Prologue

A couple of years ago I found a job as a PHP + JavaScript developer in a small company in Geneva, Switzerland. I remember going to their offices two or three times, and having several interviews with various people there; one of them was the lead PHP developer of the company, the other being the CEO, a relatively well-known person in the tech area in Geneva; both shall remain nameless. The last interview I had was with the CTO, who would be my direct boss, as I was told.

They finally chose me, and very happily I signed the contract. I handed my resignation for my current job at the time, but had a couple of months of work to do before leaving (this is usual practice in Switzerland, one that I despise deeply, but that you are legally forced to follow). All in all, three months passed between me signing the contract and the first day of my new job.

The First Day

So one day, I headed to Geneva to start my new job. I arrive at around 9am to the address where the interviews had taken place, and, oh surprise… there was nothing. Stay with me: there was nothing. Not a sign in the wall indicating that the company used to be there, not a single desk, not a phone plugged on the wall. Nothing.
Puzzled (to say the least), I asked the first person I met in the hallway about the company, and she told me that they had left a couple of months ago. I asked if she knew where they went, but she told me that she did not.

I was really, really worried by now. Had I signed a contract with some kind of fake company that had just left the country to the Bahamas or Luxemburg? I called their phone number. The automated voice at the other end told me that the number was not in service.

Oh dear.

After what must have been like 60 minutes of going back and forth in the hallways asking for some kind of information about the company, one guy told me that they had moved not far from there. Finally a clue! He even gave me an address, so I left as quickly as I could. I was one hour late to my new job; you do not do that in Switzerland.

On my way, I could not help thinking things like, “why wouldn’t they call me to tell me that they moved to a new place? What’s going on?”

So around 1030am I arrived to this new address, got into the building, and checked in at a reception desk that was standing there. I asked the names of the people that had interviewed me. The guy told me that nobody with that name worked there. Then I asked, “I’m looking for the company such and such”, and he told me that no, this was a private bank (there are lots of them in Geneva), so I must have been given the wrong address.

Bummer. Back to step one.

The guy, nevertheless, told me one interesting thing; in the warehouses behind the bank there was this new “startup center” with brand new offices, and the company might as well be there. I thanked the guy, and started investigating the area.

The word “investigating” is the correct one. It felt like being Columbo looking for a murderer.

Indeed, behind the bank there was a huge, new complex with many new offices and small companies popping up. The building was an old factory that the city of Geneva had bought a couple of years before, and where you could rent cheap office space. Perfect for startups. But in the main entrance, there was no sign of the one I was looking for.

It was almost 11am, and I was about to give up. My cell phone had not rang, nobody called from their office; my wife told me that nobody had called home either. If they were around, they really did not care about me.

Just when I was about to leave the building, I asked one guy cleaning the hallway about the company name. He told me that he had never heard about it, but that there was a huge sign near the entrance of the parking with company names, and that given that the building was fairly new, not all company names had been set up in every entrance of the building, so I might as well check that one out.

I left the building, went to the entrance of the parking, and finally! I saw the name of my new employer. Together with the indication of how to get there by foot: a 10 minute walk from where I was. I said to myself, well, what the heck. Let’s go.

When I crossed the door, I saw yet another reception desk, this time with a huge sign behind the receptionist with the name of the company. This was finally the good one. That was at around 1115am; I had been touring Geneva for over 2 hours looking for this company by now.

I tell the girl that I am starting today my new job, and she tells me that it was her first day too, so she did not know anyone, so she guided me to an office marked “Human Resources”, which looked quite appropriate for the occasion.

“Welcome to the company!”

The HR guy gets up from his desk, greets me and tells me that he started 2 weeks ago and that he did not know that I was starting that day, but that was OK, welcome to the company anyway! He guides me to the sector of the open space where the technical team works, and I finally see some familiar faces, together with some 30 people I had not seen three months ago.

The company had had an explosive growth in just 3 months.

Anyway, they point me to a crappy chair and table in the open space and they called that a “desk”, and I said, OK, let’s score some more points. Even better, the IT manager comes up to me and says “oh sorry, I don’t have a computer for you, I didn’t know you were coming today”.

I sit down, awkwardly, as everyone resumed their tasks in an awkward silence, a mix of “I don’t know anyone here” and “I hope it’s 5pm soon”. Probably one of the worst feelings I have had in a work environment in a while.

