Rant

I don’t know where to start. Politics So the US Government shut down at the end of the fiscal year, midnight on October 1st. Auspicious beginning, that. Both sides blame one another, and I’d give a slight edge to the R’s blaming the D’s for refusing to pass a continuing resolution. Neither side has its stuff together, particularly, but at least one side was going to keep public employees…well…employed. Our infant-in-chief has done other things since then but it’s more “flood the zone” crap. Demolishing part of the White House to build a gaudy ballroom named for himself on donated funds from those who bent-the-knee. Canceling negotiations with Canada (Canada?) because they ran an ad he didn’t like. Blowing Venezuelan boats out of international waters because we feel like it. Shelling California from the sea during the 250th Marine Corp Birthday, causing traffic on I-5 to back-up. Threatening to “cancel NASA”. ...

“The day….the Music Threads…Died” Zuck gave us a present this morning. It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action. Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content. Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government. It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I’m looking forward to this next chapter! ...

A Tale of Two Housing Transactions In 2012, I sold my house at Georgetown, Kentucky. If you look far back enough in this blog, you’ll find posts and pictures from that little builder-grade “story and a half” house on a corner lot sitting within dynamite’s distance from an active limestone quarry, two houses away from a meth house. Quite the neighborhood, that. In any case, I sold that house via a realtor, and I never saw the people buying the house until we were at the closing table. Eight years on, I have no recollection of what the buyer looked like, his name, or his family situation. I know he bought the place on a 100%, no-down-payment VA loan. I also know that when I mistakenly had a package delivered to “my” old address, he refused to remit the package into my possession and strongly implied he had a firearm the other side of “his” door if I had a problem with that. ...

Step right up, folks, it’s YEEEEEHAAW election time in Texas. Unlike the saner May primary in Kentucky, I’m now part of Super Tuesday, along with 13 other states. Cutting to the chase, I intend to vote ‘Uncomitted’ on my Republican Presidential ballot, and I plan to abstain from voting for Cornyn or John Carter. I’m an MJ Hegar Republican, you see. Anyway, I’m writing today to go over the 10 (yes, TEN) ballot propositions before me. ...

I’ve grown remarkably tired of some things recently. Podcasts I have a favorite podcast application: Overcast. For the past 12+ years, I’ve listened to podcasts galore. My family/friends have come to loathe subjects I begin with “I was listening to a podcast the other day and…” Yeah, not anymore. I’ve dropped several podcasts and been selective with many more, and there’s been a general theme. The Improv Comic Problem This all began when I started listening to the NSFW (NSFL?) podcast Why Won’t You Date Me? from Stitcher. I like @nicolebyer’s manic personality. I like things of the genre “dating horror stories” in that voyeuristic “Glad I don’t have to do that anymore” sort of way. Heck, I even like getting that coastal, entertainment-industry perspective, because God knows, that’s now how it is in Texas. ...

As I write this, the White House is refusing to cooperate with an impeachment investigation. Allegedly, the President used the force and weight of the United States…to help find dirt on a prospective 2020 election opponent, Joe Biden. The calculus is thus: The House has the votes to impeach him. In the senate, 20 non-Democrats need to vote to remove him from office. There’s ZERO evidence that even if ‘removed’ from office, Trump would actually leave. He does, after all, command the military. The courts are impotent to actually DO anything, since they rely upon the Executive to…execute. It seems we’re heading for a constitutional crisis here in America, since the founders never imagined: ...

We once were a nation that tolerated “intolerable” people, that balanced inhumanity with contrition and restoration of the contrite. All fall short. We abided Daniel Webster AND John C. Calhoun, Billy Graham and Larry Flynt, MLK and George Wallace, the Black Panthers and the KKK. Did we particularly WANT TO? Of course not. Why, then? Because tolerance of ideas is the price of freedom. I see that freedom ending soon. Emotion is truth. Outrage becomes mandate. Thoughts must not become a crime. ...

Hackathon (n) 1. a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including domain experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software or hardware with the goal of creating a functioning product by the end of the event. I posit Hackathons are Crap. They are useless distractions from Actual Work® that have none of the intended outcomes for anyone involved. ...

Context: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/05/war-footing-toyota-ceo-unleashes-seven-samurai-bid-survival/#more-1625584 “With our rivals and the rules of competition also changing, a life-or-death battle has begun in a world of unknowns,” [Toyota CEO] Toyoda said during a fiscal update last week. “Cost reduction is crucial. It is a fight to restore our original strength.” Dear Toyota USA I read the article below and it sickens me. You are a great company well on the way to being FCA if you take your eye off product and think only of Expense controls. ...

Dear Ford Motor Company, My 2010 Fusion Hybrid crashed today. No, I didn’t smash into anything…the electric traction system in my car crashed in the computer sense as I was rolling towards a stop sign. I was left without power brakes. Thankfully this was at ~5 mph so just stomping really hard on the pedal yielded a stop. As I approached the stop sign in electric drive mode (engine off), my dashboard lit up light a Christmas tree, displaying warning lights I didn’t know I even had. The display shouted ‘SERVICE ADVANCE TRAC SYSTEM’ and my brake pedal went almost to the floor. ...

