We posted an ad to the San Francisco Craigslist asking for girls to post videos to YouTube. If we thought they were attractive, and they posted 10 videos, we would send them $100 via Paypal.

No girls responded.

In June 2005 YouTube got revamped. “Related Videos” was added, to make the site more sticky. And instead of Jawed and co-founders spamming all their friends, they added a button “Email a friend” so the visitors could do that for them. Everything was changed to encourage user interaction. Make people want to spend more time on the site.

August 2005, YouTube gets Slashdotted. Things started taking off from here. The community did things they never expected. People would leave video responses to other people’s videos. So they created the Video Responses product. Pretty soon they had $3.5 Million in capital from Sequoya, and then you all know about the Google acquisition.

One lesson Jawed pushed home was:

Just because experts reject an idea does not mean it is a bad idea! In certain areas, there are no experts.

If you’re out there creating innovation, you may be the expert.

As we look for the next big thing, Karim suggests it will explode from newly emerging secondary technologies. Start a company that will make something that was previously difficult, easy.

And expect failure. Jawed worked on numorous other projects that failed, before hitting big with YouTube including a geographic aware IM client that grew to about 50,000 users before he pulled the plug. An interesting article about him, as the silent YouTube partner, may be found here.

Update 10/28/2006: A video of Jawed’s presentation is now on YouTube, watch it below:

I’ll be attending the ACM Reflections Projections conference (Techsocial link) this weekend. The speaker lineup looks impressive. Thanks to AJ Arora for inviting me.

Reflections | Projections brings together students and professionals from across the country to gain a broader perspective on computer science. The conference is a unique opportunity for attendees to enrich their knowledge of cutting-edge concepts from beyond the classroom. /blockquote>

The speakers include Joel Spolsky (huge blogger), Chris DiBona (Google), and Jawed Karim (co-founder of YouTube). I look forward to speaking with Jawed about the Google acquisition, seeing how I want to build a software company too.

CSS is something most of us in web development understand. But so many people still hate it. Why such an awkward response for something that makes sense after you get past the awkward tweener period? I love to teach. Especially tech. I just learn so much more that way. So here’s my CSS training for when you know css, but you want to connect the pieces together a little more.

At work we can have “Lunch and Learns,” where someone demos and astounds us as we happily munch on free food. I’ve done a few in the past, but now it’s time to ratchet it up. This is such an awesome (and underutilized) way to turn us into a consulting powerhouse. Goal: one lunch and learn per month as long as I’m working in the office.

Download:

• Zip file of the demos css tweener html css files lunch and learn.zip
• Powerpoint presentation css training tweener.ppt
• Pdf version of the presentation css training tweener.pdf

Or… look at some of my beautiful slides. Look what you’re missing if you don’t download the presentation.

Meaningful CSS

Meaningful Pages

The often misunderstood box model

Grab a cheat sheet

Get the css cheat sheet here

The coolest thing happened twice while I was teaching, I looked out at my coworkers, and every eyeball was looking right back at me rapt with attention. It may have been because I have the tendency to move a little too fast through examples, but I like to think they were really interested and I was doing an awesome job.

Teaching is the best way to learn. It puts me under pressure to stay ahead, and conversations during class bring out the tough topics we could otherwise overlook. Leading this Java class reminds me of taking Linear Algebra with all the math majors (which I was not). We would meet up in the library and use an old greenboard for hours discussing matrices and eigenvalues. I’d get hungry and want to stop, but the rush of trying to explain things to others propelled me. I nailed that class with a solid A.

For the next 16 weeks I’ll be teaching (and learning) the Sun Certified Java Programmer material along with my coworkers. To ace the exam, we’ll all need to turn ourselves into javac compilers.
From what I’ve read so far, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates do an awesome job of helping you stay interested in this beefy reading material. I’d highly recommend the book.