Meet the boss

30 minutes later (it was almost noon, and I was really starving by now), while I was sitting on my chair without having anything to do or anyone to talk to, a guy looking like a hawaiian surfer comes up to me and tells me that he was my boss. Which was strange, because he was not the CTO I mentioned earlier, but given that everything had changed so much, I was not surprised.

The surfer takes me to a meeting office, we sit down for what I think it is going to be my first work meeting, and he tells me that he has been appointed to this boss role last month, that they are dropping PHP altogether, and that they will be doing the new system using Java. The guy tells me that he knows that I despise Java (he read it on this very blog, actually) and that he does not like me not liking Java. But he cannot fire me, because he has not hired me, so my role is undefined and, as a matter of fact, I have nothing to do there.

It was 12am, and by now I know I will not be doing long in this company.

To make a long story short, a few days after that I went to the office of the CEO, I gave them my resignation letter, and they just told me, literally, “OK, bye”.

That was it.

Epilogue

After two years, I was told that the Java system was never finished. The company still exists but has completely changed its business model, and the CEO has left the country and moved his company with him.

I also learnt that the original PHP developer, one of the guys who interviewed me, the one who worked his ass off for 4 years building the only system that was actually bringing cash, was also being dismissed from the new team because he was not a Java guy. He was let go a couple of months after I left. Nobody cared that he actually knew how the original system worked, how the business worked, or that he gave 4 years of his work for a company that greeted him with another “OK, bye”.

My path to independence started that very day. Dealing with that kind of crap (of which I have many more nice anecdotes that I will write about very soon) is what tells me that I do not want to be an employee again. I prefer to starve rather than being treated like shit.

PS: you will not find the company name in my LinkedIn profile, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

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Anyway.

I used Pages during the flight to keep track of all those insomniac, bilingual tweets, while the plane was a going through the Atlantic and Canada towards San Francisco. Some are about the flight itself, others about the Argentine film “El Secreto de sus Ojos”, and finally some about the Football World Cup. Project yourself in the situation, and enjoy the rants. I certainly did :)

During and about the flight

• The iPad is the perfect onboard entertainment system. Pages as an offline Twitter client, Kindle and iBooks as ebook readers, some movies, and lots of music. 57% battery after 12 hours.
• As the stewards would say: “brace, brace”; lots of tweets coming.
• Outlook is a city in Saskatchewan, not far from Saskatoon and Moose Jaw. After this revelation to remember the next time you play Trivial Pursuit, you can resume your normal activities.
• Saskatoon officially gets the 2010 akosma award for the best city name ever.
• As you could imagine, the only interesting thing in this inflight entertainment thingy is the 3D map indicating our current position. #fascinating #boring
• I forgot to mention that my seat’s sound system is broken. I could watch any movie I want but my lip reading skills are not *that* good.
• The names of the cities in northern Canada are just amazing. Can’t remember any of them tho. Are they Innuit names?
• Our vision of the world is as distorted as a map of Novaja Zemlya in Mercator projection after the explosion of the Tsar bomba.
• Why do they still print the “smoke” section in boarding passes? Is there any airline out there still offering smoking seats?
• Given that most airplane tickets are electronic, why aren’t boarding passes? #iphoneappidea
• Let’s calculate the CO2 emissions caused by airlines still printing the word “smoke” in boarding passes. No, let’s better not.
• The keyboard of the iPad has this character: ₩ (tap and hold the dollar sign). What currency is it? Korea’s won? If Korea won, then the pun is intended.
• On the plane with @mediaatelier and @dcondrau, probably even more Swiss devs, but without wifi and Twitter, difficult to know.
• There were fewer devs using Xcode on this Swiss flight than in last year’s Lufthansa flight. I will leave the elaboration of any conclusion thereof to my dear followers.
• Why do flight attendants akways decide to serve beverages at precisely the same moment when planes go through turbulences? #complot #midwest #twister
• Now I understand why Swiss is Lufthansa’s cash cow: pricier tickets and crappier service. Only selling point: the nonstop ZRH -> SFO flight. #swissairwherearethou
• I remember when they added phones to Swissair airplanes, back in 1996; calls used to cost 10 dollars per minute. Now, in 2010, in Swiss… they cost the same. #WTF
• In the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) there was free, fast, open wifi in 2006. Most airports in the northern hemisphere, in 2010, charge a lot for a crappy connection. #WTF
• And still, no wifi in planes. #WTF
• No, I haven’t been involved in Nazi activities during from 1933 to 1945. Thanks for asking. #visawaiver
• Swiss people not traveling often outside of Switzerland are easy to spot. I let you imagine the rest of this tweet.
• The Swiss version of Homer Simpson is sitting beside me, and is kinda fascinated with my iPad. Yeah, I’m talking about you, moron.
• Oh no my dear Homer, the armrest between us is mine for the rest of the flight. See? I don’t push *my* elbow on *your* side. Wasn’t *that* hard, now was it?
• The “Skytrain” in ZRH airport, is a subway, actually. You can hear yodel and cows and other Swiss sounds inside while you go from terminal to terminal. #typisch
• Whoever said that the iPad is a consumption-only device should have stop consuming some substances before writing nonsense.

