Andy and the crusty cobs

My friend Andy works on the railways. He used to work as a master baker at one of the big supermarkets. One of the items he baked was Crusty Cobs.

Clearly customers can only buy Crusty Cobs if there are some Crusty Cobs actually on the shelves. So the supermarket also employed a bakery supervisor to check Crusty Cob availability. (Naturally the supervisor was paid more than Andy. After all he was the supervisor.) Every day, at 4pm, the bakery supervisor arrived, clutching his clipboard, and counted the Crusty Cobs on the shelves; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... Andy got praised if there was good Crusty Cob availability and chastised if there wasn't.

So Andy adapted. He baked extra batches of Crusty Cobs but waited to put them on the shelves until shortly before 4pm. Crusty Cob availability, as recorded by the supervisor, was very good. Customers wanting Crusty Cobs before 4pm were often disappointed.

A short while later as well as counting the Crusty Cobs on the shelves (always at 4pm), the supermarket also started counting the number of Crusty Cobs actually sold at the tills during the day. Now Andy also got praised if lots of Crusty Cobs were sold.

So Andy adapted. As well as sticking the Crusty Cob labels on the Crusty Cobs, he also printed extra Crusty Cob labels and stuck them on some Soft Rolls (same price). After all, who looks at the labels? So Crusty Cob sales, as recorded at the tills, were always very good. The number of Crusty Cobs actually bought by customers was somewhat less.

Not long after, the supermarket noticed a drop in the sales of Soft Rolls. They asked Andy not to bake so many Soft Rolls.

So Andy adapted. He baked less Soft Rolls, labelled them correctly, and put the extra Crusty Cob labels on the French Sticks. Customers wanting Soft Rolls, at any time, were often disappointed.

Goodhart's Law states:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Or, more colloquially:

Targets are where measures go to die.


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the mind of war

is an excellent book about John Boyd by Grant T. Hammond (isbn 978-1588341785). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
…in order to determine the consistency of any new system we must construct or uncover another system beyond it… One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.
he was always testing the limits - of airplanes, people, science, the military, and, most especially, bureaucracies.
In dozens of interviews, conducted for this book, the most consistent theme and nearly universal comment was that John Boyd was the essence of an honourable man and incorruptible.
Oral, not written, communication and conviction, not accuracy, still rule in military culture.
Boyd liked putting things together (synthesis) better than analysis (taking things apart)...
He also came to appreciate the routine practice and repetition that was required to become really good at something and to overcome the boredom by focusing on minute improvements.
He observed very carefully.
Boyd could go from 500 knots to stall speed, practically stopping the plane in midair, which would force any aircraft on his tail to overshoot him and thus gain the advantage for Boyd. In another trick, he would stand the F-100 on its tail and slide down the pillar of its own exhaust. Fire would come out of the intake in the nose of the aircraft and the tailpipe simultaneously. A seemingly impossible feat, it was challenged by others. Boyd when to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where NASA had two fully instrumented F-100 aircraft, and demonstrated it and other techniques to a series of nonbelievers. The test pilot at Edwards who challenged him at the time was a fellow by the name of Neil Armstrong.
Boyd had never designed an airplane before, but as he told Colonel Ricci and Gen. Casey Dempsey, "I could fuck up and do better than this."
The rule of thumb in the Air Force is that a plane will gain a pound of weight a day for the life of the aircraft.
High entropy implies a low potential for doing work, a low capacity for taking action or a high degree of confusion or disorder… The tendency is for entropy to increase in a system that is closed or cannot communicate with the external systems or environments.
A natural teacher, he understood that if he told you something, he robbed you of the opportunity to ever truly know it for yourself.
We are never deceived. We only deceive ourselves. [Goethe]
Boyd's dictum: "Ask for my loyalty and I'll give you my honesty. Ask for my honesty and you'll have my loyalty."
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Quality Software Management
Vol 4. Anticipating Change

