BruceEckel blogged this:

On the other hand, the WBC summit was really about psychology: why do programmers write poor code and don't seem to care about it, and what can we do to convince them to write better code and to care? At best, we succeeded in enumerating the problems that we had seen, so compared to the other summits we reached no conclusions. But perhaps the struggle was the important thing, and like Weinberg's PSL company simulation, we all needed to have these ideas inserted so we could struggle with them over the ensuing years.

I had a similar conversation with PragDave once. He related an incident with a programmer at a client that seemed 100% on board with unit testing, and then never actually did it. They'd go round and round, discussing doing it, and then it never happening.


Rick Kitts would like a "developer psychology book" (I'm quoting a comment he posted to his own article, not directly linked here...). Sounds like he wants one for the business people, too.


Bill Caputo hits on the underlying issues here as well, touching also on what I posted here: CorruptedIntentions.


Luke Hohmann says:

Forcing a given team to adopt an approach that they don't believe in ... is a certain recipe for failure.

How do we change their beliefs?

Alistair Cockburn throws a log on the fire of despair:

Somewhere in here is the point I'm trying to make.

* One point is that there really are a bunch of good techniques and behaviors out there, and there are people who use them effectively.
* One point is that most people don't know of such techniques and can't use them.
* One point is that Oh So Very Many People don't have the motivation and energy either to research and learn the techniques, or to apply them. With the very many disastrous results that we see.
* One final point is that the last point limits our hopes of eventual success, whether with agile, with lean, with project management, product management, testing, architecture, etc etc etc. As long as the multitudes can't be bothered, it doesn't matter what great techniques some of us know.

So, in this sense, I'm done with the "60% projects fail, 60% features don't get used" attack (or defense).

Those failures can be ascribed to lack of caring. That has no known antidote.

As Bruce says, this is about psychology and ethics and morals. This is about the spirit and the soul.

see FaithAndBusiness.

Brody Harper posted an article to his blog on dreams. I generally agree with what I understood his post to be about, but I don't necessarily agree with the emphasis on dream-pursuit. My first comment:

I think I jive with where you’re coming from, so long as you balance it out with verses like Prov 19:21. “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.”

If I’m settling for a run of the mill job just because I’m not actively caring for myself as a part of maintaining my relationship with the Lord, that’s not good. But if I’ve settled for working for The Man in support of my commitment to providing for my family, that can be very godly.

I’m knee-jerking to your post a bit, because I’ve seen people go too far that way and get so involved in Life!! they screw up the basics.

That, and I still struggle with this. When am I not pushing myself too hard and when am I not relaxing in what the Lord has for me and making sure I get some rest to keep up the strength for my daily responsibilities?

Shaun Groves added this bit which I also agree with:

I bring this up only because I’m constantly contacted by people with little if no ability - in my almost never humble opinion - who are moving across country, stressing spouses, abandoning kids, wasting money and time, quitting jobs that matter and that they’re truly great at to pursue a dream of music stardom fueled more by ego than actual God-given vision and ability. And it makes me sad.

Our heads are pumped full of “dream big” propaganda and few are telling us what kinds of dreams to dream. “You can be anything you set your mind to” is a lie. You can’t. I can’t play center for the Dallas Cowboys. It won’t happen. No matter how hard I try. But there’s plenty I can be.

I recently fell into a blogservation at the Rabbit Room on effort in the process of changing behavior from sinful ways to godly ones. The original post was good, but the conversation in the comments between myself and Ron Block veered away from it.

Seems the wacky world of YouTube and knockoffs have started gathering some amazing stuff. Here's where I'm collecting linkage to some of it:

Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona improv

Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges in a backstage jam
Leo Kottke, Chet Atkins and Doc Watson in a backstage jam

Lyle Mays Quartet playing Chorinho (a tune I'll forever have in my head with the wrong downbeat).

When someone writes a song, I presume it says something important to them. Very often though, I think the amateur writer fails to include enough context in the song for it to effectively communicate to others. When they sing through it themselves, they have their head and their heart included in the proceedings, and the circle is complete. In that case, the lyric and music can afford to be full of holes. The work of writing is infusing into the words and sounds the same thoughts and feelings that are otherwise taken for granted by the author, such that another listener might have a chance of seeing more of the original circle the work was based on.

