Blog Or Get Off The Pot

I hate blogs.

It's not that I hate them, really; I just don't like the "diary" format. It doesn't suit my needs very well.

However, I have this day job, you know, just like you probably do. And that takes up most of my time. If there's any time left, I'd like to spend some amount of it actually blogging, as opposed to dicking around endlessly with software and configuration just to enable me to blog the way I want to. If I'm going to dick around with coding stuff, I'd rather do something other than that.

But I hate blogs. The format's not right. Chronological ordering of my posts just plain sucks. It forces you to dig around through monthly archives, wondering if there's anything good in all the crap I spew out.

What I want is closer to my own personal Reddit, or Digg, or something like that (but not quite like them, either). I don't want you to come to my site and see what I've posted most recently. RSS can take care of that. I want you to see what other people have voted as my best entries. On my site. You shouldn't have to go to Reddit to get a decent directory of my blog. Anyway, you can't; anything that makes it onto Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us is mixed in with everything else, and gets bumped down into oblivion by stuff that's newer and/or better.

Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?

But it's got to be even better than that. Having a self-organizing browse interface like Digg's on my blog page would be nice, but I want more.

For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments are ordered chronologically, just like the entries. So the comment threads are invisible, and commenters have to say stuff like "um, actually I was replying to Dave, not Peter", and quote each other heavily -- a whole subculture of commenter hacks, just to fake threading.

Why the hell don't blogs have threaded comments? Sure, sure, some do. But that's still not enough. Not by a long shot. They need threaded comments and inline comments.

What do I mean by inline comments? I want people to point at a particular sentence I wrote, get all excited or pissed off about it, and say "I want to comment on THIS! This point right here!" So when you're reading, you should get to that part, and see a little icon or link that takes you off to a comment thread on that particularly interesting or disputed section.

In other words, the commentary on a blog entry should grow outward, not downward.

And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes -- heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me, because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version. I think people have a right to see how my ideas changed over time, after they yelled at me or made brilliant observations or whatever. So people should be able to see the revision history for individual posts.

It's starting to sound slightly Wiki-like, isn't it? Yeah, a little. But what I want doesn't exist today. It's not a blog, and it's not a wiki, but it's similar to both of them. I want an essay-publishing system, basically.

All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds. But it's not like that stuff's impossible, is it? Aren't there companies whose full-time efforts are going into making cool blog software?

Blogs have evolved into the dominant form of self-publishing, and yet nobody's doing it right. To me, that can only mean one of two things, both depressing. Either nobody's been clever enough to figure out an interface that actually works for people who aren't just posting their daily cat picture, or web programming is so insanely hard that nobody's been able to get features out fast enough to keep pace with the ideas.

It's probably a little of both. But my God, if they're hurting for ideas, all they need to do is ask. They're bursting from me; I can't keep them in anymore.

Want some? OK. Here's one: I'm sick of global configuration options. Global config options are so 1970s. When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious? And yet there aren't any browsers that let you do that. (Or are there? You tell me. Wouldn't it be nice if you could put an inline comment right here letting me and all the readers know?)

Same goes for my blog software: I want per-post configuration. It seems like I should be able to specify different stylesheet templates for each entry if I want — at least for different categories. Technical posts should have a different stylesheet from the posts about my last vacation.

And I should be able to change the settings for how I'm notified about comments on a per-post basis, because I'll care more about some of them than others.

Isn't all this stuff obvious? How can people not think of this stuff?

Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but how about a decent content-editing tool? Blog software packages can't seem to get this simple thing right. You pretty much get simple "convert line breaks" behavior, or you can embed HTML tags and screw with them for hours until you figure out how to make the blog HTML renderer behave the way the exact same tags work in every other page in your browser. If you're lucky. Sometimes it's just impossible, and you have to live with their screwed-up interpretation of the spacing before/after an ordered list or a heading element or whatever.

Can it really be that hard to get this stuff right? O'Reilly's group blogs don't even put a frigging blank line after a heading element, so your first sentence is smooshed right up under the heading.

I'm not asking for WYSIWIG here; I realize that's almost impossible given the amazingly crappy mix of browser technology standards we have to work with today. All I'm asking for is something halfway decent, like you get from any Wiki worth its salt. RedCloth would be my personal preference, but gosh, just about any wiki-style markup language would be preferable to the current choices ("convert line breaks" or "embed HTML tags that don't work properly") that most blog systems give you.

So I've been meaning to set up a public blog for nearly a year, and I haven't done it because all the blog-hosting options are just so wrong. I've been struggling with this whole issue -- not having the right self-publishing software -- and wondering whether to try writing it myself, or to just bite the bullet and live with the crap that's out there today.

Giving it the Ole College Try

How would I approach writing it myself? Well, I'd probably use Ruby on Rails. I don't think it's the end of the evolutionary road for web programming, not even close, but damn if it isn't so much farging better than the alternatives. I plan to blog about my vision for web programming of the future at some point. I think you'll like it. But for now, we've got Rails.

With Ruby on Rails, you can actually think about writing your own blog software. That level of grandiose ambition (and it is grandiose if you have as little free time as I do) enters the realm of plausibility. Until recently, it just wasn't a feasible part-time effort, because, let's face it, Web Programming is a Big Crap Sandwich, and we all have to take a bite of it. But Rails makes the idea at least conceivable.

So the other day, I poked at it a little. I set up a Rails server with Apache and SCGI, and then immediately thought -- HMMMMmmmmm, if Rails is so cool, then maybe someone's already written a blog software package in Rails. I could set that up, and since it's Rails, and I'm familiar with it, I could start evolving the software in the directions I want it to go.

Well, it's true. There is one. It's called Typo. But I have no idea if it's cool or not, because you can't install it. I mean, you can, but not in the amount of time I'm willing to allot to the effort. There's almost no documentation, and what docs exist are all completely outdated, because apparently most software developers still don't understand that nobody will use their shyte if they don't document it. The Typo folks are far from the only ones guilty of this.

And as if the Typo doc situation weren't bad enough, Rails doesn't have a model yet for hosting multiple applications in the same Rails codebase. You have to manage them as separate code trees, and handle all the routing in your webserver. Which is pretty lame, if you think about it, because Rails has a really cool routing-rules minilanguage, so why the hell can't you use it for your routing? So I have to keep Typo and any other Rails apps I want to run in their own little jail cells, with Apache as the illiterate prison guard who can't understand complex instructions I want to give it.

Dammit, what's a person to do?

I wonder how software engineers set their priorities, sometimes. Are the Rails folks even thinking about the multiple-app installation problem?

And look at MovableType, which still evidently doesn't have threaded comments, but they support group blogs. But what good is a group blog? They're just weird. I haven't seen one that works well. Maybe there are a few out there. But what percentage of all blogs do they really constitute? It doesn't seem like it was the most important feature to add.

I'm just speculating, though, since I haven't looked at MT in a long time. I'm not a big fan of Perl anymore, and I'd rather throw my weight behind software written in languages I at least like a little bit.

And yeah, I'm sure you'll all want to tell me to please try your blogging software cuz its k00l. But I can't frigging install them all, only to find they suck as bad as Typo did. I've installed MovableType before, and it took at least half a day of tedious labor. I'm sure YOURS will also be a day of work. Forget it; there's no point in wasting precious days evaluating your probably-broken software and digging around your probably-missing documentation. There are plenty of hosts out there, and after looking at Typo, I decided to use one.

Supporting languages I like is partly why I picked Blogger; it's got a mix of Java and Python folks working on it, or so I've heard, and I think Java and Python are a darn sight better than Perl. Python, especially. It's a good language. Also picked Blogger because I have some friends that work there. And I hear it's going to get better at some point in the future. And "Blogger" is a cool name. So I'm willing to live with its inadequacies for now.

So I'm going to start blogging. It was blog, or get off the pot. Posting static HTML pages was ridiculous. (But hey, I honestly didn't think anyone was going to read them. It didn't really become a problem worth thinking about until late December.)

What will I blog about?

I have a lot of stuff to say. For one thing, I've realized that I have more ideas than time. Way more. It's not even close. I've been hoarding ideas for several years now, hoping I'd find time to get around to implementing (or documenting, or publishing, or whatevering) them someday. But it's not going to happen. Software and documentation both take time to write. Lots of time. If I come up with ten ideas that take 5 years each, I'm pretty screwed.

I did a 5-year idea once. I had an idea for a game in 1993. I knew exactly what game I wanted to play. I could envision it and even describe it in great detail. It was a fusion of all my favorite games to date: Nethack, Darker Realms LP Mud, Ultima IV, and Crossfire. A multi-player, tile-based, graphical MUD. I knew it would be a wonderful game, and yet nobody was writing it, or even discussing it. After a year or so, I realized nobody was thinking about it like I was. But I wanted to play the thing, so I decided to buckle down and write it myself. I figured it'd take me about 18 months. I mean, it's a tiles game; how hard could it really be? So I started working on a design in 1996, and started coding in 1997.

18 months, what a joke of an estimate. The game was pretty much "done" the way I'd originally envisioned it after about 5 years. I spent another 2 years pushing it to new levels; after actually having it online, new ideas started really coming in, both from me and from the players. After a total of 7 years, I threw in the towel, because my productivity had slowed to a crawl, all because of Java. God, I wish I'd picked Python. Or Common Lisp, or something that supports dynamic development. But in 1996, Java had great marketing, so that's what I picked. Thanks, Sun! You screwed me!

Half the game's written in Jython now; it simply isn't possible to do an extensible game like that in Java. You either write your own minilanguage or you use a JVM language; those are your only choices. People are adding code to the game right now, as we speak, and they're changing it on the fly. They can't go rebooting the f***ing server with a hundred players online every time they want to make a change. Java just doesn't work for that kind of application. Nor does C++. So all online games use dynamic extension languages. No exceptions.

Five years, that's how long that little idea took. Plus 2 years of adding bells and whistles. And that, folks, is why I'm giving in and using a blog host. Because I have lots of ideas, lots of things to say and to explore, but only a few dozen years left at best. I can't afford to go chasing every 5-year idea that springs to mind. After due consideration of the crap web frameworks and crap blog packages out there, I decided that I don't want to spend my next 5 years implementing my vision for a decent self-publishing system. Someone else can do it.

