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The Duct Tape Programmer

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#111

Post by ellyagg »

olavk wrote: post #82

Joel does not mention that Netscape code was so bad that it cost them serious credibility and customers. As a Netscape user back in the day, I did not care whether Netscape used unittests or duct tape, but I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer because Netscape was so buggy it was painful. Over a few years Netscape code became so unmaintainable they had to start from scratch, which cost them years. Joel wrote…

Parent has the worst vote count/relevance score I've ever seen. JWZ didn't write Netscape 4.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#112

Post by [deleted] »

gruseom wrote: post #28

It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing, and I'm sure Peter Seibel agrees. But he negates his entire point at the end. After going on about how great duct tape programmers are, he says, don't think that means you can be one, because they're magic. (He says "pretty", but in this case pretty means magic.) To wit: Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull…

[deleted]

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#113

Post by jnaut »

Though the title "the duct tape programmers" may be a bit misleading but I think the essence and emphasis was on "Shipping is feature" and over engineering is not.

I don't think Joel meant to say that accumulating technical debt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt) is the way to go, rather he suggested/re-iterated Donald Knuth's statement on optimization: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." in his very own way.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#114

Post by tptacek »

gruseom wrote: post #28

It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing, and I'm sure Peter Seibel agrees. But he negates his entire point at the end. After going on about how great duct tape programmers are, he says, don't think that means you can be one, because they're magic. (He says "pretty", but in this case pretty means magic.) To wit: Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull…

Tangent: you think Spolsky overdoes it with the marketing stuff, gruseom?

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#115

Post by gruseom »

tptacek wrote: post #114
gruseom wrote: post #28

It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing, and I'm sure Peter Seibel agrees. But he negates his entire point at the end. After going on about how great duct tape programmers are, he says, don't think that means you can be one, because they're magic. (He says "pretty", but in this case pretty means magic.) To wit: Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull…

Tangent: you think Spolsky overdoes it with the marketing stuff, gruseom?

No, actually, I think he's brilliant at it. I tend to at best half agree with him on software issues, but I enjoy how lively his writing is and the way he uses it to promote his company is usually fine with me. In some ways it's exemplary, because the promotion is typically secondary to what he's writing about, and tends to be related to the subject at hand, so it doesn't come across as arbitrary or sneaky. I suppose a lesser writer might have trouble pulling it off, but it's a good model for software people.

Still, it was nice to see him get excited about something not directly in that vein.

Edit: It was also by reading a Spolsky post way back when that I originally discovered PG's essays. So I can't ever get too mad at him.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#116

Post by tptacek »

gruseom wrote: post #115
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: you think Spolsky overdoes it with the marketing stuff, gruseom?

No, actually, I think he's brilliant at it. I tend to at best half agree with him on software issues, but I enjoy how lively his writing is and the way he uses it to promote his company is usually fine with me. In some ways it's exemplary, because the promotion is typically secondary to what he's writing about, and tends to be related to the subject at hand, so it doesn't come across as arbitrary or sneaky. I suppose…

It's tricky, right? We blog a lot for a company our size --- multiple books worth of technical writing on the blog --- and we still feel like we have to be ultra-careful about promoting ourselves to keep people from feeling like we're just trying to sell something. For instance, I'm not sure we've ever worked in a call to action for our consulting services in a post.

It's definitely one of the things I'm most impressed about with 37s and Fog Creek, that they've managed to extract so much business value out of their blogs.

Reading Spolsky back in '03-'04 was what made me want to become a product manager, which I was pretty quickly able to do, which experience taught me what little I know now about the software business (you know, besides actually writing and shipping code, and, uh, getting funding, neither of which appear to have any correlation with success in the business ;] ).

I actually think Spolsky's weakest on the hard tech content, and strongest on the product marketing side.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#117

Post by gruseom »

tptacek wrote: post #116
gruseom wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, actually, I think he's brilliant at it. I tend to at best half agree with him on software issues, but I enjoy how lively his writing is and the way he uses it to promote his company is usually fine with me. In some ways it's exemplary, because the promotion is typically secondary to what he's writing about, and tends to be related to the subject at hand, so it doesn't come across as arbitrary or sneaky. I suppose…

It's tricky, right? We blog a lot for a company our size --- multiple books worth of technical writing on the blog --- and we still feel like we have to be ultra-careful about promoting ourselves to keep people from feeling like we're just trying to sell something. For instance, I'm not sure we've ever worked in a call to action for our consulting services in a post. It's definitely one of the things I'm most impress…

I'm not in your target audience, so I've seen very little of you guys' blog, but it certainly didn't feel marketing-driven to me.

