A case for code reviews

THIS is a fabulous example why your organization/team should be performing code reviews.

We're not talking about poring over the entire code base once a month (that's just cruel); no, you check the code your teammate or colleague wrote or modified before it even goes into the main branch of the source control repository, just like how open-source projects do it.

Use Review Board: it's free and works with the modern source control systems. If you have one of the source control systems that isn't supported, have one of your teammates come to your desk to give your changes a once-over until you figure out a software solution that allows you to send them the changes so they can review it on their own time while you start working on something else.

Seriously. Stop the bad software madness in its tracks TODAY.

Ego-driven software development

(or "How M.C. Escher Would Have Packaged His Software")

This was too "good" to not blog about. I heard about IronPython Studio, a Visual Studio-based IDE for writing Python code for/with .NET tools. In order to install this interesting gem, you first need to install its pre-requisites, which is one of flavors of the "Visual Studio 2008 Shell": Isolated Mode or Integrated Mode. Sounds easy, right? Wrong!

The actual downloads seem innocent enough (I got both, just to be safe -- as an aside it was hard to tell which one would suit me best): they arrive as executables. Here's how many levels of "packaging" there are:

1. Running either of vs_AppEnvRedist.exe or vs_ideredist.exe will create a temporary directory where the EXE's files are extracted and an "installer" is launched


2. You accept the EULA and click next a few times and what do you end up with? "The redistributable package has been installed". That's right, you ran an installer that installed another installer. Total disk space needed for this (at apogee): 400 MB for the original download, 400 MB for the temporary files and 400 MB for the "redistributable package" = 1200 MB


3. As you finish the first "installer", the temporary files are cleaned up, so we're back to consuming 800 MB. You run the second installer and the first thing it does is check its signature, which consumes 400 MB of RAM. It then proceeds to extract files to another temporary directory (400 MB again, although this time it's in a bunch of smaller files - 286 MB of which is various versions of the .NET framework), thus bringing our used disk space back up to 1200 MB. Those of you following at home will notice that I haven't actually installed anything useful yet. Accept another EULA, select the only feature (wut?), pick the destination folder and go (again)! At apogee: 400 MB + 400 MB + 400 MB + whatever installed size it was (I didn't check)


4. Oh, it looks like we're actually done! What was I installing, again?

I'm reminded of Adobe Acrobat Reader installers from, oh, I don't know, ten years ago, before one-file installers were even invented. IronPython itself is available in a single MSI file, while IronPython Studio's download options are both available as an MSI file in a ZIP file.

There is no technical reason for this. There simply is no excuse for these fractal installers except that someone (or an entire team of someones) at Microsoft decided they needed to be involved in the supply chain that brings us internauts this bare Eclipse-wannabe that does not even include a text editor. I mean, seriously, the only thing that could have been worse would have been to wrap the whole thing in a "downloader" (like Visual Studio Express) or in an ISO 9660 file (like Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1).

I have a special offer for the person in charge of the Visual Studio team: I will personally come over and deliver atomic wedgies to everyone responsible for these shenanigans! Just give me a call; you know how to find me.

There is some good news after all this: IronPython Studio not only just works, but so does its debugger. Kudos to that team.

Effort vs. Results

I remember having a conversation with my father when I was a kid about his company's employees. I was shocked to discover they were being paid by the hour. I remember following up with a question along the lines of "Wouldn't that encourage them to take lots of time to do their work?" He assured me that, although it was a possibility, it didn't happen very often. (and presumably he explained that people who did that could lose their job, so it was to their long-term advantage to not slack off)

Fast forward a few years later, when I'm in high-school and a student asks the teacher - after she explained a homework assignment - if any marks would be given for effort. I couldn't help but laugh out loud, thinking he was pulling the teacher's leg. He didn't join me in laughing or smiling (and probably shot me a dirty look). Uh oh. He was serious!?!?

Maybe I found that proposition silly because I figured there was no way for it to be reliably measured: it would have to be self-reported. How hard would it be to say "I spent 100 hours on this" when handing it in? And if I had completed the assignment in 10 hours and produced equivalent results to his, would that mean he would get more marks than I got because he spent more time?? Worse yet, even if it wasn't self-reported, how would it be measured??? And what about the difference between "brain time" and "body time"?

Nowadays, I understand why people are [usually] compensated by how much their skills are in demand and that it is possible to be 10 times better than someone else at what you do. Maybe I also did as a kid? That might explain my reaction in both instances. Could it also explain my drive for correctness? My passion for getting things done and done right?? Now here's a doozy for you: would this knowledge at a younger age have helped other students??? Or maybe I'm just being arrogant and that I should just shut up for being the nerd that didn't have any trouble with his assignments????

Discuss.

P.S.: Please go easy on me as I have been working on this blog post since November and it's only now that I have been able to finish it.