But those static HTML pages had to go. I had to blog or cut bait.

So here we go. I'm blogging now. I hope you'll like it!

My save-excursion

A friend of mine on a neighboring team at Google presented me with an interesting math problem the other day. It went like this:

Friend: Hey Stevey!

Me: Uh, you know people don't actually call me that to my face, right? Only behind my back.

Friend: (cheerily) But you're Stevey! Look at your badge!

Me: Sigh. OK, fine already. What's this math problem?

Friend: Let's say there's this hypothetical blogger who writes for 4 hours a month, and he desperately needs an editor who will never materialize, and in those 4 hours he produces very... large... ummm...

Me: And what exactly are you trying to say there, ex-friend?

Ex-friend: Oh, nothing! It's purely hypothetical! I'm just saying that I, er, well, I've been reading for hours and I'm only half done with your last blog entry, and I accidentally fell asleep and had a wonderful dream that I was finished reading it, and then I woke up and my keyboard was gone. Plus I'm still not done yet.

Me: That was a pretty long story.

Ex-friend: (reading what I wrote) That's not what I said! What do you mean the keyboard was gone?

Me: Uh, never mind. I'll fix it in the real blog.

Ex-friend: Fine. Whatever. Anyway, we were all thinking...

Me: Oh! So it's "we" now, is it? And who are my other ex-friends in this particular hypothetical situation?

Ex-friend: Jared and Todd and Jeremy.

Me: B-b-but — you can't say their names in my blog!

Ex-friend: Oopsie.

Me: There are people listening!

Ex-friend: No, Stevey, I think your readers all died of starvation on account of trying to finish your blogs in one sitting.

Me: D'oh! OK. Yeah. I think I get it. You're saying — and correct me if I'm wrong here — that if I write for an hour a week, I'll produce blogs that are only like 600 times too long, rather than the usual, ah...

Really-ex-friend-now: 2400.

Me: Ouch! That's just... low. (frowning vaguely, looking at my fingers) I know how to multiply, you know. I was just thinking about something else, that's all.

Really-ex-friend-now: Well, we think maybe you should give it a try! Just one hour a week. You could be, like, a columnist.

Me: Yeah! I won't get paid, and nobody will read any of it, but otherwise it's pretty much exactly the same as a columnist in all respects. I can be like... like Paul Graham, and sit around in my underwear writing articles about how I get to sit around in my underwear writing articles about stuff, on account of having written everything in Lisp. Except I'll still have to wear pants.

Friend: Um. (edging nervously towards the door) So does this mean I don't have to finish that last blog about Cinderella?

Me: *sigh* Pinocchio. And no, you don't have to finish it. He dies at the end, anyway.

Friend: (sympathetic frowny-face) Sad. (runs out)

Stevey's Blog... Column... Thing.

So! I'm going to try writing for an hour a week, and also try limiting my blog to a certain number of words that columnists apparently never actually discuss but which appears to be around 800, and we'll see if it nets me fewer complaints. And I'm going to start... last Friday! This blog is officially 3 days late, but I figured apologizing could get me a couple of extra words.

As of that last paragraph, I was at 2338 chars, or 437 five-letter words, at least in the first draft. I'll spend the rest of today's entry explaining how I knew that.

Since I'm writing this in Emacs (where else?) I need an Emacs command that will count the non-whitespace characters in the current buffer and tell me how many there are so far, plus divide by five to show how many "words" I've written, since as we all know from fifth-grade English class, words are always five letters.

First I type C-x 2 and switch to my *scratch* buffer. You can write lisp code there. When it's tested, you can copy it into a file somewhere that's loaded by your .emacs.

I start with the basic interactive function skeleton:

(defun blog-column-length ()
  "Print stats on current blog column, or blogollum, or whatever"
  (interactive)
  (message "hi there"))

That's pretty much the minimal command you can invoke with M-x. After typing it out, I put the cursor anywhere inside the function definition and type M-C-x (i.e., Ctrl-Alt-x) to evaluate it. Note that we don't have to restart Emacs to do this. *Ahem*. At least Eclipse comes with free bullets.

Now we can type M-x blog-column-length to see the "hi there" message printed to the minibuffer. If I were doing lots of output, I could use with-output-to-temp-buffer, but I figure this can just be a one-liner. The (message) function takes arguments similar to C's printf.

Note: by evaluating my function, I've fully integrated it into Emacs. I can tab-complete the command name, do M-x describe-function to read the help string, do M-x apropos blog to find it in the list of commands that have 'blog' in the name, and so on. Emacs is cool. Why aren't all editors like this?

I mean, if you were trying to follow along with our little exercise in Eclipse, at this point you might have it out of the box, maybe, but there would be parts all over the floor, styrofoam everywhere, and you'd be staring at the 10-page Hello, World demo trying to figure out where main() goes. Good ole Eclipse. And I hear the Visual Studio team was jealous of Eclipse's "lightweight" plugin system. (Is it any wonder that developers never customize their tools? Jeez.)

Anyway, all that's left is to count the characters. It helps to know one wacky thing about Emacs: most functions are written as scripted versions of exactly what you would have done by hand. That's how it got to be called "Emacs" — Editor Macros. As you learn the editor commands, you're also learning how to program Emacs, because you can use all those commands in your elisp code. Sweet!

There are lots of ways to count the non-whitespace characters in the buffer, but the first one that came to mind is to go to the beginning of the buffer and start looking at each character, incrementing some counter if it's not whitespace, and keep going until we get to the end of the buffer.

So that's what we'll do. First, go to the beginning of the buffer:

(goto-char (point-min))

You could also use

(beginning-of-buffer)

if you prefer. No biggie.

Then we need a loop. How about "while"? Sounds good to me. Let's loop while we're not at the end of the buffer:

(while (not (eobp))
      )

It's good to know all the little functions for testing if you're at the beginning of the line (bolp), end of line (eolp), beginning of buffer (bobp), end of buffer (eobp), etc. 'p' means predicate; i.e. a function that returns true/false. It's just a lispy naming convention.

Oh, let's wrap the whole thing in a save-excursion. That's an emacs macro that saves/restores the point and mark around any editing operations. If you want to be able to run your command without affecting the user's actual cursor position, use save-excursion. You see it all over. There's even a haiku about it:

The friends chat gaily,
I stand up to join their talk.
My save-excursion.

Really. It's a real Emacs haiku. Look it up! The only Eclipse haiku I know goes like this:

startApplication()
thenWaitFriggingForever()
thenItGoesRealSlow()

That's what they used to say about Emacs, but then hardware got faster so they needed a new elephant.

Anyway, here's what we've got so far:

(defun blog-column-length ()
  "Print stats on current blog column, or blogollum, or whatever"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (not (eobp))
      ;; we're going to increment a counter in here
     )
    (message "count will be displayed here")))

First, we need to declare a variable. I'm tellin' ya: declaring your variables is all the rage these days.

(let ((char-count 0))

This declares a variable char-count, initialized to zero, within the scope of the let-block, which is sort of like a curly-brace block in C or Java. The extra parens date back to 1955, and they get real grumpy if you mention them, so let's not.

Next we need to say "unless we're looking at a whitespace char, increment char-count". Here's how:

(unless (looking-at "[ \t\r\n]")
  (incf char-count))

Gosh. And everyone always says they despise Lisp. It's not that hard, is it? The only trick is knowing where to put the parentheses, and that's easy. It's just (function arg arg arg). If arg is a call to a function, then you parenthesize it, and it all nests nicely, sorta like XML but without all the yelling.

Plus those extra ones around the let-declaration, but we don't talk about them, remember? That's how you remember them.

Then we move the cursor forward:

(forward-char 1)

Putting it all together:

(defun blog-column-length ()
  "Print stats on current blog column, or blogollum, or whatever"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (let ((char-count 0))
      (while (not (eobp))
        (unless (looking-at "[ \t\r\n]")
          (incf char-count))
        (forward-char 1))
      (message "%d chars, %d words" char-count (/ char-count 5)))))

Et voila. Almost exactly 1 hour. Well, 90 minutes, but who's counting.

6936 chars, 1387 words. OK, it's a little longer than my target, but what's a few words in the pursuit of Emacs education between friends? Plus I got a couple of jabs in at Eclipse, so it's not a total loss.

See you all next week!

Blogger's Block #1: Joelprah

Part 1 of an N-part series of short posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract. Hold your nose!

Ever since my last entry I've had blogger's block. Haven't been able to write a thing. I've tried, but haven't made any progress on anything.

Partly it's because I hinted I'd be writing about a controversial technical topic next. I was going to, but I can't seem to bring myself to talk about it. I've tried exactly umpteen approaches, many of them over half finished. None of them quite hit the mark. You make a promise like that, and I think you'll find it hard to keep. I know I have.

It's also partly because I was finishing up a long-ish project at work, and then I went on a much-needed vacation for 2 weeks. Of course I just stayed at home and worked on a new Ruby on Rails site, which might not sound like much of a vacation to you, but if you've been working with the web technologies I've been working with lately... let's just say RoR is like having a pillow surgically removed from your face. I can breathe again.

Incidentally, my game-and-blog server has been down for a week, since I decided to shepherd it into our current century by upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to the latest Ubuntu. Wow. Ubuntu rocks. Everything just works, including apt-getting a smp kernel and rebooting. So now I can drag the server back to the dismal concrete bunker in downtown Seattle where my ISP hosts the thing.

I moved the old Drunken Blog Rants, though. They're now all hosted in
pages.google.com. They were (inexplicably, as always) getting a lot of traffic, and it was really eating into the CPU and bandwidth for my game, so I've moved them to a place where they'll presumably have better latency and availability. When my old server comes back online, I've just told Apache to do permanent redirects for the 50-odd articles.

Putting them in Google Pages was pretty easy. I eventually wound up getting to where I could port one in about 90 seconds, so the whole exercise only took a few hours. It really was the perfect place to host them: they're mostly static content, and I just needed a permanent place for them to live. Google has a way of creating things I actually use. Blogger's just good enough. The spreadsheet is just good enough (I use it for my diet log). Google Pages is just good enough. And so on. I'm living more and more in my browser now because of Google.

I work there now, you know. A teeny fish in a big ocean of brilliant people. I'll blog about that a bit in one of my upcoming bloguettes, I think.