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-32-3). This is the second (or is it third?) snippet review for this book (here's the first). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Ultimately what helps you most in managing system size is courage and realism.
Without action things will only get less visible over time.
Human systems don't change unless the individuals change, one at a time.
Growth is always non linear.
... the incidence of test failures is directly proportional to the square of the size of the crowd multiplied by the rank of the senior observing official [Augustine's Laws]
The dynamic behind this law is simple: A large crowd of high dignitaries means that the event is planned according to external, not internal, events.
It is easy to look at this diagram and believe that you're seeing a defined process. You're not. What you're seeing is an optical illusion.
"model" is just another name for a guide to anticipating the future.
Cultural changes have a much greater potential impact than process changes because one cultural change - such as driving fear out of the workplace - can affect hundreds of process changes.
Feedback works on continuity. The pieces in the model cannot be too large (or response will be slow), and they must be stable (or response will not be predictable).
Error prone modules are born error prone and stay error prone.
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go pair

At the recent Agile on the beach conference I was chatting to Paul Massey who runs BlueFruit Software in Redruth (which, by the way, is a great company to work if you're looking for a job as an embedded developer). I was reminded of something Paul mentioned to me a while back that relates to pair-programming. He and a friend played go against other people on a server. Their go rankings were 8k and 9k respectively. Interestingly, they then played against other people as a pair. And their joint-ranking went up to 6k. Paul writes:

When I play go, I have a problem that I struggle to find the patience for strategic thinking. I combat this problem by doing strategic thinking when my opponent is playing and tactical thinking when it's my turn. Yesterday I realised the parallel with pair programming, i.e. tactical thinking when at the keyboard, and strategic thinking when away from the keyboard. Both are important.


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cyber-dojo dates

If you'd like me to run a private cyber-dojo for you please email me. I love travelling (especially to places where you can fly-fish for atlantic salmon) and meeting new people. There is often no charge but I do ask you to cover my travel expenses.

past cyber-dojos

I no longer keep this list updated...

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the first cyber-dojo Raspberry Pi

Here's the first Raspberry Pi raised from cyber-dojo donations :-) Everything works so it's off to my old school in the morning.
In case you're thinking "where is it?" (it's only credit-card sized) it's to the right of Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater, between the keyboard and the monitor with an aptly raspberry coloured ethernet cable attached. Here's a close-up.
And here's cyber-dojo running in Midori. More Pies have been ordered and should be arriving in the next few days. Many thanks for your donations. Keep them coming!

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Cadora salmon

Today I have mostly been fly fishing for salmon on the River Wye at the Cadora beat. I missed a good take on Cadora pool on my fifth cast! About half and hour later I had another take. This time on Little Run. Didn't miss this one :-) Cock fish, quite thin, measuring 34 inches from nose to tail. I'm guessing 13lb ish. After taking my hook out (a Cascade) I noticed another fly hook with some line attached! It took a while to recover before swimming away - perhaps it had just smashed someone else up!?

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holes

is an excellent book by Louis Sachar (isbn 0-439-12845-5). If you've not seen the film the story revolves around a boy called Stanley, whose offered the choice of going to jail or going to Camp Green Lake. He chooses the lake. Each day he has to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet in diameter.
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages, particularly the ones about digging the holes. They remind me of refactoring, and the pain of introducing a test-seam into legacy code:
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
Using all his might, he brought the shovel back down onto the dry lake bed. The force stung his hands but made no impression on the earth.
...
He noticed a thin crack in the ground. He placed the point of his shovel on top of it, then jumped on the back of the blade with both feet. The shovel sank a few inches into the packed earth. He smiled. For once in his life it paid to be overweight. He leaned on the shaft and pried up his first shovelful of dirt, then dumped it off to the side. Only ten million more to go, he thought, then placed the shovel back in the crack and jumped on it again. He unearthed several shovelfuls of dirt in this manner, before it occurred to him that he was dumping his dirt within the perimeter of his hole.
The digging got easier after a while. The ground was hardest at the surface, where the sun had baked a crust about eight inches deep. Beneath that, the earth was looser.
Though he tried to convince himself otherwise, he'd been aware for a while that his piles of dirt were too close to his hole. The piles were outside his five-foot circle, but he could see he was going to run out of room. Still, he pretended otherwise and kept adding more dirt to the piles, piles that he would eventually have to move. The problem was that when the dirt was in the ground, it was compacted. It expanded when it was excavated. The piles were a lot bigger than his holes were deep. It was either now or later. Reluctantly, he climbed up out of his hole, and once again dug his shovel into his previously dug dirt.
Stanley kept digging. His hole was almost up to his shoulders, although it was hard to tell exactly where ground level was because his dirt piles completely surrounded the hole. The deeper he got, the harder it was to raise the dirt up and out of the hole. Once again, he realized, he was going to have to move the piles.
As he dug he was careful to dump the dirt far away from the hole. He needed to save the area around the hole for when his hole was much deeper.
"Well, the first hole's the hardest," Magnet said.
"Well, the first hole's the hardest," said Stanley. "No way," said X-Ray. "The second hole's a lot harder. You're hurting before you even get started. If you think you're sore now, just wait and see how you feel tomorrow morning, right?" "That's right," said Squid. "Plus, the fun's gone," said X-Ray.
"You're right," he said to X-Ray. "The second hole's the hardest." X-Ray shook his head. "The third hole's the hardest," he said.
That meant he'd dug forty-four holes. Stanley dug his shovel into the dirt. Hole number 45. "The forty-fifth hole is the hardest," he said to himself. But that really wasn't true, and he knew it. He was a lot stronger than when he first arrived. His body had adjusted somewhat to the heat and harsh conditions.
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dig the trenches before the bombs start falling