Sobre la pelicula “El Secreto de sus Ojos”

• El otro día fui a ver “El Secreto de sus Ojos” con Clau, y me quedaron, obviamente, muchas cosas picando, pensaturrias.
• Me imagino la Argentina de mis padres como un lugar con una dosis mayor de inocencia de la actual. Debe haber haber sido un lindo lugar.
• Vivir en la Argentina de los 80 no estuvo mal. Aparte de las hiperinflaciones y crisis crónicas, yo tengo lindos recuerdos de aquella época.

Sobre el mundial

• Si Drogba se fracturo y quedo afuera del mundial, entonces se queda con las Ghana. Y el resto del tweet es superfluo. #mundial
• Si te fracbturas, necesitas una drogba para conbtener el dbolor. #mundial
• Primero Beckham, después Rooney, ahora Drogba… que otros jugadores se quedaron afuera? #mundial
• Atacante norcoreano inscripto como arquero… te imaginas? El técnico lo tendría que probar al arco, por ahí después se lo recordaría como el Higuita coreano. #escorpión #taekwondo #mundial
• El conocido árbitro paraguayo Carlos Amarilla no participará en el mundial. Tampoco asistirán el reconocido juez de línea francés Marcel Orsay ni el legendario hincha de Camerún. #burumbumbúm #mundial
• Burumbumberia, burumbumberia, yo soy el hincha, de Nigeria. #mundial
• Burumbumbana, burumbumbana, yo soy el hincha, de Ghana. #mundial
• Burumbumbafrica, burumbumbumbafrica, yo soy el hincha, de Sudafrica. #mundial
• Burumbumbar, burumbumbar, yo soy el hincha, de Madagascar (las hinchadas de Zanzibar y Escobar cantan similares canciones) #mundial
• Burumbumbique, burumbumbique, yo soy el hincha, de Mozambique. #mundial
• Burumbumipto, burumbumipto, yo soy el hincha, de ………………. (enviar respuesta correcta en un reply) #mundial
• Burumbumbina, burumbumbina, yo soy el hincha, de Argentina (el que diga “efedrina” es boleta). #mundial
• Burumbumbal, burumbumbal, yo soy el hincha, de Codesal (cantito alemán) #mundial
• Burumbumbola, burumbumbola, yo soy el hincha, de Angola. #mundial
• Burumbumbasta, burumbasta, yo creo… que ya basta.
• El otro día dieron en la TV Suiza (en italiano) la película de Kusturica sobre Maradona. Muy buena.

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Last year’s language was Go, and the books, well, here we go:

• Software Engineering: Barry W. Boehm’s Lifetime Contributions to Software Development, Management, and Research
• The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK
• Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders
• Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces
• Pragmatic Version Control Using Git
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Software Engineering: Barry W. Boehm’s Lifetime Contributions to Software Development, Management, and Research

Barry Boehm is a name that might not strike a chord immediately, but if you work in the software field, it should. He has been working non-stop for the past 50 years (that’s right, 50), discussing all kind of subjects related to the practice of software engineering. This book is a compilation of his most well-known papers, with subjects ranging from project management to components, from iterative techniques to developer productivity. The guy has written about all of it, and when you realize how right he was, you wish you had read those papers earlier in your career.

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

Erica Sadun is a legend in the iPhone software engineering field. Her involvement with the iPhone developer community from the very beginning (during the dark times of jailbroken iPhones) has increased since the release of the official iPhone SDK in March 2008. Her articles on Ars Technica or The Unofficial Apple Weblog are epic, and her book could not be other than a masterpiece. Make no mistake: this is not a book for beginners (and, by the way, the second edition has recently been published) but it is the perfect companion for all of us who spend a life in Xcode and the SDK. I hope she will continue providing more editions of this book, particularly now that the iPad has been announced, and will be released soon.

Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders

O’Reilly has some very successful book series, like the “Head First” and the “Beautiful” ones. The latter, very similar in spirit and nature to the “At Work” series of books by Apress, provides a series of interviews to key industry players, in different fields, highlighting real-world experiences. This book takes this approach and brings an incredible series of war stories from organizations like IBM, Media Molecule or the NASA, told by Grady Booch, Tim O’Reilly, Cory Doctorow, Steve McConnell and, yes, even Barry Boehm. This book reinforced my belief that software is a social process, and I think that you will enjoy these stories about how many well-known products we use and love (or hate) every day have been brought to market, and how their teams struggled to stay together – or how they miserably failed.

Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces

The iPhone OS and Mac OS X both share a legacy of design, attention to detail and awesomeness that can be explained by the sole existence of a single set of APIs: Core Animation. This library allows developers to create stunning visual effects with great performance and with just a few lines of code. The rational use of animations is considered a huge usability win, bringing context awareness to users, helping them understand what’s going on their applications and providing feedback and a “real world” feel to software. Bill Dudney provides here a short yet complete introduction to the concepts behind Core Animation, both for the Mac OS X and iPhone OS; all in all a must have for all Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers.

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

I’ve been a happy Subversion user for years. I’ve kept svn repositories for my Master’s degree work, my personal documents and of course for most of my projects. However, the server-centric nature of Subversion always made me think twice before creating a repository, and not being able to browse repository contents without a specialized client was always a pain in the neck. Not to name the fact that branching in svn is harder than it should be IMHO. Git changed all of that. Creating repositories with Git is not only cheap, it’s easy and fast, and branching could not be easier. This book was the one that showed me that there was a better way, and now with my Github account, I can’t think of any other way to handle any kind of project. This book provided the initial knowledge to get started, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Git.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Tim Ferriss is a strange kind of guy. He comes up with this book and tells you that you are working too much, that having a boss is killing you, and that you should be sipping margaritas in the Caribbean instead. And then he proceeds to show you how to do it. This book is interesting in many aspects, the first of which is the irreverent tone and the complete faith the guy has in his method. I could not agree with everything he said but I have to agree with the fact that he’s really convincing. Tim believes in what he says and the book is a really funny one, and I can’t deny that reading it helped me take the final decision to start my own company. So, in any case, beware! This book is dangerous :)

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During a chat session with Stefan Fürst from Media Atelier we put together a quick list of significant Mac applications created in Switzerland (and southern Germany), and indeed the list (in no particular order) is nothing short of impressive; check it out:

• Zattoo, a really great TV player (cross-platform, actually, but the Mac version works really well);
• Cornerstone, one of the best Subversion clients for the Mac OS X operating system (the other being Versions);
• TimeLog and GrandTotal, the two applications used by independent contractors (like me) to keep track of the time spent in projects, and then to generate invoices out of that data – and which I personally prefer and strongly recommend over Billings;
• Distribute by Seven Lakes Software, dubbed the best ERP software available in the Mac, with an impressive feature list and lots of positive reviews;
• Snowtape, an application I’ve become addicted to lately, which allows you not only to listen to internet radio stations… but also to record them as MP3 or AAC files, which are automatically imported into iTunes!
• Waveboard, a Google Wave client for Mac (and iPhone soon, too!);
• Mailplane, a native Gmail clients with awesome capabilities;
• Posterino, Proxymind and Snippet Mind from Zykloid;
• Background Music by infoAtelier, currently in a promising beta test phase;
• iBackup;
• GraphClick, iLocalize, ProVoc, XS and AudioXplorer by Arizona Software (even if they aren’t in Switzerland anymore I think, they are definitely worth including in this list);
• PowerMail and FoxTrot by CTM Development;
• LiquidCD by Maconnect
• Several Mac products by Stephan Burlot’s Coriolis Technologies;
• Don’t forget that most Cocoa apps are unit-tested with Sen:te‘s original OCUnit unit testing framework bundled with Xcode since 2005!
• And last but not least, the diverse suite of Logitech drivers and control panels written by Men in Silicium in Geneva!

It really looks like the Swiss enjoy writing Mac apps (I certainly do and will publish mine soon!). Have I forgotten anyone? Please don’t be upset, and feel free to leave your links in the comments below. I’d love to know who else is creating killer apps for the Mac in a radius of 300 km around Zürich!