So where was I? Oh yeah. Blogger's block. It wasn't just the Mystery Tech Topic that's had me blocked, nor was it entirely the vacation. There are some other weird things going on, and I'm going to have to learn to deal with them or I'll never be able to write anything again.

First, my blog got really popular after Joel Spolsky linked to it. That guy is like the Oprah Winfrey of tech blogging. Yeah, I watch Oprah. I can't help it. When my wife's watching it, I try to ignore it as best I can. But then I sneak a peek, or I laugh at one of her jokes or one of her guests' jokes, and then I'm hooked until it's over. My wife Linh says Oprah is the most powerful woman in the U.S. Linh says that if Oprah told every woman in the United States to go jump off a cliff, they'd do it. Oprah, don't do it!

Well, if Joel told all the techies to go jump off a cliff, I'm sure only a handful of them would do it, probably just the parkour wannabes. But when he tells them all to go read my blog... well, I used to get a max of 8,000 to 9,000 hits a day. After Joel linked to me a couple of times, about 70,000 people came and peered at my blog, most of them newcomers.

After your blog gets that popular, even for a little while, you'd better grow a thick skin fast. I've seen people praise Joel and bash on Joel (more of the former, generally), and I've been able to read both sides with interest but without emotion. Just try doing the no-emotion thing when they're talking about YOU.

I mean 70,000 people is like a stadium-full. Imagine all of them glaring at you. Imagine them wanting to lynch you! Some of them did!

So I'd been planning to write an entry once a week, even a small one, and thanks to the Mystery Topic and Oprah-Joel and my work project and my vacation and whatnot, I haven't posted in over a month.

To help me overcome this block-thing, I'm just going to post small stuff for a while. It's the #1 rule of blogging, you know: when in doubt, spew it out. If you say something incredibly stupid and insensitive, no big deal, everyone will just despise you.

D'oh.

Well, we'll see how it goes. Maybe writing short articles will help. I have a whole bunch of things queued up that I'd like to write about. Maybe just writing about them will clear this whole blog-constipation problem up, and I can get back to pooping out entries with my usual, um, ah... my metaphor has stretched to the breaking point here... with my usual "aplomb". Ahem.

If that fails, I might just start writing under a pen name. Heck, my blogs would probably be a lot better for it, and more frequent to boot.

This is a hard problem. We'll see how it goes!

A programmer's view of the Universe, part 3: The Death of Richard Dawkins

We're getting close to the end of my blog. After today's entry, I only have three left to write. After that, I'll only blog anonymously or (more likely) not at all.

This is part three of five in my "Programmer's View of the Universe" series. I struggled for a while with how best to introduce the ideas in this installment, and ultimately opted for a short story.

This is a science fiction short story. It's different from many other sci-fi stories in that it is set in the "near future", but it has realistic schedule estimates. So unlike 1984, 2001, The Singularity is Near and all the other sci-fi stories that grossly underestimated their project durations, this one is set 1000 years in the future. I.e., right around the corner.

The story is disrespectful to pretty much everyone in the world. It will create a fantastic shit storm. This is probably a good time to point out that I don't speak for my employer. [Edit: Yay for fiction! Apparently marking something as fiction placates people. Nice to know.]

The story is 18 pages (PDF from Google Docs print preview). That's not unusual for my blog, but I went ahead and published it as a standalone document.

I'd encourage you to enjoy it, but I'm old and embittered enough to know better. You probably shouldn't even read it. Just wait for someone to summarize it for you.

Installments 4 and 5 will not be short stories; they will be regular old blog rants. In them I will further develop these ideas, and I will also attempt to clear up any gross misconceptions about the story, of which there are bound to be many.

My final blog-rant entry is the only one I care about anymore. I've been working on it so hard that my fingers have started to fail. It's been tons of fun, aside from the chronic pain. It's about a neat programming language, and Emacs, and lots of other stuff. I can't wait!

Oh yeah. Here's the link to the story. I've never done a read-only Google Docs link before, so it's probably broken. Or editable. I don't know. We'll see.

This week is going to suck. People are going to be mad. Maybe I should take a vacation and come back when the whining is finished. Can someone email me and let me know when it's all blown over?

Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter

I'm always getting criticized for writing long blogs. "Way too verbose! Couldn't he have said all that in two paragraphs?" Not everyone feels that way, of course; lots of people tell me to keep doing what I'm doing. But the size critics are doggedly persistent. And I don't think it's just people who are slow readers. Even friends of mine will sometimes advise me to trim my entries down, which is a surprise, since I thought most of them would have picked up on the cause and effect relationship between blog length and popularity. Evidently not!

So, like, let's get this out in the open: I'm doing it on purpose. Yes, sure, I could do with an editor (the people kind), but only if said editor were on board with long blogs, because that's the kind I want to write.

In short, I think long blogs have better survival characteristics: greater reach and greater impact. And I've decided to celebrate the august occasion of the 1000th kneebiter publicly maligning my style by explaining why I do it. And yes, it'll be long. Set aside at least 20 minutes to read this thing. You've been warned!

The Expectations Problem

Let's start with the obvious. People expect blogs to be short – at least, shorter than mine. They expect that because it's pretty much how everyone does it. Short entries, and frequent. Here's my cat today. Doesn't he look sooo different from yesterday? No wonder so many people hate bloggers.

When I write my long blogs, I'm bucking established social convention, so it's natural that some people will whine that they're too long.

Well, how far off cultural expectations am I? Doing a quick print preview in my browser shows that my last entry, formatted at about 14 words per line (typical for a printed book) weighs in at about ten pages. So it's roughly essay-sized. I'm not talking about those toy five-paragraph essays they made you write in high school. I'm talking about real-life essays by real-life essayists. Real essays can range from three pages to 30 or more, but ten pages is not an unusual length.

If I were attempting to publish these entries as books, publishers would laugh at me. They're way too short to be books. Sure, I could bundle them, but that's beside the point. The fact is, two different real-world audiences have entirely incompatible views on what the proper length for my writing should be.

Trying for Essays

I like to shift between writing articles and essays. The two overlap to some extent, in that an "opinion article" can be essay-like. But an essay attempts to be richer and deeper than an article. Essays can take all sorts of forms – prose, poems, stage plays, screenplays, short stories, even songs. And yes, they can take the form of blog entries.

Essays have different goals: some introduce new ideas, some aim to change minds that have been made up, some try to rally people to a cause, some just poke fun. Regardless of the goal, I think what unites them as essays is that they strive to imprint the reader with an idea, some hopefully unforgettable perspective, even if the reader doesn't necessarily agree with it.

Essays might use humor to endear you, or satire to shock you, or storytelling to entertain and lull you, or logic to convince you, or rhetoric to persuade you, but in the end they're trying all trying to imprint you with a little piece of the essayist's personal perspective on life.

So we've established that my longer entries are for the most part essays in blog form, with nary a cat picture to be found. I think the appearance of my entries in feed-readers alongside cat pictures and other non-essays is a big contributor to why so many people feel they're too long. If I instead herded them off into a page titled "Essays", as essayist Paul Graham does, then my guests might arrive with more appropriate expectations.

But let's face it – that's more work. Blogs are the closest thing we've got today to a ready-made, turn-key, high-availability essay publishing system, one that permits comments, subscriptions, biographical links and the other trappings you'd expect. It's not ideal – I even talked about this in my first-ever Blogger entry, but none of the issues I raised then have been resolved, doubtless because most people don't write essays, so there isn't a pressing need.

Blogging's the best medium I've got today, so that's where I publish my essays.

Amusing true side-story: I met Paul Graham at Foo Camp last summer. After his crowd of admirers had dispersed on the first day (he's pretty famous), I came up and introduced myself. He was very nice and polite, and he was even kind enough to venture: "I've read some of your ...essays." He said the word essays with this funny pained look on his face, as if he'd just swallowed a gob of wasabi and was trying to play it off like nothing was wrong. I think he meant well, but that expression was just priceless.

I already knew my work wasn't for everyone. :)

Anyway, there's more to the long-blog problem than mere expectations. You can still make a valid argument that my entries are too long even for essays, or at any rate for the material I'm covering or the points I'm making. And I'll still disagree with you. Let's see why.

Blowing the Cache

So, I have this pet theory I'm going to foist on you. It's probably total hokum, and someday I may be proven as wrong as Lamarck, but for now it's a hypothesis that fits the data pretty well.

First, let me tell you what the pet theory is about. I talked about it a little in an essay I wrote in 2004, You Should Write Blogs. In the essay I outlined some unexpected behavior of an essay my friend had written and circulated at Amazon: nobody read the thing, but somehow a year later everyone knew about it, and its core message had been imprinted on everyone in the company, up to and including the executive staff.

In the intervening three years since I wrote that essay, my own blog has taken off to level that can only be described as absurd. I've been lampooned in web comics, discussed endlessly on Reddit, Slashdotted, invited to Foo Camp and various big conferences, approached about writing books, recruited constantly, and heckled mercilessly by my coworkers, all of whom are smarter than I am, both technically and also in the sense that they don't make public asses of themselves once a month.

It's undeniable that I'm doing something right, at least in terms of reach. My blogs may or may not be any good, but they're widely read. So are they really too long?

Well, people always tell me: "Steve, you'd be doing yourself – and us – a huge favor if you just made your entries shorter." So I try it now and again, and I've observed a correlation between blog size and splash size. It's as if you're all in a pond, and I'm throwing a rock into it. Bigger rock, bigger splash.

I think you can actually stretch that metaphor one more level. I think if I throw in a sufficiently large rock, it'll crush you, which for most of you is an undesirable outcome. The rock needs to be big enough to splash you and get you all wet, but it shouldn't kill you.

To translate that bizarre thought into non-metaphorical terms, a blog that's too big will cause "too many" readers to drop off, for some value of "too many". A longer entry means that fewer people will read it immediately, although I'd argue based on experience that longer entries that are worth reading will ultimately achieve a wider audience. It just takes longer for them to make the rounds - sometimes months or years. But there's a tradeoff there. It can be useful to make a big splash all at once, in the style of Gladwell's Tipping Point.