If I write code without tests I will end up with low quality code. Worse - I'll discover that having written code without tests I've naturally ended up with a codebase that resists being tested. When this happens the codebase is not being 'malicious'. That's just that way it is. That's exactly the way I grew it. Testability isn't something that appears by magic. If I want a codebase to be testable I have to write tests for it as I go along. So that I find out just how testable it actually is and steer accordingly.

Sun Tzu put it very well in The Art of War when he wrote:

Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.


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out of inodes!

A huge thanks to everyone who tweeted about cyber-dojo donations going to buy Raspberry Pies for schools. It caused a big surge of use on the site :-) Which unfortunately brought the site down :-(

At first I thought the 'No space left on device' message meant I'd run out of disk space. However a df revealed plenty of 1K blocks still available. The problem was not lack of disk space it was lack of inodes! This is because cyber-dojo uses a lot of files (every press of the run-the-tests button results in a git commit). I put a temporary fix in place by recovering a few thousand inodes. That gave me enough time to put a better fix in place - some scripts to zip and prune dojos based on both their age and total number of traffic-lights. Successive prunings reclaimed 231,941 inodes which should last a while. Sorry for the glitch.

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raising money for Raspberry Pies

I built cyber-dojo to help promote deliberate practice of test-driven-development at the team level. It's free (beer and speech), there's no login or registration and there are no adverts. It's hosted in the cloud and, until a few moments ago, its home page had a small donate button to help pay for the hosting.

After hearing Eben Upton's keynote at the Agile on the beach conference I've decided that from all previous and future donations will go 100% towards raising money to buy Raspberry Pies for schools.

Please help publicise this in any way you can! Thank you.

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Gus and the breakfast police

At breakfast on the second day of Agile on the beach I was queueing behind my friend Gus Power. Gus asked for two sausages and was told he could only have one. I knew what he was about to say next so I intervened in the interest of trying to keep the queue moving at some speed slightly faster than stopped, and said "And you can't trade one item for another either".

So Gus had just one sausage. And Odette was not allowed a fried egg either - but could have scrambled egg. I thought for a moment and, when it was my turn, I said - "I'll have the maximum I can have of everything please." I got one piece of bacon, one scoop of scrambled egg, one scoop of beans, one scoop of mushrooms, one of those reconstituted potato croquette things, two pieces of toast, two individually wrapped "bricks" of butter, two plastic containers in the shape of a miniature thumb-sized bath containing marmalade, and... a sausage. I walked over to where Gus and Odette were sitting and joined them. I gave the sausage to Gus, explaining that I didn't want most of the food - but I did want Gus to have two sausages.

The point of this story is not to whine about the conference. It was a really excellent conference. The breakfast staff usually serve students which may have something to do with the somewhat draconian rules. The point is that overly rigid rules foster bureaucracy and generally end up self-defeating. The intention behind the rules, to avoid waste, is laudable. But rigid rules and their associated lack of trust in both the servers and the served simply creates more waste. A system like that invites people to live down to its expectations.

