Ooh! Shiny Thing

Over the years I have seen a lot of new technology come and go. Some of it sticks, some of it was just a bad idea. The problem is that often we as software engineers tend to get excited about some new bit of technology or a design pattern etc. This is the "Ooh! Shiny Thing" syndrome that many of us share.

While I'm a fan of new technology, it is a double edged sword. What tends to happen is that some new technology is used in one place in the code but other places that were using and older technology don't get updated. Now there are two ways of doing the same thing. Then someone else comes along and uses a third technology for the same task.

Maintaining a code base having several ways of doing the exact same thing means that you need to learn each method. While not a bad thing to learn, it takes time. Time devoted to maintenance can be costly. Given that pretty much any technology will have bugs, you are also taking on that problem as well.

Over the years I've found that the shininess tends to wear off of new technology pretty fast.

Use new technology, but be careful when doing so. In an ideal world the new technology should replace the existing technology that does the same thing. But only after it has been proven to be reliable and viable for the future.

One of your best gauges is the old-guy. Sure he may be old and set in his ways, but there are good reasons for this. It isn't that he can't learn new things. Certainly as we age it is more difficult to learn new stuff. Of course there are some that are unwilling to learn anything new. You should ignore them.

The ones you want to use as a gauge are those that are continually learning new stuff. Look at what they are learning. Let them know about what you are interested in. They may have some insight that say's it's good or bad. Take that input and use it to make a more informed decision.

Recently I've invested quite a bit of time learning stuff out of the boost library. Some of it is very good. For example shared_ptr is so essential that it has been pulled into the next C++ standard.

Other things are less compelling. Some of them while nice in theory will put a world of hurt on your compiler. For example boost::format while a really nice way of doing type safe formatting in a printf sort of way will produce a very large amount of template code. In many cases the much more lightweight stringstream is just as readable.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't use it, but what appears nice on the surface can have some very serious side-effects that are not at all apparent.

Another easy to abuse boost function is bind. In some cases it can make C++ into a write only language. Once you get a bit beyond the simple syntax to bind a function into a std::for_each the code can become almost unreadable and also is also susceptible to errors such as passing by value instead of by reference.

I'm sure that you can look at your own code base and find similar cases where someone was overly clever.

Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should.

Be careful with your new technology. Before you use new technology make sure the rest of your team is OK with it. Getting their buy-in is important and the act of doing so may change your mind about the viability of the technology.

Do What You Enjoy

While at some point in time we all need to get to the bottom line of making enough money to live and perhaps a bit more to do some of the things we enjoy, doing a job just because it makes you money is ultimately unsatisfying, unless making money is what excites you.

I happen to enjoy writing software. I also enjoy other things that are creative, such as the occasional remodeling job, blogging, cycling etc. The software thing is what currently pays the bills and as it turns out is enjoyable to me most of the time as well.

Every once in awhile you will get excited about something. Perhaps it's a new technology. When that excitement peaks you should follow it. Over the years I've seen many great ideas thrown around that eventually turned out to really big. Very often those ideas were implemented by others who also had that idea, but instead of pushing it into the background pursued it.

The reasons for this are varied. Often the idea seems impossible to implement. I'm reminded of an idea that some of us tossed around when I was in college studying mechanical engineering. We thought it would be cool to have a pen that would be able to write by itself. It would have tiny gyroscopes in it to control it's movement. We also thought that we could have the pen record what you were writing using accelerometers.

Interestingly the second part of that idea is now a reality in the "Pulse Smartpen". This pen uses a camera and tiny dots on the paper to record what you write. In fact it goes even further in that it knows where on the paper you are and so can play back stuff.

Obviously back in 1980 when we had this idea there were massive impediments to doing what we talked about and it was really only an idle conversation that none of us were even slightly motivated to try.

The thing is that there were many more practical ideas that could have been implemented given the technology of the day that I and others were sometimes excited about. But we often let the practicalities of life get in the way of pursuing them.

Or worse we knew they couldn't be done.

Many of the greatest inventions were done by those that didn't know it couldn't be done. Don't let someone else talk you out of doing something you are excited about. Push forward, even if it takes years of working nights and weekends to get the job done. While you are doing that you will learn something. And maybe that will lead to a breakthrough. When it's no longer fun put it away and do something else.

In any case always have something that you are pursuing that excites you.

America's Got Talent?

I recently watched the "America's Got Talent" show. Interestingly the winner was not the most talented person. Two singers got the top two spots, one country and western the other opera. The opera singer was in my opinion and others that know music a significantly better singer.

This got me to thinking about what makes software popular. In my experience the best written software from user interface design and from the point of view of software quality is not necessarily the most popular. The program that I work on now, "Chief Architect", is much more popular than the program I worked on before "HiQ".

The quality of the code I'm working on now started out significantly worse than what I had thought was average quality code in the industry today. Even now I don't believe the code quality is significantly better than average even with all the work our team has done to improve it. It has improved dramatically over the years as has been attested to by our customers and our software metrics.

The interesting thing is this poor quality code produced a consumer product that has several times been the #1 product in it's category. So clearly code quality isn't what makes a program popular.

The user interface design in this example is also interesting in that it had and still has numerous cases where the design is inconsistent, cumbersome and visually unappealing.

What is it that makes one product more appealing than the other? In the case of "America's Got Talent" there are a lot more people who like country and western music than those that like opera. The same idea applies to "Chief Architect" and "HiQ". "Chief Architect" appeals to anyone who wants to design a house while "HiQ" appeals mainly to engineers who are trying to solve some hairy computational problem.

This ties in with my previous blog post "Know Your Market". If your goal is to make the most profit then the idea of working on things that are really useful should be extended to include the idea of working on things that appeal to a wide audience.