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these companies (I’m just a friend of Stefan). And if you’re more into “enterprisey” stuff, here’s the “Swiss-Made Software” label site that you migth find more interesting ;)

Update, 2009-10-23: Some more applications added after the publication of this post:

• Luscious SMS, the SMS client for the Mac;
• Special mention for Cyberduck, an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X, or “the poor man’s version of Transmit” :)

Update, 2009-10-24: Sophie Teuschler tells me not to forget the multiple Apple Design Award winners SubEthaEdit and BoinxTV by The Coding Monkeys, not far from Switzerland, in Bavaria…!

Update, 2009-10-25: I’ve just received an e-mail from Cyril Pavillard about his company Mnemis and their product Uniboard which looks absolutely awesome by any standards. Be sure to check out this cool Swiss project!

Update, 2009-11-12: Just found out about noidentity and their MoneyBook iPhone application. It seems that this application is just a copy from another one called “pennies”. Shame on you noidentity.

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Trifork started organizing JAOO conferences around 1996. At that time, Java was the hottest thing on the programming landscape, and Trifork thought (rightly so) that Java-oriented conferences could be a success. Over the years, JAOO evolved to encompass many other subjects, like Inversion of Control, Design Patterns, Architecture, Open Source, Functional Programming, and of course every possible trend the industry has enjoyed (or suffered) in the past 13 years. In some cases, like the RubyFoo event in London new events have spawned from JAOO to respond to growing new trends.

The first distinctive fact about JAOO is, then, its diversity and agnosticism. You are more likely to find a speaker about your favourite technology or programming language here than in any other conference, except perhaps lately in the StackOverflow DevDays, which share with JAOO the openness and breadth, if not the maturity. The advantage of such “mixed” conferences is the ability to contrast approaches and discuss alternatives, something usually more difficult in conferences like Apple’s WWDC or Microsoft’s TechDays, given the evident bias these have.

Another unique element of JAOO is the list of speakers. Take a peek on the current and past speakers who ever gave a speech in JAOO: Barry Boehm, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Martin Fowler, Charles Simonyi, and I can’t name them all without blinking my eyes and swearing for not having attended JAOO before. The list is simply a “who is who” of software engineering.

There is another element that makes JAOO stand among developer conferences, and it’s the commitment of trying to improve not only our minds, but also our bodies: take a look at the JAOO IT Run, a nice and original response to the (real) problem of overweight in the IT industry. And it sure is a success, even if I’m not sure I would sustain more than a kilometer without a heart transplant.

Finally, JAOO also has an interesting social commitment, trying to bridge the huge gap in the number of men and women working in this industry: at JAOO conferences, every attendee has the right to invite another person of the opposite sex! This initiative is not only great, it’s a positive step to make women join the ranks of software engineers worldwide, and I think it’s an idea that should be emulated elsewhere.

In any case, I was not only surprised by JAOO’s quality, breadth, topics, interestingness, but also by its social and human side, trying to adopt initiatives that make us not only better engineers, but also better human beings, in a better society.

Disclaimer: I’m a speaker on the JAOO iPhone Dev Days Zürich 2009 next Thursday.

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1. Contact the most important people in some field.
2. Sit down and ask a similar set of questions to each one of them.
3. Record all the interviews and then write them down.
4. Publish the resulting book, usually with great reviews (such as this one).

This does not constitute, by any means, a new genre; but it’s certainly a fashionable one in your technical bookstore right now. At least Apress and O’Reilly have realized that this simple technique yields epic books.

I have already blogged about Founders at Work, thus it’s worth mentioning that Coders at Work (which I’m reading right now) has just been released. Both books share a similar structure (as well as a similar cover), and both are highly recommendable, with interviews of David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Wozniak and Paul Buchheit for the first, and Donald Knuth, Joe Armstrong and Brendan Eich for the second.

On the other side, O’Reilly is very well aware of the force conveyed by this kind of books: their “/Theory/In/Practice” series of books has some gems which, I think, are really worth reading:

“Beautiful Code” features interviews with Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold and Yukihiro Matsumoto; “Beautiful Teams” (already my preferred book for 2009!) features Tim O’Reilly, Barry Boehm and Grady Booch; finally, “Masterminds” has great interviews with Bertrand Meyer, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, Brad Cox and Anders Hejlsberg.