So we've got a tricky number to solve for. Very short entries get ignored; I've tried that. Longer entries can make a splash but may not have broad long-term staying power. Very long entries tire people out, so they can take years to make the rounds. What's the right length for making a big splash the day it's published?

That's where my pet theory comes in. Oh, you may laugh! Ha, ha, you might say! But I, who know absolutely nothing whatsoever about Cognitive Science, have a pop cog-sci theory about the right length for an essay.

The right length for an essay, I believe, is exactly "one sitting": no more, no less. You should be able to read and absorb it fully in one go, with no breaks. Moreover, after you finish, you should be at the point where you need to take a break. You should want to stand up, stretch your legs, grab a coffee, play some foosball, get your mind off everything for a while. If you don't need a break after the essay, then it wasn't long enough.

I suspect the maximum length for a "sitting" is 50 minutes, given various government studies I learned about while I was in Navy Nuclear Power School. They determined that people absorb information best (and concentrate best) in school in 50-minute intervals with 10-minute breaks. They'd figured out all sorts of other stuff too: use outline form, make the students copy the outline into a notebook, repeat everything exactly 3 times, and so on, all ways they'd found that lead to better retention of the material. But the 50-minute thing seemed intuitively reasonable. Those ten-minute breaks were indispensable.

I actually think 50 minutes is the absolute upper bound for a sitting; the optimal duration is probably lower. But the takeaway here is that one consequence of my pet theory, which we'll get to shortly, is that the ideal length for a blog is measured as a duration, not a word count.

Of course, that presents a problem, because duration is a function of word count and reading speed. I need to account for different personal speeds, and some folks like to read slowly. Heck, some don't even read at all. It's one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They can't read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them commenting all the time in my blogs: "I didn't actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same..." Lovely.

So I need to aim for something lower than 50 minutes, to make it possible for average readers, and then hope that for fast readers I'll still have blown their entire page cache. Being a fast reader is actually a disadvantage here.

Figured my pet theory out yet? I'll bet some of you have!

Stevey's Brain-Cache Theory of Essays

My pet theory is predicated on the hopefully obvious axiom that our brain is a computer. As a computer, even though it's structually different from a von Neumann machine, it's still constrained by the same laws of physics. Hence, it probably has a multi-level cache.

I have some even more farfetched pet theories about the architecture of this cache, but whatever the architecture, caches all share the property of being limited short-term storage.

I really want to talk more about how I think this cache works, and I keep deleting paragraphs about it. I'm in a bind: if I talk more about it, my pond-boulder will get too big and crush people. But if I don't, then I'll be accused of grossly oversimplifying.

So it goes. Let's oversimplify.

Your brain clearly has at least two obvious caches: your short-term memory and your long-term memory. Your long-term memory is more complex than a cache, but behaves like a cache in the way it forgets things that aren't refreshed periodically.

The Wikipedia entry on short-term memory, linked above, says short-term memory lasts about 20 seconds. And long-term memory, of course, is persistent and can last up to a lifetime.

My pet theory posits the existence of at least one second-level cache in your brain that holds data for a while before deciding whether to commit it to long-term memory. That "while" varies but is at least 10 to 15 minutes.

Of course, writing the theory down like this makes all the holes in it pretty obvious, and I'm way too lazy to try to patch them all up here. Following the best academic tradition, I leave the hole-patching as an exercise for the reader.

In my pet theory of the brain, such as it is, your second-level cache keeps track of all your sensory input for the past few minutes. It also serves as a scratchpad area for doing computation: if you're trying to follow a complex argument, you need to construct a graph: idea A leads to B and C, C implies D, etc. Even following a scene in a story requires a graph and some computation: think of a bank robbery movie scene with five people involved. Following its progress requires a little short-term memorization and some deduction, and your mind does this for you automatically for situations up to a certain low level of complexity.

What about bigger arguments and more complex scenarios? Well, if the graph is too big to fit in your second-level cache, then your brain needs to swap some ideas to "disk" (your long-term memory). This is also known as "learning stuff." Painful, I know. I've been there.

So my pet theory is that if you want to make a lasting impression, then you need to fill up the reader's second-level cache and start blowing pages (cache elements) out into their long-term memory. If you want to imprint them with something memorable, you've gotta flush it to disk. To fill the cache you have to create a story big enough to fill their short- and medium-term memory and start spilling over into long-term memory, at which point you're guaranteed that some of it will stick. It won't be just another funny blurb that your reader sees, laughs at, and immediately forgets.

This obviously entails some effort on the part of the reader, even if they're having fun. You watch a 2-hour movie and you'll be exhausted (or at least ready for a break) because your brain is busy swapping stuff out. It uses more energy because of those pesky laws of physics that led to the cache structure in the first place.

I think this whole idea scales up to N-level caching; if you write a whole book about something, and the reader manages to get through it all, then you've probably left them with a lot more long-term memories and patterns.

But a good essay is usually just trying to get one idea across. One idea, one big rock in the pond: one sitting, one story. That's my theory. And it's the thesis of this essay, with the conclusion being that the relationship between blog length and popularity is actually causative.

"There's one thing in particular that struck me..."

In the spirit of filling your second-level cache, I'd like to offer you just one detail of my pet architecture: I think our caches are only partly LRU; I think there's some randomness involved in which pages your short-term memory chooses to discard when you're interrupted with new data. In fact, if anything, they may be MRU (Most Recently Used), given that when you're having a conversation with your friend and you both get interrupted, you often can't remember the thing you were just now talking about, but you can both remember things you talked about a few minutes before.

If that's true, then the stuff that gets swapped to disk is probably different for every reader, and may be somewhat random. In other words, everyone comes away with some different memory of the essay. It's likely also in no small part a function of how well any given turn of phrase is a match for the reader's experience. So a good essay needs to try to say the same thing in a bunch of different ways, hoping that whenever the reader's brain decides to latch onto something that "strikes" them more or less permanently, it's hopefully related to the core message of the essay.

So everyone gets something different. But I think that's a good thing. If the readers come away thinking about it at all, the essay has succeeded.

Wrap-Up

There's more I could say about my style. Expectations and page-caching theories aside, I think there's entertainment value in a good story-essay; you can't really weave in good jokes without some supplemental material, for instance. And I like to tackle inherently complex topics because they're more interesting, so it's never as easy as summarizing with something as pithy as "Java sucks". It's not that simple, no matter how people want it to be so.

So yes, there's more I could say, but my gut tells me I've reached the one-sitting limit. So I'll wrap up here.

I know I've oversimplified. I know I have no business talking about cog sci when I've never even read a book on it, unless you count Gödel, Escher, Bach. And I know that even if I'm right, I may still sometimes overshoot the ideal length significantly.

But I'm convinced, and I hope you are now as well, that my blog entries are successful because of their length, and not in spite of it. It's OK if you don't agree with my pet theory as to why the longer ones are more successful; I've certainly got nothing but intuition backing me up here. But by getting you to disagree with it, I've left my mark. At least you'll remember the idea now. Consider yourself imprinted. This one's on the house!

At this point I recommend stretching your legs. Take a walk, get some fresh air, let those disk drives cool down. You can ponder this stuff later. It'll still be there in your brain, like it or not. I guarantee it.

Boring Stevey Status Update

I had an exciting morning of not getting fired today. Get this: I'm on a trip to Google's Mountain View headquarters, and was glancing at Reddit between meetings, and lo and behold, I was inexplicably in the Reddit Tabloids again, this time for being fired, or so people were speculating (far too hopefully, I might add. Geez.) Needless to say, I immediately put all my other work-related plans on "pause" while I tried to figure out whether I was, in fact, being fired. Can't accuse me of not having my priorities straight!

It turns out it was a minor mixup by an automated system, a system that decided to jump-start its own evolution by going directly from brownian motion to VP-level decision-making (2 evolutionary hops total. Hee.). This automated system had apparently just watched the movie Brazil, and thought it would be fun to send me off to Information Retrieval. So my account was disabled, from which lonely data point the Reddit crowd concluded that I must be getting fired right now, in real time, like OJ in his white SUV. And seeing as I was too surprised to think of a counter-hypothesis, I spent about 20 minutes in an undignified, trouser-soiling panic. Thanks, Reddit!

Anyhoo, after some friends inside Google had undone the mistake for me, I pondered the overall thrust of the Reddit comment thread ("You suck". "No, YOU suck." "Your mom sucks." comment score below threshold) and decided I really ought to write something. Otherwise I'm likely to fall off the wagon and disappear for a year. Time is just whooshing away. I wish I could get back to High School Time, where even a single hour-long class can seem like eternity, and 4 years is effectively infinite. Sigh.

I do have a bunch of half-finished blog posts lying around, but nothing has really gelled yet. So I guess I'll ramble about stuff I've been up to. You know. A status update. Blech.

Incidentally, I've decided to try to limit myself to roughly 1000-word posts, which is about the length of a newspaper column, near as I can tell. I'll prolly just call it 5000 non-whitespace characters, and write an Emacs function to tell me when I've gone over. Off the top of my head, maybe something like:

(defun blog-check ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (let ((count 0))
      (while (not (eobp))
        (unless (looking-at "\\s-")
          (incf count))
        (forward-char))
      (message "%s:  %d chars, %d words" 
               (if (<= count 5000)
                   "OK so far"
                 "Dude, too long")
               count
               (/ count 5)))))

which, when I run M-x blog-check, faithfully reports:

"You suck."  "No, YOU suck."  "Your mom sucks."

Oops, sorry. Wrong macro. My new function actually tells me:

OK so far:  2177 chars, 435 words.

Halfway there, baby!

So... In 500-ish remaining words, here are the first things that come to mind as I sit in this comfy modern-looking couch in Building 43 of Google's Mountain View headquarters.

JavaScript

I've been doing a lot of JavaScript-related stuff lately. I don't know if JavaScript 2 (aka ECMAScript Edition 4) is going to be the Next Big Language, but it's certainly going to be a Next Big Language. (There's room for more than one, obviously.) And in the meantime, well, JavaScript 1.7 is working plenty well for me.

Let's see... I'm working on a book on Mozilla Rhino with Norris Boyd (the primary author of Rhino, now a Googler in Boston). It's coming along in bursts, and is probably about 10% complete after 3 months of dorking around with it on weekends between football games (that goes for both me and Norris, as it turns out, although his team is 12-0, dammit). But it should be a pretty cool book, assuming football season ever ends. The book is pretty much where all my Joke Output has been focused lately, which hopefully helps explain my recent blog drought.

