A new look at how to create unit tests – using Photoshop!  Sense of humour required …

Read it here [pdf]

Of course you have to have a business model eventually. But experience
so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something
popular is a lot easier than making something popular.

An interesting read in this recent interview.

Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers is a recent find, well worth a read. It’s in the vein of something you’d expect to find on John Lim or Joel Spolsky’s sites, but there are a few new tasty angles.

Heinlein – Specialization is for Insects

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the
adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight
must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness
and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within,
we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming
system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder "for
Daddy’s office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking
moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of
principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of
the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the
task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something:
sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer,
like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles
in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are
so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand
conceptual structures. (…)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and
works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results,
draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in
our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to
life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and
delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Fred Brooks, The
Mythical Man-Month

Here’s the summary:

Paul Graham, popular author and Lisp programmer,
discusses what business can learn from open source. According to him,
it’s not about Linux or Firefox, but the forces that produced them. He
delves into the reasons why open source is able to produce better
software, why traditional workplaces are actually harmful to
productivity and the reason why professionalism is overrated.

Paul takes blogging as an analogy and explains how the
phenomenon is actually very similar to the open source movement. Both
show that amateurs often surpass professionals in what they choose to
do, because they love what they are doing. He also points out that in
the age of the internet, which has made collaboration extremely easy,
large corporations find it difficult to compete with software produced
by a bunch of inspired hackers. Paul also takes a dig at workplaces as
we know them and illustrates how the most productive phase of any
company is when it is still a startup.

Update: follow up with this one, also very good.

]]> http://phpkitchen.com/2005/11/paul-graham-on-it-conversations/feed/ 0