I agree about Spolsky & Co. not being that technically strong, which is a little ironic given how much he's written about attracting the best programmers, etc. Still, although I don't read him regularly, I almost always enjoy when I do. And a lot of what he says about the software business is really helpful. Chris Dixon linked to a post of his the other day about lowering the price of complementary products which was a great example.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#118

Post by olavk »

ellyagg wrote: post #111
olavk wrote: post #82

Joel does not mention that Netscape code was so bad that it cost them serious credibility and customers. As a Netscape user back in the day, I did not care whether Netscape used unittests or duct tape, but I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer because Netscape was so buggy it was painful. Over a few years Netscape code became so unmaintainable they had to start from scratch, which cost them years. Joel wrote…

Parent has the worst vote count/relevance score I've ever seen. JWZ didn't write Netscape 4.

Netscape had quality issues long before version 4. Navigator really felt like it never left beta. Version 4 was just the point where the accumulated technical debt had become so huge that it proved impossible to recover from - and at the same time IE matured as a credible alternative.

The tag was a nice pragmatic solution, but from there it went quickly downhill. Already around version 2 Netscape was adding badly thought-out features like , etc. which have taken a decade to get rid off. Rendering bugs and inconsistencies were never fixed.

They could probably have recovered and consolidated by stepping back and focusing a bit more on quality and sound design for a while. But they didn't.

It seems every single project Netscape developed was either abandoned or turned out so buggy it was unusable. Clearly no single programmer can be blamed for that, and I believe Netscape had lots of brilliant developers on board. (And I don't doubt that JWZ was a brilliant programmer.) It must have been the overall "duct-tape" mentality that was to blame.

Some of the other replies blames various parties like Collabra, the "business people", strategic mistakes, Microsoft and so on. Sure Netscape made some strategic blunders, but it is still one of the few examples where genuinely bad code quality was a major reason for the downfall of a company. (Quark would be one of the few other - like Netscape they squandered a near-monopoly by releasing increasingly buggy software and pissing off their users).

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#119

Post by olavk »

eugenejen wrote: post #89
olavk wrote: post #82

Joel does not mention that Netscape code was so bad that it cost them serious credibility and customers. As a Netscape user back in the day, I did not care whether Netscape used unittests or duct tape, but I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer because Netscape was so buggy it was painful. Over a few years Netscape code became so unmaintainable they had to start from scratch, which cost them years. Joel wrote…

The argument ingnores a fact that if netscape did not take off and be popular, microsoft might not ever consider buying spyglass browser and expanded it into IE (Eric Sink led the spyglass team, with his memoir http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html ) and waged browser war in late 90s. What all software architects forget is, most of time, the piece of code that we wrote is to solve problems in life. Those problems…

Obviously Netscape created a revolution. The "duct-tape" approach allowed them to iterate quickly and deliver Netscape 1.0 to the masses and change the world.

However, the rapid success of Netscape was very much due to that the basic architecture and protocols of the web was already designed by others. I give Netscape credit for the tag, but apart from that, almost anything Netscape designed on their own were ill-conceived disasters from and to and JSSS.

So I think the correction to the duct-tape approach is that it works best if somebody else already designed the basic architecture, e.g. if you are copying an already established product. It does not seem to work very well if you have to design something original.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#120

Post by bootload »

blasdel wrote: post #80
bootload wrote: post #14

"He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40." This phrase comes from watching too much Eastwood (Gran Torino ~ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205489/ ) The idea behind it is you can jury-rig/fix almost anything with WD40 & duct tape alone without the need for fancy expensive tools.

Except that both of those tools are the absolute worst at their respective jobs! Standard duct tape uses an awful adhesive that depending on the humidity turn into a gummy mess or desiccates into flakes -- either way leaving a difficult residue and not actually holding. The loose right-angle weave of the coarse fibers means that it has zero shear strength on the most common axes, and is prone to splitting when under…

"... Standard duct tape uses an awful adhesive that depending on the humidity turn into a gummy mess or desiccates into flakes ... WD-40 combines a solvent, a mild lubricant, and an adhesive (!) -- it's extremely prone to collecting grit and caking it onto surfaces ..."

I hear what your saying but I'm talking hacks (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3961148668/) not engineering ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3960385835/

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