There is an interesting videoconference on Broadband as an economic development driver by Steve Rosenbush, senior Writer at BusinessWeek Online engine.

http://www.iian.ibeam.com/events/mcgr004/14273/index.jsp?autoLogin=false lets you log in. It should be free, although you may need to create an account.

Some interesting tidbits:

• The US has 94 telephone lines per 100 people.
• Developing countries may only have 5 lines per 100 people.
• A 1% increase in phone lines leads to a 3% increase in GDP
• Nov 2003: 35% of US internet users had high speed access, May 2004: 42%, Dec 2004: 50%, 2005: 53%+

Dr. John Rudledge of Rudlege Capital, LLC (Economic Advisor to Reagan and Bush) talks about what is broadband. He suggests it is a verb, not a noun. It means you’re faster than everyone else. Once the “Pony Express” was broadband, now it is wireless and cable internet, for some it is optical fiber to the desktop. He continues,

Christina Heakart (?) is the Gen. Mgr. of Marketing for Microsoft TV. She points out that the entire broadband revolution is limited to people using PC’s. It’s helped businesses and homes (with PC’s) into the digital age. In 5-10 years broadband will bring it to the TV. We will see the ignition of enormous new amounts of new commerce, new ways to communicate, unite community, and new content. … Bring the TV in as a full citizen to the digital age. TV will become 2-way and no longer 1-way.

Leo Hinderly, Jr (Managing Partner of InterMedia) claims broadband is not available to all and is in fact discriminatory–favoring urban and wealthy areas; rare in rural and poor areas.

Once again, John Rudledge says there is not (or only recently) a broadband policy in the administration. Most pressure for reform has come out of congress.

Christine advocates the free market to “wave it’s invisible hand” that will allow economic models to emerge for the digital divide to reunite. Most people that are poor don’t have PC’s. They have TV’s but not PC’s. It doesn’t matter if they have broadband in the home if they can’t use it.

About Christine’s point with poor not having PC’s — the open source community in Chicago has been working on creating free machines in exchange for volunteer hours building refurbished PC’s out of donated hardware. I’ve been volunteering there, and I encourage you check out their website at www.freegeekchicago.org With some digging, you can even find some pictures of me, I suspect.

Then they go into a lengthy Q & A where I stopped watching. I’m tired and can use my sleep to arrive at work early and get my laptop to then meet with Chris Perry, CEO and Frank Gruber, blogger extraordinaire (and tech event planner) two fascinating entrepreneurial types.

International issues often seem very far away. Yet amazing and groundbreaking things are happening… such as the following.

Mike Fay flew over Africa at 500 feet and took 92,000 pictures. My friend Michael the pilot and film school student told me about this.

Fay wants to convince policy makers to invest in natural resource management for the promotion of peace. Sounds odd? Perhaps not. He alleges that Darfur, Rwanda, and many other troubled areas in Africa have resource depletion as a hidden cause. Would convservation help preserve peace and prevent human rights abuses? Read the article here, or watch the really, really good and short video here.

I like to look a bit more in what he has done. And how he arrived at this incredibly fascinating position in life.

“Fay drummed up support from various sources—the Human Footprint lab at WCS, the WILD Foundation, the Bateleurs (an Africa-based organization of bush pilots volunteering for conservation), and, as chief financial sponsor, the National Geographic Society.”

I find it interesting who he got involved… and the varied life stories of the people behind; the pilot slash optometrist and the Mario Scherer pilot slash Kosovo war crimes investegator.

“Fay arranged collaborations wherever possible with local conservationists, field scientists, or national agencies, assisting them with their aerial-survey needs as well as adding data to his own comprehensive trove.”

In order to be successful anywhere, you must arrange collaborations.

He also used some awesome technological mashups such as geotagging the photos, saving them to a tree terabyte drive on the plane, and using a Tablet PC to annotate them during the flight.

Post your comments on what you think about this guy, his political ambitions, or the breathtaking pictures/videos.

And please, take a few seconds to look at the video.