I've been watching the EcmaScript Edition 4 fireworks with keen interest. While I wouldn't want to name any specific parties, for fear of offending someone, it seems to me that one party, whom I'll refer to as "Uncle Mike", is up to his perverted old tricks again. If, like many others, you feel that "Uncle Mike" is being a "complete dickwad" (to put it as euphemistically as I can) then you can help by getting all your friends and sales people and random family members to switch to Firefox. Really. It'll help.

You might also write a polite letter to your favorite Ecma General Assembly Voting Member Company, telling them how much you and your ten thousand closest friends are really looking forward to the imminent ratification of EcmaScript Edition 4. Or hell, spam all of them. That's what Uncle Mike does.

NBE

Continuing in the spirit of freeing all my cats from bag-imprisonment, I should also mention I've been working on an Ecma-262 compliant JavaScript interpreter in Emacs-Lisp. I used to have actual details here, but it ate up 1000+ words, so I'll just summarize for ya.

The short synopsis is that I'm building a complete JavaScript environment in Emacs-Lisp, with two goals: (1) create a world-class JavaScript IDE for Emacs, and (2) permit writing Emacs extensions in JavaScript, since (2a) people aren't exactly flocking to elisp, and (2b) JavaScript turns out to be a better language, now that I know them both in excruciating detail. Emacs is a great environment that needs a better extension language, and JavaScript seems well suited to navigate the popularity-vs.-elegance tightrope I'm faced with.

That's the elevator pitch: puts people to sleep in 20 seconds, guaranteed.

The status-in-brief is that I now have a fully functional, Ecma-262 compliant JavaScript interpreter and runtime in elisp, which began as a port of Narcissus. I'm currently reworking the parser and parse tree to be faster and more IDE-friendly. Next I'll need to turn the interpreter into a byte-compiler that emits Emacs-Lisp bytecode, which should enable it to run as fast as (or faster than) Emacs-Lisp. Then I'll need to actually write the IDE and the emacs host objects.

The whole thing looks to be at least a year out, at least on my current budget of 3 hours a week, so don't hold your breath. I'm giving priority to the IDE functionality, since I kinda need it for other projects, so that could potentially happen by summer.

If you happen to think of a clever name for this project, please let me know.

Other Stuff

Well, this 1000-word limit is... a toughie. I've already blown through it, although hopefully I get some slack for counting HTML tags. But I have to wrap up, so I'll close with some Unsubstantiated Random Thoughts that maybe I can clarify in upcoming crudely-truncated entries:

Google continues to be an astoundingly awesome place to work. Like my friend Dominic says, "it feels like I've won the lottery every day."

Our Rhino on Rails framework is still working great for us, and has finally begun to gain serious internal momentum at Google. Hopefully next year we can open-source it.

Interviewing for tech jobs at Google continues to be really hard (for both interviewer and interviewee), and I've accumulated enough truly useful interviewee-prep tips to merit a full blog post. Look for that one soon.

I still use Emacs to an extent that could justifiably be described as "unhealthy". I'd love to do another Effective Emacs post someday.

I still watch a lot of Anime. Currently watching Le Chevalier D'Eon, which is pretty awesome so far.

I taught my dog Cino to play guitar, a feat which so astounds people that they all say I should put it on YouTube, so there's Yet Another Side Project for me.

I'd love to write more about all this. The 1000-word limit seems to have made it feasible for me to create posts in a single sitting, with no bathroom breaks, provided I can actually go to 1500 "words". So hopefully in addition to all my side projects, I can blog more often.

And with that, I'm going to get back to my "day job" project(s), which are sadly confidential. But they're so cool that if I did tell you about them, you'd be so overwhelmed that you'd have to go sit in one of our $5000-ish massage chairs, like the dude sitting next to me right now.

Man this place rocks.

Psh. Whatever!

How the hell do I write stuff? It just comes out, like poop, and the result is usually nearly indistinguishable.

Brad Pitt, in an interview, once said something like: "I don't know what the hell I'm doing up there in front of the camera. Really, I have no f---ing clue." He's become quite an actor, hasn't he? Maybe you've decided he'll never be Bogart (he's got a few years to go, though, doesn't he?), but you have to admit he's a lot better than various actors-who-always-play-themselves whose names rhyme with Rom Ruise.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply even indirectly that I'm a good writer; I know better. Don't ask me how I know — I'd have to think of seven words in the right order to explain it. I just know. I suck.

I do read my old entries occasionally, though, and I think: "Gosh, how the hell do I write that stuff? I could never do that! Well, er, I mean now, that is. Obviously I did it before. Just what are you trying to say, anyway? Do you think I'm some sorta dumbass?"

I wonder.

Dave

I learned to write from my brother Dave, who as far as I can tell wasn't a very good writer. He was a good Liver, to coin an utterly awful phrase; he lived, and that's always better than writing. Writing just tries to show you how people lived, and it never comes close, never gives you that rush of being there just when something wonderful is happening.

Dave died, you know. I've often thought that if I ever wrote a book, it'd be about Dave. He just kinda got sick one day. We golfed, we biked, we had long late-night discussions about his philosophy class, we reminisced about things you could never repeat, during the years we lived in different states, stuff happening mostly at parties, teenager sins you committed as a teenager. Fun stuff. Nothing you didn't do yourself, of course, but it's still unprintable.

He died. I've been dead ever since then, you know. I didn't close my eyes for a single night, for four years after he died, without thinking of offing myself, becaused I missed him so much. My brother Mike knows; my brother Kevin knows; my Dad and Mom both know. We were all there. It's like losing a limb, but worse. So much worse. I realized after Dave died that I'd glady have given both arms and both legs to have him back. I would.

Everyone loved Dave. Everyone wanted to be Dave. Dave had wine-tasting parties at his little apartment; he taught us all to golf and to keep aquariums and to mountain bike and to appreciate the fine points of football strategy. He had a soul-beagle, Bentley, who still misses him to this day.

He had a girlfriend, Nancy, who was more of a wife to him than any wife I know. My wife agrees, and she's only met Nancy once.

Dave just got sick one day. It happens. He didn't feel good. He was coughing. He had night sweats. You know, a cold. A fever. Bronchitis. Something nasty. Didn't want to get anyone else sick — I remember he would sit away from us on the couch so he wouldn't give it to anyone else. He was so considerate.

We didn't know it was a tumor. He was only 23; I mean, come on. He was an all-star football player in high school. You don't get tumors when you're 23.

His doctor mis-diagnosed him, twice. It's OK; we forgive him. It's been 8 years, and I think we all forgive him now. I had a friend in the Navy, back when I was in the Navy, who got mis-diagnosed. It happens. His doctor said he had, I dunno, a cold, something lame. He had leukemia. Doctor mis-diagnosed him twice, just like Dave. With Dave, the doc said it was bronchitis, nasty case, definitely needed bedrest.

The Navy friend got heli-lifted off the sub to a medical facility in Oregon. He didn't make it.

Dave didn't get to ride in a helicopter, but he did get an ambulance. On the 3rd visit to his doctor, the doc took his oxygen level and said: "Ooh, time for the ambulance." Dave trusted him. Turns out Dave had lymphoma, and pretty advanced. No reason. No family history. He just had it. Maybe the environment. Maybe too much coffee or nutra-sweet. Nobody knows. And like everything else in Dave's life, his lymphoma was world-class. It ate him up in a way that no other cancer could.

You really don't want to hear about that part. Trust me.

We trusted Dave. He had a sense of humor like you've never, ever seen or heard before. It would take up several chapters in my book. Dave could make people laugh who had obviously not laughed in years; he'd crack a joke, something made up on the spot, context-sensitive and all, and they'd HAW, HAW, *hack* *cough* HAW HAW HAW until we thought they were going to have a stroke. Dave was the only person I knew who could make someone laugh so hard that I thought they were physically uncomfortable.

So it goes.

I'm not going to make my blog about anything at all. You can peg me as a programming-language guy, or a would-be math guy, or an inconsiderate jerk who says bad things about the vehicle with which you earn your living. But that's not what I'm about. Because I appreciate that you're reading this, I really do, but I'm not writing it for you. I don't know you.

I'm writing for Dave. I sure miss him. We all do. Everyone from Geoworks misses him. They made him a big banner, back when we knew he was sick, but we didn't know it was that bad. I mean, I should have known. The first day in the hospital, after his ambulance trip, after he passed out from lack of oxygen at community college from climbing six flights of stairs from a broken elevator, with a tumor the size of your fist growing between his heart and lungs, and the nurses asked him what he'd been doing that day, and he said he passed out trying to go to class, and he said their eyes got all big and round, I should have known.

Because his doctor started crying. I've never seen that before, and I hope to God I never see it again. She was the visiting doctor, the resident, whatever they have at 10pm at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, Washington, the place Dave spent the next year and a half, the rest of his life. She looked at his chart that first day, and said some encouraging words to him, and then as we were walking down the hall, me and my mom and this strange doctor, she was crying. We thought that was kind of weird, because you don't cry in public, especially if you're a doctor, especially hanging around the family of someone you just saw.

Dave made so many jokes that we couldn't even understand them all, there in the hospital. The nurses loved him. One nurse told him: "You were the best! Even Dr. Wasserman says so!" Dave kidded her for the next four months over that one. "Don't refer to me in the past tense!" I saw her blush every time he mumbled it through the morphine. But he knew and she knew and I knew that he was just messing with her, just having fun on his deathbed. Who else can do that? Not me, I don't think. I don't know.

I remember a road trip, one we did in our parents' van way back when, and our little brother Kevin was about seven years old. Dave taught Kevin to say: "Psh! Whatever!" It took him a little while to grok the concept. The idea was that any time someone said anything you disagreed with, or even if you just felt like it, you would reply: "Psh! Whatever!" You could substitute the socially acceptable variant "Tsk! Whatever!" as long as you could produce a suitably sardonic clicking sound with your tongue, a sound to make Zulu heads turn in envious surprise. Dave had mastered the depreciating tongue-click. For mere mortals, the acceptable default was "Psh!"