I think that the names of the interviewees, in each of the five books, speak for themselves. In all of them, I have found inspiration, advice, tips, humour, awe and enlightenment. The good thing being that, in most cases, you don’t need a Computer Science degree to read these books; it’s just a matter of empathy and sociology. Our world is driven by software, and the stories behind its construction are not only interesting, they are also important to understand the cost, the difficulty and the wonder that constitutes a piece of working software. These books are a way to approach the immense complexity of our society.

I really look forward to read more books of this kind! If I forgot to mention any other similar book, just leave the reference in the comments section below. I’d love to read your suggestions.

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I’ve been fortunate enough to earn a pretty decent living doing basically what I consider a hobby for the past 13 years, which is typing code on a computer and see if it works. Which most of the time doesn’t, but that’s part of the game.

I strongly believe in what Elizabeth says in this talk, and I have believed in this for years. I deeply believe that we, software developers, software engineers, both self-taught and those coming out of college, are just creators, just as Elizabeth describes them. Simple creators, being able to provide new ways to information to be shown, to flow, to entertain, to move. Simple channels through which ideas are transformed into tools, behaviours, images and sound.

There’s been a huge debate in this matter. Knuth named his masterpiece “The Art of Computer Programming”, and the single choice of this title has sparkled a longlasting debate in the software community, one that this essay is unfortunately going to feed, too.

Interestingly enough, Knuth developed his own typesetting system for his book, TeX, which is named after the Greek word meaning “art or craft”. His work not only had to be the most important book ever written on programming, but also, it had to be beautiful.

It had to be an object of art.

And I think that programming itself is art. And I think that programmers are artists. And this is maybe the single reason why so much has been written about programmer productivity, why software project management is so hard, why discussions around programming languages distort into trolls and heated arguments, and why you feel this anger against this words on my blog and you call me names.

This is why writing opinionated software is key to success, that’s why the best software companies take time into creating great software development environments that stand out, that’s why Peopleware is so important, even 20 years after being published for the first time.

It is all about letting the flow of art come through the person whose hands are on the keyboard. It’s all about letting this happen. It is not us who write, it is the writing that comes to us.

Software is art, and as such, it needs time, patience, iterations, silence, passion, coffee, naps, pizza, books, compilers, laughs, Nintendo Wiis and unit testing suites.

The creation of good software is embodied in the creative process itself. The best engineers I know suffer from this process as much as they enjoy it, using an iterative process of trial and error which, even after all these years, still applies. The best software developers release sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes with quality, sometimes not, but they release. They refactor. They document. They teach others about all of this. They always think that they can do better.

They always think, as Elizabeth says in her talk, that their current work is the worst in the history of programming: “Not just bad, but the worst”. They suffer about it. But they release, and they fight against the fear of being critisized because of their choice of programming languages, operating systems, tools, processes, insufficient testing or design patterns.

Real artists ship. The making of this industry is full of examples of why software is an art: the first Macintosh, Smalltalk, NeXTstep, the Internet, Erlang, Apache, Ruby on Rails, UNIX & C, Lisp; just glimpses of wisdom, brilliantly crafted, that struck as obvious yet incredible, and which prompt a huge crowd to cheer up and applause.

Anyway, I’m not as famous or well-known as Elizabeth or Duncan. I have not yet done anything such as Ant or Tomcat (originally written by Duncan, by the way), even if I release software and projects with an increasingly high rate lately, and with many projects in the pipeline these days. I hope that my best successes are still ahead of me. And I hope you’ll enjoy them one day, too.

Do I think that a little “genie” is besides me? Yes I do. And given the extremely rational background of most engineers out there, stating such an argument will raise more chuckles than anything else. Heck, who cares.

If you ask me, there is something magic out there.

PS: there’s this quote attributed to Jorge Luis Borges which says that “publishing is a way to stop editing”… and I thought about it just after publishing this post. I don’t know if he really said that, but in any case I agree. The difference being that, in our case, we refer to publishing as “releasing”. But the feeling is the same.

PS (2): I’ve already written about the importance of delivering working software. I just forget about all I’ve written or linked to.

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In this article I will provide a short overview of two kinds of challenges that I consider that software engineers will have to confront in the next 20 years: the human and the technical.

The Human Factor

A quick look at the agenda of the 29th Int. Conference on Software Engineering (held in Minneapolis last year, from the 20th to the 26th May 2007) shows the key themes considered by the software engineering research community as the major challenges today:

• “Improving Software Practice through Education: Challenges and Future Trends”
• “Research Collaborations between Industry and Academia”
• “Model-driven Development of Complex Systems: A Research Roadmap”
• “Source Code Analysis: A Road Map”
• “Software Reliability Engineering: A Roadmap”
• “Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination”
• “Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Roadmap”
• “Self-Managed Systems: An Architectural Challenge”
• “Software Project Economics: A Road Map”

(Source: ICSE 2007)

Mixed up with technical concerns, some presentations highlighted core problems that appears in the current state of software engineering: communication, collaboration and human issues.