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Agile on the beach

Last week I attended the excellent Agile on the beach conference in Falmouth, Cornwall. I'm really proud to have been the consultant who provided most of the technical-tdd agile training that has helped create 50 new jobs in Cornwall.

I thought Schalk Cronjé's talk was excellent. So was the one Ed Sykes did. And Seb Rose too. The highlight for me was Eben Upton's endnote. Inspiring. I'm going to visit my old secondary school and see if they want half-a-dozen Raspberry Pies. And I'm going to buy one for myself and put Cyber-Dojo onto it. I ran a double cyber-dojo session at the conference and several teachers said they wanted to run cyber-dojos as part of their course - fantastic.

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frozen names

A radio phone-in caller reminded me of the Label Law yesterday - the name of the thing is not the thing. The caller said his local shop is run by an Indian gentleman who everyone calls Ray. For 15 years the caller has called him Ray. But, he recently discovered, his name is not Ray. It's not even close. He explained that everyone calls him Ray because the previous owner of the shop was called Ray. At least that's what he's been told. Maybe the previous owner was called Ray because the previous previous owner was called Ray!

It's a bit like sixth form college. That's the school you used to go to after you'd finished five years at secondary school. But in 1990-ish they changed the numbering scheme. Now the year number is the number of years you've been in education. One for your first year at primary school, eleven for your last year at secondary school. So now sixth form college is where you go after you've finished year eleven. But it's still called sixth form college.

I'm also reminded of something Jerry Weinberg wrote in Experiential Learning - Vol 3 Simulation.

Rules are frozen solutions. Rules are solutions to yesterday's problem, carried forward to the present, but usually without reference to the problem they were intended to solve. Each rule is really an "if-then" rule, but the "if-then" part is seldom stated.


If you don't know why you're putting eye-of-newt into the cauldron then you're in trouble when the magic potion stops working. And if you don't understand why eye-of-newt works, you'll probably be afraid to change the recipe.

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practice and observation



I want to get better at speycasting. I need to know how I'm currently doing and what aspects of my casting to pay attention to next. Those are exactly what I don't know. To make rapid progress I need the help of another person - someone who is both an expert at speycasting and also an expert at teaching speycasting. In my case that person is Gary Scott (who took this short video).

I've no doubt there are masses of faults in my casting technique. That's irrelevant and not helpful and does not deter me at all. What counts is working towards some improvement in the next video.

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refactoring in the shower

Some houses are populated only with teenagers. When one gets in the shower they notice the plug-hole is clogged with horrible gunk: hairs of indeterminate origin, bits of soap, spit, bogies, general fluff (like the stuff that grows in your belly button), congealed shower gel, etc., etc.,. But they don't clean out the plug-hole. After all, they didn't make the mess. When they've finished they're cleaner. But only slightly. And they don't clean the plug-hole. Partly because they then notice there's no towel. They curse the other teenagers as they walk around the house naked, dripping water as they go, looking for anything vaguely absorbant they can commandeer.
After a while the plug-hole gets so gunked up tackling it becomes a truly repulsive task. It actually clogs the plug-hole. The shower fills with water - it starts turning into a bath! But it wasn't designed as a bath. Splashes leak over the lip of the door. Water collects under the shower base where it's not visible. Not at first anyway. After a while the ceiling below the shower starts to discolour in a tell-tale circular pattern. But it goes unnoticed. At first anyway. Soon the ring grows so large it's unmissable. But it's ignored. After all, it's a full-scale call-the-plumber-and-tiler job now.

Some houses contain a mixture of teenagers and adults. When a teenager showers sometimes the plug-hole is gunk free and there's a dry towel but sometimes the plug-hole is gunked up and there's no dry towel. They can't quite understand this. But they never clean the plug-hole and never put up a clean dry towel. When an adult showers sometimes there's a build-up of plug-hole-gunk and no dry towel. They know the previous shower-goer was a teenager. Sometimes there's no plug-hole-gunk and there is a dry towel. They know the previous shower-goer was an adult. When they've finished they clean out any plug-hole-gunk and put up a new dry towel.

Some houses house only responsible adults. Whenever they start to shower they don't notice any gunk around the plug-hole because there never is any. And there's always a fresh clean towel. After they've showered they clear any plug-hole gunk and put up a new dry towel.

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