I say this after 19 years making software: There’s always a date. Get over it. I’ve lived through the Agile Revolution, and various schemes to sell consulting named: Spiral, Rational Unified Process, eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and the Scaled Agile Framework. Through it all, there’s always some sort of date. Words like: Milestone Need by date Deadline Start of Production Promise Date Customer Promise Statement of Work Honestly, if they’re not there, you should probably be worried. Projects of significance require planning and planning requires dates. If you haven’t seen a date in quite sometime, you might want to join the rest of us getting paid oodles of money to ship features to customers who’ll pay us. ...

I’ll never forget M. M was my mentor, and we didn’t always get along. I chose him as a mentor because we didn’t get along. I needed someone who had different perspectives than I did. Anyway, one of our early meetings, I talked about people at work I admired. I expressed that I admired a guy we’ll call Brad. Brad was a guy I’d worked with many times. He was part of senior leadership, and he still found time to write code, on the evenings and weekends if necessary. At the time, his architecture team was embroiled in doing the scut work of rolling-out “Agile Development” to a hardware-development organization. (Another really long post for another day….) ...

I’ll never forget taking Tyler on a tour of our new offices in Building 001 at Lexmark HQ. Back in the day, 001 had been a manufacturing line that made the iconic IBM Selectric Typewriter and the Model M buckling-spring mechanical keyboard. People still like those things today. Suffice it to say, it was a quarter-mile long building with a floor flat as a pancake, and roughly 35 yards wide. For a good decade after I hired-on, most of that building sat empty, home to a disused loading dock and stacks of IBM standard issue desks and chairs. In 2012, our control-freak CFO decided we needed to do some “space consolidation” so he spent millions of dollars outfitting that area as a massive cubicle farm and moved us from our private offices and labs into that farm. ...

As I type this, it’s 8:44 am, and I just drove 30 minutes in 10 miles of pouring rain to start the week on 4 hours of sleep. I went to bed about 11:30, but didn’t fall asleep until nearly 1am—very unusual for me. Like an overtightened bolt, I felt my corners round-off just a bit yesterday, the torque warping my mind just too much to sleep. There’s much to consider, globally, nationally, and within my own hearth. Much I can do little about. Globally, there keeps being more of us, and our impact on the planet worsens by the year. Humans certainly seem less education, humane, and trustworthy than we did even 10 years ago. Perhaps my eyes are just open to our own debauchery, my naiveté burned away like so much slag from God’s refiner’s fire. ...

Ah, the Spotify Engineering Culture. We’ve all heard the gloss: Small, independent Squads organized into buzzwordy terms like “Tribes,” and “Guilds.” These terms hearken to days past in humanity, days of community and craftsmanship. Here’s what I take from the above: None of that fricking matters. What really matters is a throwaway blurb at the very end of the video, starting at 12m 30s. Transcribed here: We’ve learned trust is more important than control. Why would we hire someone we don’t trust? Agile at scale requires trust at scale, which means NO POLITICS. It also means no fear. Fear doesn’t just kill trust; it kills innovation. Because, if failure gets punished, people will be afraid to try new things. ...

The unfortunate thing about working in a corporation is you have to ’tie out’ with people. This sounds awfully exciting, with visions of ropes, knots, maybe even a lasso or wrestling someone to the ground. It’s not that exciting. No, what “tie out” really means is getting 2 or more people to agree to do something. In general, that requires those people be physically or virtually in contact at the same time. ...

Methodology Doesn’t Matter; People Do I’ve been in industry for 15 years, as unbelievable as that seems. I just want to shake people when all they can talk about is Process this and Methodology that and Tool this other. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Okay, it does matter, but only when you have the people end of things sorted out first. Assuming an equally talented group, those with a better system will (generally) perform better over time. However, no methodology in the world is going to make disengaged, sloppy employees perform well. (It’s tempting to draw a parallel to the Auto Industry, but I’ll spare you.) ...

Way back in 2004, I wrote a short review of Tate’s Bitter Java Basically, when this book appeared, Java was ~8 years old, and was at the peak of its hype cycle. Embraced by both the enterprise software world (okay, IBM) and the nascent open source community, Java was the golden hammer, fit for any problem. Except, it wasn’t. People who could program, but who weren’t familiar with domain requirements began writing Enterprise Software, and they began making a mess of it. My own company had to write-off about $7.4 million on a “failed software project” back in 2003. Suddenly, the C-levels stopped saying “Maybe we should rewrite our stuff in Java.” Historians term such retrenchment the Thermidorian Reaction, predictable after every revolution. For us in the industry, it was the heart of the doldrums between the Y2K largesse and the onslaught of Web 2.0. ...

So, Zappos announced that they’re moving their whole 1500 person organization to ‘Holacracy’. Why? Ironically, because of an autocratic decision by the CEO: Last fall, while exploring ways to scale Zappos without letting bureaucracy set in, Hsieh met Brian Robertson, the founder of the management consultancy HolacracyOne. Ah, this is classic: The CEO gets sold some snakeoil, the troops have to drink it. So, what is ‘holacracy’. Is it like ‘democracy,’ ’theocracy,’ and other terms that’ve been with us since antiquity? Nope. Some guy invented it out of whole cloth. ...

George Carlin (God rest his soul) had this great bit about humanity. From memory: “How’s the earth doing?” people ask. “We’re destroying the earth.” How’s the EARTH doing?! Earth is doing just dandy. Four billion years and counting. Like we’re really going to hurt the Earth. You wanna know how the Earth is doing? Why don’t you go on down to Pompeii and ask those people frozen in place under Vesuvius. The EARTH is doing just fine. It’s not going anywhere….we are. (::Wild applause::) ...