My stepmom Mindy was less than pleased. "Kevin, don't you listen to them!"

You wouldn't believe the cheering that me, Mike and Dave produced at 7-year-old Kevin's beautifully crafted response: "Psh, whatever!" (Hi, Min!)

Dave imparted me and everyone near him with a sense of humor, by osmosis, although we were all really just a pale shadow. He had his world-class sense of humor until the very very end. A few months before then, I was visiting him in his hospital room, and he told me in thick, steroid-induced tones (after having thrown up his esophagus the night before, which he recounted to me with some surprise as being like spitting up long filets of salmon) that he'd lost bowel control a few days back, because of the chemotherapy, and he'd had an incident "like the one in Trainspotting". I hadn't seen Trainspotting at the time, but I got the picture. I didn't know what to say, so he chimed in, almost unintelligibly:

"Look on the bright side: at least I didn't have to clean it up!"

How could I laugh? How could I not laugh?

I'll say some pretty strange or seemingly mean things in my time, in my blogs, but you have to keep it all in perspective. My brother was tortured to death. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but aside from the miracle of morphine, those folks in medieval torture chambers had nothing on him. His suffering lasted 18 months, during which he basically dissolved, for all intents and purposes, and in the end I think (not really knowing, myself, but guessing) that the worst part was psychological. Facing your own death at 23 years old is pretty scary. Especially when you're melting.

So I probably have a slightly different perspective than you do. To me, it doesn't matter all that much anymore. I just try to make people around me happy, and enjoy myself, until, you know, I have some sort of major Trainspotting incident. Hopefully one that I don't personally have to clean up.

I don't really mean to be mean, though. I hope you realize that.

Stuff

Despite my best intentions, my blood pressure occasionally rises when I blog. Or more precisely, after I blog, because no bowel movement is ever inspected as scrupulously as the articles posted to Reddit. Even when my blog tries to be innocuous, the comments always seem to get to me.

My doctor says I might have bronchitis. What the hell do they teach med school students, anyway? It's as bad as a Computer Science degree.

I wish there were a way to request, respectfully, that certain of my articles not be posted to Reddit, because even though I want people to read them, I want them to read them at the right time. And that's different for everyone. Probabilistically speaking, the right time for most people is not going to be the day after I post them.

Then of course there's Digg, the Reddit for... Digg people, I guess. Diggers. Duggers. Whatever! Lord help you if you get Dugg, or whatever it is they do over there. And del.icio.us, which in addition to being hard to type is no longer the sprightly young company it once was, ever since You-know-hoo! bought them. Sometimes I wish I could just never be posted there.

That's not nice to the folks looking for karma, though, I guess, so really I just mean this entry, today.

I'd like to blog more about non-technical stuff. I feel like blogging about technical stuff is, well, you know. Dirty? Incestuous? It's not like I'd be saying anything you don't already know, or won't already know at some point, from someone else.

On the other hand, I always feel the (few) bloggers I read ought to stick to the same topics. If I'm reading Bill de hÓra, the only blogger I read regularly, and he suddenly starts talking about his dog, then I feel ripped off, as if the Discovery Channel had started doing a chef competition, or the Food Channel started doing specials on wrestling alligators.

That's not entirely fair of me, I know. People are always broader than what they blog about, but we sort of expect the best bloggers to stay on topic, to keep blogging about whatever we liked last time we read them.

Well, I'm going to take a deep breath, a leap of faith, and see if I can broaden my blogging to include non-cs-technical topics. Yes, some people will whine and moan about it; people will whine and moan about anything and everything. I do it too. But I'd love to blog about the movies I like, and video games, and music, and books, and people, and just plain old good times I've had. Because you never know how long it'll last.

I'd like to ask you, just one person to another, not to post this blog entry to Reddit, Digg or similar. I'd prefer that people learn about my brother Dave through some mechanism other than a newsfeed full of karma modders. You know? So I've deliberately avoided tech topics in this entry, in the hope that it will somehow pass unnoticed.

We'll see.

If not, well... psh! Whatever.

Miss you, Dave.

A programmer's view of the Universe, part 1: The fish

I write a column for computer programmers called "Stevey's Blog Rants." It's basically a magazine column — I publish to it about once a month. The average length of my articles is about 12 pages, although they can range anywhere from 4 to 40 pages, depending on how I'm feeling. But for precedent, don't think blogs: think of Reader's Digest. The blog format sets the wrong expectations.

Hence, some people complain that my articles are too long. Others complain that I have not given my arguments sufficient exposition, and that my articles are in fact too short on detail to warrant any credibility. This is a lose-lose situation for me, but I keep at it nonetheless because I enjoy writing. Even if nobody were to read my blog, the act of writing things down helps me think more clearly, and it's engaging in the same way that solving a Sudoku puzzle is engaging.

You should try it yourself. All it takes is a little practice.

My blog topics vary widely, and sometimes I even venture outside the realm of programming. Programming is where I'm most comfortable, and it's also where people seem to ascribe to me some level of punditry: I'm not necessarily right, but even my greatest detractors grudgingly admit that I'm entitled to an opinion, by virtue of my having spent twenty years hacking day and night without any sign of wanting to give it up and turn into a pointy-haired manager.

Even though I love both programming and to a lesser extent writing about it, there are also lots of non-programming topics I'd like to write about. Being a career programmer gives you an interesting perspective on issues not directly related to programming. You start to see parallels. So maybe I'll branch out some more and see how it goes.

The programmer's view

The first thing you notice as a programmer is that it trains you — forces you, really — to think in a disciplined way about complex logic problems. It also gives you a big booster shot of confidence around problem-solving in general. Junior programmers tend to have very high opinions of themselves; I was no exception.

In time, though, programming eventually humbles you, because it shows you the limits of your reasoning ability in ways that few other activities can match. Eventually every programmer becomes entangled in a system that is overwhelming in its complexity. As we grow in our abilities as programmers we learn to tackle increasingly complex systems. But every human programmer has limits, and some systems are just too hard to grapple with.

When this happens, we usually don't blame ourselves, nor think any less of ourselves. Instead we claim that it's someone else's fault, and it just needs a rewrite to help manage the complexity. In many cases this is even true.

Over time, our worldwide computer-programming community has discovered or invented better and better ways ways to organize programs and systems. We've managed to increase their functionality while keeping the complexity under control.

But even with such controls in place, systems can occasionally get out of hand. And sometimes they even need to be abandoned altogether, like a dog that's gone rabid. No matter how much time and love you've put into such systems, there's no fixing them.

Abandoning a system is a time of grieving for the folks who've worked on it. Such systems are like family.

And there's a disturbing lesson at the tail end of such experiences. The scary thing is that it's very easy, as a programmer standing at the precipice of complexity, to envision systems that are orders of magnitude more complex, millions of times more complex, even unimaginably more complex.

In the end, programming shows us how small we are.

The fish's view

Long ago, I used to have a Siamese fighting fish, also known as a Betta splendens, or simply a "betta". You can buy these fish at almost any pet store. I kept my betta, who was a deep vibrant red, in a pretty little 15-gallon tank decorated with a resplendence of real freshwater plants. And for a while I think my betta was happy there.

Like many Americans, I went through a phase in which I kept and ultimately killed many, many tropical fish. I didn't kill them intentionally; I wanted them to live and thrive. But keeping them alive for long is a challenge when you don't live in the tropics. So they might live for a few months or maybe a year, but they would always die prematurely. It was sad, and eventually I could no longer bear it, so I stopped keeping them.

Of all my fish, my betta left the biggest impression on me. The betta is a remarkable fish in several ways. For one thing, bettas are physically beautiful, and when they are at full display, their fins expand, peacock-like, into a fluid rose shape that is undeniably dramatic.

Bettas are also remarkable because they fight. They do not fight to establish a pecking order, as other fish do; they fight to kill. The males display their fins and then fight whenever they see another male betta, or even their own reflection, so they have to be kept alone and away from mirrors.

But bettas, I think, are most remarkable for their intelligence. Of all of the hundreds of tropical fish I kept, only bettas displayed anything resembling intellectual curiosity.

This really makes bettas some of the saddest stories in the tropical fish industry. Like other hobbyist fishes, they are stolen from their natural habitat and shipped overseas, or at best farmed in unsavory conditions. But unlike most other fish, bettas are also dyed to enhance their color. They are generally housed in tiny fist-sized bowls because of their ability to breathe air when necessary. And they are bred to express their fighting genes, and are often made to fight by their owners. Whereas other fish are kidnapped and sold, bettas are abused.

But worst of all, I believe their high intelligence endows them with greater capacity for suffering than other fish species. They can suffer physically and emotionally, but as we will see shortly, they can also suffer intellectually.

So bettas are a sad story.

My betta

Here is the specific sad story of my betta, the fish that left such an impression on me.

I had taken to lying on my bed and watching my betta for an hour or longer. The betta was the sole occupant of the tank in my bedroom. I had filled the tank with plants and copious natural light, so the effect was calming and serene. At times I almost envied the betta for the nice home I'd made for him.

One day, after the betta had been in his new home for several weeks, I found him exploring. It was a most unusual exploration, and one that I will never forget.

For the first few weeks, the betta explored the way you would expect any reasonably intelligent fish to go about the task. For the first few days he swam around to every nook and cranny of the tank, to make sure he had the lay of the land. Then for a few more days he experimented with staying put in different locations to see how he liked their feel.

Just like people, most fish will soon find a spot or a path they like best, and they'll stay in that spot or on that path for the rest of their lives.

But my betta was different. After his initial explorations he became restless. I'm no Fish Whisperer, but I could tell that he was restless. You would have thought so too. The betta started spending most of his time looking out of the tank, examining my bedroom. And he was clearly looking at specific things in the bedroom, not just "out there" in general. He would periodically swim around looking mildly agitated. He was acting like he wanted out.

I did everything I could to placate him. I experimented with different fish foods. I changed the water weekly and monitored it carefully to keep its temperature and pH within acceptable ranges. I added more lights. I added more plants. I rearranged the plants. In desperation, I even added a little castle.

Every time I tried something new, it would pique his interest for a little while. But in time, and faster each time than before, he would revert to his state of restlessness.

I'd never seen quite this behavior in other fish, so already he was demonstrating what seemed to be above average intelligence.