---

Counterpoint: a song that's too explicit many times doesn't work because it tries to make concrete out of something mysterious, and in the process blows all the smoke away and nothing is communicated. A song that's ambiguous enough to allow the listener to fill in the cracks with their own experience is ... good (this sentence: bad).

Great conversation in National Geographic with Francis Collins.

ShaunGroves was promting what appears to be a new-ish website called iJigg. You can find some cStudios material over there.

After a few years of refusing to add commenting support to my BlogKi here, I caved.

See, I really still hate comments on blogs. It's an awesome way to have a defragmented half-arsed conversation that ends way too soon. I prefer a much better medium for electronic conversations, this nifty thing called 'email'.

For the astute observers, a while ago I added a 'comment' link on the right side of each blogki page that was actually my email link. But I guess people aren't drawn to that because they can't publicly display how cool their particular comment is (well, that's at least true for me when I comment at other sites). (Well that, and the more obvious reason that no one reads my blog).

But comments still stink, because there's no good way to get notified that the conversation is still happening. If I ever come across a page a few days old, there's little point in commenting, cuz it'll never get read or acted on by the author.

The other thing preventing me from caving is seeing the blogosphere inundated with posts about commenting ... ahem ... (but /mine/ is special and interesting) ... anyway ... about comments being enabled, then disabled, then spammed to death, then this and that and the other thing. And frankly, I didn't have much time to figure out how to add my own commenting forms and captchas and all that.

A few of the blogs I read though, use HaloScan, so I decided to give it a shot. That and I've been wanting to add footer plugins for clWiki, so I killed two birds with one stone, and it turns out HaloScan is pretty cool. It'll notify me with comment updates, gives me a Dashboard to manage all the comments, and it'll try to filter out the spammers and I can put everything into moderation mode if I need.

So ... you can now comment (and trackback) away. All 2 of you. Have fun.

A wonderful poem by Daniel Priest (two degrees of SeanMcMains) that inspired a little thing I wrote.

[March 2005] - This last week brought on another fit of pseudo-modern classical improvs recorded on my GigaStudio sampler setup, fueled by some leftover inspiration from PaulCantrell's piano blog. Grab them here:

improv viii

Three pieces in this session, of varying tempos and moods. The first I rather like -- slow but with some very dense chords underneath a simple almost melody. Short structure repeated 3 times.

The second is quite chaotic (at best) and sloppy (at worst), and on repeated listens, I seem to mostly like it. Unlike a lot of the improvs that get a few unrecorded takes to gather some shape, this was recorded literally after the first piece with no prep. The only theme in my mind was to grab for as many minor/diminished shapes my hands were familiar with, without trying to tie them together in any meaningful way -- not that this was necessarily accomplished, that's just the only thing I recall going for. I was in a somewhat irritable mood as well, so if I thought it was getting too 'normal' I'd push myself to meander which usually led to more hasty runs in the right hand.

The third ... I want to say this didn't get any prep takes either, but it may have, given that it has a bit of a recurring theme in the right hand. It starts with a line over a minor/major 7 sound, then shifts into an interesting chord progression starting on a pure C triad. The form is (mostly) run through about three times.

No MIDI editing on any of the tunes (the overall feel seems better than previous efforts, unlike the recently re-blogged ImprovSessionTwo), and just some standard Abode Audition processing that I seem to be liking -- some compression, slight reverb and EQ. Unfortunately, the compression comes out blaringly towards the end of the second piece, so that may get revisited for a new mix in the future.

Shaun Groves is a singer/songwriter with RocketownRecords. I bought his first album because I was already into a couple of other Rocketown artists, Out of the Grey and Watermark, and it's pretty good. Hadn't kept up since.

I stumbled over his blog sometime in January '06, and this last week have been intrigued by the last several days of posts, detailing some large struggles he's been going through with his own faith. Today's post is here, and you can find links to the previous days along the side.

[Updated link to his blog... he begged me (well, all his readers) to do it]