The core substance of software deserves more eyes and more minds, thinking ways to describe not only the big picture (something that you can do with fancy diagrams) but also to give solutions to the problems that developers find daily while building systems up. Software is a process, but not any kind of process: a human one, maybe the most intangible of all processes; and as such, it is filled with all human brightnesses and failures.

(Myself, in 2006)

I have the deep, strong conviction that software development cannot and must not be separated from the human-side problems of forming, keeping and training teams, enhancing the internal and external communications, improving and enhancing the individual creativity as well as the ways of reaching team consensus. As a powerful example, the seminal Peopleware book by DeMarco and Lister showed that many of the most successful software companies have been those that excelled in creating human-centric environments:

In 1982, (Mitchell Kapor) founded Lotus Development Corporation, for which he is most noted. While there, he revolutionized corporate workplace culture by making diversity and inclusivity top priorities in his goal for creating an environment that attracted and retained employees. There were many “firsts” for Lotus, including being the first company to sponsor an AIDS Walk event in the mid-80′s and refusing to do business with South Africa due to Apartheid.

(Sterling-Hoffman)

Thanks to a sharp hiring process, a series of innovations in their flagship spreadsheet product, and a progressive corporate culture, Lotus dominated the software landscape of the 80s. Today, Google follows very closely Lotus’ steps (Google, 2007a), and their brilliant results in the last few years seem to confirm this trend. Google for example allows their employees to use 20% of their time in their own projects (Google, 2007b). This is resulting in an incredible amount of code, used internally and also released as open-source projects:

Google is a fantastic company to work for. I could cite numerous reasons why. Take the concept of “20 percent time.” Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time pursuing projects they’re passionate about. I started one such exciting project some time back, and I’m pleased to announce that Google is releasing the fruits of this project as an open source contribution to the Macintosh community. That project is MacFUSE, a Mac OS X version of the popular FUSE (File System in User Space) mechanism, which was created for Linux and subsequently ported to FreeBSD.

(Google Mac Blog, 2007)

The empowerment of both the individual and the team (the emphasis is important here) is key for a successful software project.

Parallelization

Herb Sutter has put it very clearly: technically speaking, since the beginning of the decade, there is no way for getting more processing power without jumping to multicore architectures:

The key question is: When will it end? After all, Moore’s Law predicts exponential growth, and clearly exponential growth can’t continue forever before we reach hard physical limits; light isn’t getting any faster.(…)
If you’re a software developer, chances are that you have already been riding the “free lunch” wave of desktop computer performance.(…)
Right enough, in the past. But dead wrong for the foreseeable future.

(Sutter, 2005)

The problem is that more cores do not necessarily mean more computing power, because the jump done by chip manufacturers has not (yet) been completely followed by the software community. Of course there is the concept of “threads”, and multi-threaded applications can benefit of performance boosts when running on multicore hardware platforms; however, a number of myths have to be debunked, as the common “2 x 3GHz = 6GHz” (as explained by Sutter here: http://www.ddj.com/showArticle.jhtml?documentID=ddj0503a&pgno=3), and even more importantly, creating multithreaded applications is not easy. At all.

A couple of months ago, in the “Questions and Answers” of LinkedIn.com I answered an interesting question about parallelization; the following excerpt of my answer pretty much summarizes my opinions about the current state of multithreading, as well as some challenges that are raised for the future:

The problem is simply that the “streamline” programming languages languages do not provide good ways to code multithreaded applications. (…) Not at all. The problem is real, since multithreading applications are extremely complicated to think of, let alone develop properly. A line of code in a high-level language could mean several hundred instructions in a processor; and depending on the sharing algorithm used at the CPU level, each one of these instructions might be executed separately, sharing resources with other processes. So what happens when? (…)
What I mean is that the fact that the JVM and the CLR support threads does not make good .NET or Java developers good multithreading developers by default. It’s a different mindset; who is accessing your resources? (…)
I think that as long as programming languages do not take multitasking and multithreading as base features (and not as mere library or API add-ons) we will continue struggling with single-threaded applications that collide with each other.