And then one day I found him engaged in an exploration that was altogether new.

He wasn't exploring the tank. He'd already investigated its topology for weeks. This time, he was exploring the nature of the tank. That's what caught my attention, and not just for that day, but for the rest of my life.

There was a twenty-inch vine in the tank that extended from the lower left back corner to the upper right front corner, along the diagonal of the main volume of the tank. The vine belonged to one of the many plants I'd put in there in the hopes of making it feel more like the Mekong river basin and less like a plexiglass tank in Seattle, Washington.

The betta had his nose on the vine. He was floating just above it, twitching his fins slightly to stay in place, and he was keeping his eyes as close to the vine as possible while keeping it in focus: about half a centimeter to a centimeter. And he was traversing the vine.

With the tiniest of motions, he was propelling himself along the vine towards the lower back right corner, keeping it under close scrutiny at all times. This excursion, from the halfway point to the end of the vine, took him perhaps three minutes. He was taking his time.

When he got to the end of the vine, he remained rooted in place while he inspected the 3-inch-radius spherical volume at the end of the vine, which was truncated in three dimensions by the walls and floor of the tank. He spent about three or four minutes doing this inspection, evidently making sure the vine really did terminate in the corner, and did not escape the tank.

After he had thoroughly scrutinized everything in the betta-sized vicinity of the vine's end, he turned back to the vine, nose pressed close, and began working his way along the vine in the other direction.

At this point I sat down to watch, because if he was doing what I thought he might be doing, then... I didn't know what to think. I wanted to see it for myself.

Over the next seven to ten minutes, he crept along the vine, never losing sight of it nor getting further than a centimeter from it, until he reached the upper-right front corner of the tank. He then proceeded to repeat his inspection of the volume at vine's end, ensuring himself that the vine terminated in the tank rather than protruding beyond the wall.

But what if he had missed something?

Sure enough, he turned and looked down the length of the vine for a time. And then he put his nose back on the vine and began again his long descent to the other end.

He did this for five days.

By the second day my amazement had turned to concern, and by the third day I felt utterly helpless. Here was an intelligent prisoner, my captive, exploring the mechanics of his prison with a thoroughness that only the imprisoned can afford, looking for an escape with deathly tenacity.

But while purchasing my betta had been easy enough, returning him to his real home would be unthinkably difficult, and probably unsuccessful even if I'd tried. Returning him to the fish store seemed like a dead end; he could easily wind up worse off than he was now.

So I concluded that there was nothing I could do. As he inspected the vine, I bit my nails, and timed passed in silence.

After the fifth day he gave up. And then he did something that I still don't understand, even though I've heard about this kind of thing before, and even though I personally saw him do it: he died of unhappiness.

It only took him a few days. He refused his food, he stopped moving, and to all external appearances he had become ill. But I knew better.

The lesson

Whenever I find myself struggling against the tide of massive system complexity, I think of my betta. He had a big heart, a small brain, and a small range of sensory input. I watched him use them all as methodically as any programmer to reason his way through to a soundness proof of the inescapability of his prison.

We like to think of ourselves as being pretty smart. Admit it. We do. But in the grand scheme of things we're intellectually little better off than that fish. We can easily find problems so complex that reasoning about them can take days or weeks of microscopic scrutiny, like my fish swimming along his vine.

And we can just as easily envision problems thousands or millions of times more complex: problems beyond the reasoning abilities of any person, any group of people, or even our entire species.

This has ramifications for the way we think about things today.

I believe I will have more to say about this soon. Right now I need to go mourn my fish, whose soul shone as brightly as that of anyone I've known.

I take it all back! Send me your money!

Author's Note, written (shortly) after this entry — I'll spare you the suspense: today's post is crap! It's partly just a "hello, I'm still alive" ping, and partly an effort to close out some of the topics I opened recently, so I can move on to new things. And it does poorly at both. But I've been insanely busy at work for the past 2 months, and I wanted to get one more post in before the end of the year, so there's been no good time for it. We just recovered from a 3-day power outage in Kirkland after a nasty windstorm, so before diving back into work, I figured I'd throw these thoughts out, jumbled as they are. There's nothing new here, though.

After reading the first couple of comments, I've decided that my next few blogs will almost certainly be about Emacs hacking, since I've done a ton of that on the side lately. It's fun to talk about, and yields lots of prettily-colored code. So after the first of the year, look for some Emacs stuff from me.

---

Rumor has it that I've been eaten by Godzilla. There's a fat-joke in there somewhere, my gut tells me. Ahem. There's also apparently a rumor that I was abducted by the Agile Mafia, as if they were somehow competent enough to get past their standing morning meetings and do something about me. And there's evidently speculation that Google got mad at me for exposing how cool they were, and they locked me in a room filled with doughnuts and are forcing me to eat them all.

That last one is -almost- true, except the part about the lock on the door. They know all they need is the doughnuts.

Anyway, I figure I'd better write something before Godzilla really does eat me. Lord knows all this Google food is turning me into a target even Gojira-sama might notice.

I don't know what I'll end up writing about today, but let's start with my blog anniversary, shall we?

One-Year Blog-O'-Versary

Almost exactly a year ago (give or take a couple days), my buddy and fellow Googler Sean O'Connor was walking over to invite me to play foosball on our crappy old table, as we often did, when he mentioned in passing: "hey man, I read your blog".

"Sorry, which blog is that?" I hadn't blogged anything to my internal Google blog in a while, but I assumed that's what he meant.

"The one about Emacs".

That was just weird. I hadn't written anything about Emacs since back at the 'zon. What was weirder was that he was the third person that week to mention a blog entry of mine, which had never happened in my six-month tenure at Google, and each person had mentioned a different old Amazon entry.

A little investigation turned up that there was this spiffy new-ish user-posted news site called Reddit, a PG-startup site no less, and a bunch of my old Amazon internal blogs had been showing up there that week. Which was odd, because I had put them online fully six months earlier and then forgotten all about them. Why were they popping up now, all at once?

For lack of a better term, I'll call this phenomenon Essay Molasses. If you know what it's really called, please enlighten me. I wrote about it in my You Should Write Blogs essay back at Amazon, describing an essay my good friend Jacob Gabrielson had written (still Amazon proprietary info, alas, though it wouldn't hurt them to publish it now.) Almost nobody read it initially, to my considerable dismay, but after six or eight months its key ideas had mysteriously spread to virtually everyone with decision-making power in the company.

Essay Molasses is a time-delay on a meme that would otherwise spread rapidly, but because the idea is encoded in an essay from a relatively unknown author, most people aren't going to read it until it seems everyone else has read it. Like anything else, the growth rate is effectively exponential, so by the time you hear about it, it seems to have appeared overnight. But its initial readership is measured in days (or weeks) per person, rather than persons per day. By the time you hear about it, it may have been around for quite some time.

Based on my two data points — Jacob's essay and my Amazon blogs — I could conjecture that the time delay is about six to eight months. But I'm sure it's a function of context, and content. How long was it before Hardy noticed Ramanujan, or Einstein paid attention to Bose? (Not that anything I or Jacob have written is nearly so original nor valuable, of course, but I figured I'd pick some examples of Essay Molasses that you've actually heard about.)

Although I don't have anything resembling conclusive evidence, I think Essay Molasses is closely tied to the survival of the idea. It's a gestation period, and if you take away the essay that wraps the idea, the embryo won't survive. People accuse me of being long-winded, but it's not often that breaking short wind, amusing as it can be, has any real long-term effect.

I could use a good marketing name for this longer-is-better phenomenon too. The synopsis is that I think taking the time to write about something thoroughly gives it a greater (if slower) impact. Look at Gladwell's "The Tipping Point," or Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds." Either of their theses could have been succinctly expressed in a simple essay or paper, but would they have had the same global impact? I think not.

With respect to blogging and essays, researching your idea a bit is helpful, sure, but even just thinking about it carefully can often provide that nourishing yolk that gets your idea past the chicken-and-egg adoption phase and into the mainstream, where people can whine about how much they dislike you on Reddit. Ah, sweet, sweet success.

And taking too long to research it can effectively kill it. I've been blocked many times by the desire to turn an idea into a more formal thesis, when all I really needed to effect change was to get the idea out there. People are smart, and they'll figure out the remaining details (and omissions or errors on your part) quickly enough once you've got your basic idea across. So call it laziness, call it long-windedness, call it sloppy pseudo-journalism, but I'm writing the way I do because I suspect it yields the best ratio of effort to impact. Feel free to be your own judge!

So, after that six-month pregnant pause last year, my Amazon blogs burst out last December like a sudden, fierce, smelly wind, blowing everyone's hair back and causing mere candles to flame like war-torches. And I've emitted occasional new outbursts ever since.

The problem is that once you've said one or two things that are tolerably credible, everything else you write gets immediate attention, with no molasses anywhere in sight, and if you say something stupid it will be all over the place in no time. So it can be a little scary writing anything at all. It's no wonder people are so slow to publish research papers; they have to cover their arses tenfold, and hem and haw with the approriate disclamatory rituals to minimize the risk of being found wrong on some point, to their supposed perpetual embarrassment.

Of course Ramanujan was wrong about a lot of his theorems, and it doesn't mar his genius in the slightest. But most people would rather be right about something trivial, or simply not be heard at all, than be wrong occasionally in the quest to get their ideas out to others.

OK, I've said way too much on Essay Molasses. Presumably the lessons here are: (1) say what's on your mind, and don't worry overly much about being right or wrong or you'll delay the flow of ideas; (2) don't expect anyone to read your work until sufficient Essay Molasses has flowed slowly under the bridge, and (3) take some time to tell the whole tale. Even if people don't care for the destination, they might possibly enjoy the journey.

Agile Postscript

I've been thinking of writing some sort of Grand Finale to what would then become my Agile Trilogy, but none of my ruminations have really jelled into any, ah... any jelly worth... er, ruminating. *Cough* So rather than trying to make them pretty, I'll just dump my ideas on you in the buff. They're flitting around in my head like, oh, a bit like healing fairies from any Zelda game, if you really must know where I'd rather be right now, and I'm going to snatch them in mid-flight and put them in little jars for you to gawk at.

You can really tell when the wine gets ahead of the writing. I'm telling you.

