Seek Nuance

You’ve got a trip scheduled, say a vacation or technical conference, and you’re looking forward to it.

If the company asks you to cancel it because now’s not a good time to be out of the office, should you?

Is there ever a good time to be out of the office?

When do you bend, vs. drawing a line in the dirt and saying you won’t cross it?

I’m just asking the question.

Personal and professional integrity matter. They’re the most important gifts you can give yourself.

I’m reminded of this by an article I read today about a firm. I know a lot about this particular company. The article was, essentially, a marketing puff-piece, the kind of thing you read in a rag like the Puget Sound Business Journal. The news is always positive, everything’s great, and the future is so bright they have to wear shades. (Companies that go ventral fin up from poor strategy, execution, business models, marketing strategy, malfeasance, or outright stupidity never get written up.)

I expect spin from such articles. It’s OK. There’s a time and place for everything, including positioning a corporate brand or reputation, and spreading news about business opportunities.

But there’s a line you don’t cross. You don’t claim something that is not true. Period. Once you’ve done that, your credibility evaporates. Losing credibility is like losing privacy — once it happens, it’s awfully hard to restore. I have a long memory for negative-credibility moves, as do many (most?) others.

I counted three statements in this article that I know are false. A couple of others were borderline. I also know the company spokespeople interviewed in the article know they were false.

Such behavior is pathetic. Yeah, this is a hot button of mine.

Principles only mean something when you stick to them when it’s inconvenient.

- Laine Hanson, “The Contender”

Here’s a rule: Never lie. Never say something that’s not true. If you’d rather not talk about it, say that and move on.

We still haven’t upgraded our iPhone 3GS to a 4S. We’re now less then two months until the end of that phone’s contract, so I’ll take another run at them this week.

This week, I suddenly got a hankering to dive into GNU Emacs customization. Every 10 years I go berserk with it, like a recurring fever. ::cracks knuckles::

The WIPO patent work in my job hit a speed bump. It was of the, “walk into a dead-end, turn around and back up,” variety. There were some challenges with Kind Codes, but now I’m past them, a little older and wiser for the experience. This next week will see me fold it into the trunk, try the code in a staging system, and perhaps start inventing new name extraction heuristics. Neato.

We have three cats. Two of them are pushing 19 years of age, and one of those, Max, is on the way out. He’s losing nearly 4 oz each week. There’s no specific illness…his intestines have just shut down and he’s not absorbing nutrition anymore.

What’s shaking down on the farm…

Whilst dealing with many interruptions, the PCT/IPC improvements to my company’s product are nearly ready to go live. Sometime this week, we’ll start storing international patents in our datastore, with fully hooked-up classifications. It’ll be flippin’ neat-o! With the back-end (importing, deciphering, parsing, storing) improvements done, next comes the front-end enhancements. (“Oh! A publication number can now have that format?”) Then everything magically falls into place. That’s the plan.

At work, I monitor our codebase’s size using cloc. I take monthly snapshots. I like how our LOC have remained roughly the same, while we add new features and fix bugs. I visualize the codebase becoming tighter and firmer, as we weed out and replace bad code with code doing more work with fewer lines. I enjoy the visualization, and there are grains of truth within. I’ve come across code I wrote months ago, and I say, “Gah! I could use a list comprehension there and save three statements!” Or something similar. All things being equal, fewer lines of code and/or fewer source code statements equals fewer bugs.

Read more…

I’ve been remiss. I can hear your wailing and gnashing of teeth from here.

Lots going on in my personal and work lives. Lots of fun at work. My current task is parsing XML International Patent Classification (IPC) data. Oodles of goodness.

More later!

Our product was unveiled. On the day of the PR release, the company website got fewer hits than this blog gets on a so-so day. Um…

My company’s near to unwrapping its product. Alas, the new corporate website needs more work, so the unwrapping is delayed. I want to brag. But can’t yet.

Back to work…

Thankfully, I didn’t get laid off.

It’s been a very somber Monday. Quite a way to return to work from my Open Source Bridge vacation.

My work is going well. We released a substantial pre-alpha of our product, and the first reactions are positive. I can’t say more than that, except to say that we’re now in a slog to reach the next release, which, if all goes well, will be somewhere between an alpha and a beta. Time will tell.

Read more…

Lately I’ve been mulling the attribute of flexibility. How much is too much, how much is too little, and how much is just right?

You’re working on a project, and the requirements change. This happens all the time. If it happens too often, should you call a “foul?”

There’s the question of how often is too often. What’s too often for you might be NBD for a colleague, or (more importantly) for the company.

One school of thought is that we should never call a foul. Software engineers (developers, product developers — pick your favorite term) have a customer. That customer is a client, product management, etc. Our job is to build what the customer wants to the best of our ability. We should be clear (at times, “crystal clear”) about the costs of changes in product requirements. Beyond that, if the customer wants a change then that’s fine!

Read more…

Stretching is good — physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Stretch whenever you can. If it hurts, back off a bit. Rest and try again.