(Myself, this time on LinkedIn Answers, 2007)

I think that the challenge of parallelization is not only an extremely tough one, requiring what Thomas Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift”, but also an extremely huge business opportunity; after all, while the top of the Chinese ideogram for “Crisis” means “Danger”, the bottom part means “Opportunity” (Mary R. Bast, 1999).

Very Large Systems

I also think that software systems will invariably get bigger and bigger. And given the historically high risk of failure of software projects, the dependency on software of the modern society, the pervasiveness of the Internet, the low prices of connectivity and the overall globalization, it is more important than ever to get ready for those challenges.

In July 2006, the well known Software Engineering Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University published an impressive report (freely downloadable) called “Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future”:

The study brought together experts in software and other fields to answer a question posed by the U.S. Army Office of the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Army (Acquisition, Logistics & Technology): “Given the issues with today’s software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code?” Increased code size brings with it increased scale in many dimensions, posing challenges that strain current software foundations. The report details a broad, multi-disciplinary research agenda for developing the ultra-large-scale systems of the future.

(SEI, CMU, 2006)

The 150-page long report gives an extremely detailed vision of the challenges raised by complex systems, in the following areas:

• Design
• Monitoring
• Human interaction
• Computational Engineering
• Deployment
• Legal issues

The report provides interesting conclusions, highlighting the methodologies and techniques that will required to tackle these systems efficiently, among them the role of the W3C, the forthcoming trends of grid computing and parallelization, the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative of the OMG, and finally the development of larger Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) platforms, such as .NET or J2EE (page 41 of the report).

The report also places a strong emphasis in the concept of socio-technical ecosystems and I think it’s worth a read by everyone interested in software engineering.

Conclusion

Given its youth, we have yet to see the most important developments in software engineering. However, it is extremely difficult to predict the future in this industry: Bill Gates himself published a book in 1995, “The Road Ahead”, where he only slightly talks about the World Wide Web:

“The Road Ahead” appeared in December 1995, just as Gates was unveiling Microsoft’s master plan to “embrace and extend” the Internet. Yet the book’s first edition, with its clunky accompanying CD-ROM, mentioned the Web a mere seven times in nearly 300 pages. Though later editions tried to correct this gaffe, “The Road Ahead” remains a landmark of bad techno-punditry — and a time-capsule illustration of just how easily captains of industry can miss a tidal wave that’s about to engulf them.

(Salon.com, 2000)

In any case, I think that there are important challenges in our industry: the need for better human management, the jump to multicore architectures and multiprocessing, and the ever-growing size of software projects. These three elements will without any doubt change the shape of the industry in the years to come, and raise new challenges in turn.

References

Adrian Kosmaczewski on LinkedIn Answers, “For the software architects out there, do you feel there is an impending paradigm shift in the software development model, towards “parallel computing” models?”, January 2007, [Internet] http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=7804&askerID=4194838 (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Adrian Kosmaczewski on Kosmaczewski.net, “What will the Software Architecture discipline look like in 10 years’ time?”, March 16th, 2006 [Internet] http://kosmaczewski.net/2006/03/16/software-architecture-future/ (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Bast, Mary R; “Crisis: Danger & Opportunity”, 1999 [Internet], http://www.breakoutofthebox.com/crisis.htm (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

DeMarco, Tom & Lister, Timothy, “Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Edition”, 1999, Dorset House Publishing, ISBN 0-932633-43-9

Google, “Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google”, 2007a [Internet] http://www.google.com/jobs/reasons.html (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Google, “What’s it like to work in Engineering, Operations, & IT?”, 2007b, [Internet] http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=about.html (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Google Mac Blog, “Taming Mac OS X File Systems”, January 11th, 2007, [Internet] http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2007/01/taming-mac-os-x-file-systems.html (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

ICSE, “Future of Software Engineering”, 2007, [Internet] http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/icse07/index.php?id=104 (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, “Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) Systems – The Report”, July 2006, [Internet] http://www.sei.cmu.edu/uls/ (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Salon.com, 2000 [Internet], “Why Bill Gates still doesn’t get the Net”, [Internet] http://archive.salon.com/21st/books/1999/03/cov_30books.html (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Sutter, Herb; “A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software”, 2005, [Internet] http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184405990 (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Sterling-Hoffman, “Opening Doors To Higher Education”, [Internet] http://www.sterlinghoffman.com/newsletter/articles/article140.html (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

Wikipedia, “Thomas Kuhn” [Internet], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn (Accessed June 3rd, 2007)

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