First, I was going to write an earnest little memo from Karl Marx, written to Josef Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, along these lines:

Memo: Communist Imposition
To: Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong
From: Karl Marx

Dear esteemed General Secretary Stalin and PRC Chairman Mao,

I have lately been surfing the net and have heard alarming rumors to
the effect that certain regimes have been imposing their Communist
processes on the proletariat.  I assure you gentlemen that this
behavior is one hundred percent at odds with the core principles of my
Communist Manifesto.

To be sure, introducing Communism does sometimes requires a bit of
counterintuitive bloodshed in overthrowing the bourgeoisie.  However,
after the revolution, self-determination should be the rule: citizens
should stop and reflect at regular intervals on how to become more
effective, and adjust their behavior accordingly.  These rumors of
enforced adoption of personality cults, violent suppression of
non-Agi, er, I mean non-Communist Party ideas, and the blatant
exploitation of the working class — these are all distortions of
the ideas I set forth in my Manifesto.

Well I say: tsk, tsk.  All an educated man can hope for is that
continued patient education will eventually help people understand
what Communism is really about.  And I prefer to explain rather than
to kill dissenters.

Yours always,

Karl Marx 

Wouldn't that have been cute? Nah, you're right. Stupid. Plus, I kinda have a soft spot for Fowler on account of his Refactoring book (you know, the one none of you IntelliJ users actually read), so I'd have reservations about poking fun at him in public, even if he'd said something really dumb.

Next, I was thinking of responding individually to each of the 10 trillion comments I got on my last 2 blog entries, like so:

Commenter: Entertaining rant, but you just don't get it! Agile works for me, so it Must Be True.

Me: I take it all back! Give me your money! Oh, God, what have I done? Is it too late for me to get away with becoming a Feng Shui consultant? I had no idea how much money you can make by exploiting the credulous. Seriously. Had I only known... ohhhh, the pain... But given that I've pretty effectively excluded Agile Consulting from my agenda, how far afield must I reach before my balls are safe?

Commenter: Great post! It's the best!! If you've got a moment, please drop by http://www.i-beat-captcha.com and find out all about my spam thingy. Made it myself!!

Me: Mmmmmm.... Spaaaaammmmmm....

But I'm too lazy to respond to all of them personally. So, you know, just send all your disposable income to an Agile Consultant near you. Any one of them will do just fine. They all say the same thing: "You don't quiiiiiite get it yet. Cha-ching!"

NEXT, I was going to reflect on how I don't like ceremonies. Yeah. Seems unrelated, I know. But Agile, being a church and all, is big into ceremony and ritual. You'd think ceremony would kinda get in the way of actually getting real work done, but they'll tell you otherwise. So they get this aging bald guy to cut a big ribbon in front of the new mall... damn, I'm sorry. My bad, I've got the wrong ritual. They get an aging agile consultant to steep your team in all the latest stand-up rituals, including the all-important Passing the Hat ritual.

I'm not big into ceremony. I've known this for many, many years, since I was a wee youngun on my way to First Communion, and my intense dislike was deeply reinforced during my long tour in the heavily ceremony-laden U.S. Navy. I don't like dressing up. I don't even particularly care for the Two Big Ones: weddings and funerals. I can deeply appreciate receptions and wakes, since they're much less rehearsed, and peoples' true feelings tend to display. But ceremonies, where we all dress up and hold hands and mouth the expected mouthings, they're just not for me.

Maybe they're for you. If so, we differ, and I can respect that. Most people like their ceremonies; they think they're one of the things that separates from animals. Not true, of course; I've seen hippos and crocodiles performing the most amazing and heart-rending death-rituals on Discovery Channel. But ceremonies make people feel like, you know, life's all important and meaningful, and that big green mall-ribbon somehow imparts depth to an otherwise shallow and trivial historical event.

Not for me. And I see a clear connection between Agile, with its stand-up meetings and its status reports and its hokey project management artifacts, and the desperate need for ceremony. To me, ceremony is necessarily phony. Real ceremonies are unrehearsed, impromptu gatherings in which the participants stand momentarily in awe of the amazing events in which they are (almost always unexpectedly) partaking. Such occurrences happen once and only once per event. Spare me the Mall Grand Opening Guy.

FINALLY, in my third big Agile Installment, I was planning to demonstrate to all interested parties that Agile is simply about recycling tired ideas, nothing more. The Agile folks are entirely concerned with being able to predictably replicate shit that other people have already delivered: it's just the Church of Me-Too.

This last point seems pretty obvious, if you stop to think at all about it for a moment. Do we have Agile Modern Art, in which teams gather to predict how many days it will take to produce the next modern masterpiece? Do we have Agile Great American Novelists getting together in little self-help meetings to talk about how Operations Research can help them write the next Da Vinci Code? (You can just smell the jealousy on them, too. How did such a crap novel make it so big? A hundred thousand prospective Agile Authors have been asking themselves that since it farted itself into the public consciousness. Oh you can bet your sweet b-hind that I'm jealous. At least I admit it!)

The answer to all these rhetorical questions, is, of course: "eight?" (If you're a Simpsons fan, anyway. "Do I know what a rhetorical question is?" --Homer, in quite possibly the Best Line Ever.)

You can't predict the delivery or quality of great art, unless maybe you consider Thomas Kinkade to be Great Art. You can't predict the next Mark Twain or the next Douglas Hofstadter, and no amount of stand-up-meetingism is going to produce one for you. Index cards surely will not. But prediction is what half the Agile folks claim to stand for. Ah, prediction. How we look to our psychics, our soothsayers, our bookies. Now, yesterday, tomorrow, forever. We all yearn for prediction. But when you fall for that crap, you've fallen, like a star from the sky.

I predict that I won't last another glass of wine at this rate, so perhaps I should begin meandering towards a wrap-up.

It seems pretty clear to me, on reflection, that Agile is really all about being able to predict and manage the delivery of stuff that others have delivered. The same old tired websites, the same old inventory-management systems, the same old database-driven doohickeys that the consultants in question have seen a hundred times before.

That's fine and dandy. Wonderful, in fact. As long as someone else does it. You? Fine. Go for it. But I'm going to close this blog with a little belief of mine, one that you're most welcome and encouraged to disagree with, although it won't dissuade me in the least. Let's get to it, shall we?

The Silver Keyboard

In his Mythical Man-Month essay, Fred Brooks Jr. argues that our attitude towards software project management derives from our folklore, in which people cried out for a silver bullet to slay werewolves. But so far there's been no silver bullet: no single, magical, overnight 10x productivity gain.

So when you meet a werewolf: some project or task you're saddled with that threatens your livelihood, what can you do? Lacking a silver bullet, all you have is your own two hands. You grab your silver keyboard and start bashing away. That is to say, you roll up your sleeves and you do the work.

If your boss is a jerk, fire your boss. That much, I hope, is obvious. When I first wrote about software development at Google, most people wrote me and said "you pegged it." But a few people mailed me privately and said: "which Google do you work for? Because it's not like that for me at all!" The answer is: Google is what you make of it, for yourself. If your boss is a vampire, fire him or her! Google can't (and shouldn't) police every last nook and cranny of its own development organization. You need to make sure your group is Googley. And you know exactly what that means, so if it's not that way now, fix it!

And if you're not at Google, which many of you brilliant engineers out there are not, you still know what Googley means! It's the opposite of "sucky". If your organization or team or little cubicle cul-de-sac is un-Googley, then fix it! Googliness needn't be constrained to Google, however prevalent it might be there today.

But how? I mean, do you have that kind of power? You're just a peon like me, right? How can you fire your boss? Or for that matter, if your boss totally rocks in an unrecognized way, how do you promote your boss?

The answer is that you need to be confident. Agile consultants are on the lookout for weakness. If they espy it in you, they'll pounce! And you may not be strong enough to withstand their Agiley claims. I wouldn't have been, fifteen or twenty years ago.

But there's an out for you — for all of us: if you're a superstar, then your management chain needs you. They want the best for you, and if for some reason they don't, or they just don't understand how valuable you are, then they're doomed. Which means "screwed," in modern terminology.

So how do you make yourself a superstar? Never stop learning. I've heard people say they think this position is a crock, that it's ludicrous, that you couldn't possibly spend your whole career learning new things.

But I think differently. I think every program you write should be the hardest you've ever written. And that's what I blog about, mostly. Improving yourself. Because most employers, the ones who matter in the long run, they'll be able to see how great you've become, and they'll alter the very course of their business plan, if necessary, to make the best use of you. Does that sound incredible? Well, I've seen it play out both ways over my modest 20 years in our industry, and that's how I see it.

And that's my little belief. You're welcome to regard it or disregard it as you see fit. But I call my own shots. And even now, after I've found an employer who surrounds me with almost terrifyingly brilliant people, people far greater than I am in virtually any technical dimension you care to name, I can still tell, and tell them, when they've gone astray, and they listen. (Fortunately they rarely stray, and I'm still learning a ton from them every day. The benefit of working for Google, at this point, is still mostly mine.)

And it's a wrap!

My next few blogs, I think, will be about how to make yourself an engineer who's above the Agile Treadmill, who can call your own shots, do your own startup, whatever you see fit.

But I haven't been blogging for a reason. Well, actually a few. One is that I still feel a pressing need to earn my keep at Google, and I've been working like a demon possessed on a new framework of my own devising that I think will more than adequately pay my way for the past year here. Another is that I have an obligation to get my computer game, Wyvern, back online: an obligation to some 50,000 players (out of 250,000 who've tried the game) that I dursn't easily turn my back on. Plus I have some pretty cool stuff in store there, for you Wyverneers who may be listening. Once I get this Google project reasonably secured, that is.

And I do take my own advice: I read voraciously, and I spend as much time bettering myself as I can possibly muster. It's paid off so far, so I see no reason it shouldn't continue to do so.

But these past four hours are all I can afford towards blogging this quarter, so it'll have to do! Hopefully I've quelled any concerns (or hopes) that I've been eaten by Godzilla. And I'll see you all in the New Year, blogging afresh about fresh new topics, God willing.

Happy holidays, and Happy New Year!

p.s. We have 2 Tornado foosball tables in the Google Kirkland Office now. Amazing what just one short year can witness...