Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
* Paul Makepeace ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things are way more important than a faster chip or RAM. your right of course, however all of those things are more expensive and in some cases involve disgarding existing equipment and at the end of the day its a hobby machine that currently is lucky to have an average CPU usage of 0.1% per hour -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.uklinux.net
Re: Consultancy company
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Piers Cawley [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [snip] And table football's no fun if you're playing with yourself. Maybe if you kept your hands on the table football...? gdr -- rob partington % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://lynx.browser.org/
Re: Consultancy company
Roger Burton West [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 12:24:24AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: The vision I have is of a team (or teams) working in *our* premises, with customers working with us. (side-rant) The customers _must_ be kept isolated from the developers. This is the single most important thing the customer-interface people (whatever you call them) can do. Inviting the customers into your office will drop productivity by 30-50% because your developers can't talk honestly about what's going on. That's exactly wrong. And the XP book explains why far better than I ever could. -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Consultancy company was [Job] BOFH wanted was: Re: Red Hat worm discovered
IIRC, Sim City is one of Ken Livingstone's favorites. There can't be the option to revoke all bird feed sellers permits.
Re: Consultancy company
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 10:28:13AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: One customer. On site. Full time. Absolute honesty. Nice idea if you have customers who can take the truth, and who know when to shut up and let people get on with things. I'd like to see it working, but I haven't yet. R
Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 12:24:24AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: Now, I freely admit that I have partaken of the Extreme Programming Kool-Aid, and dammit I want to do it. I want to try it too. I'm not convinced by all of it - pair programming for example - but so much of the other stuff seems damned sensible that I want to give it a go. Including pair programming. I'm trying to keep an open mind on that fucking stupid idea. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
Re: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- pitfalls of scaling consultancies
Paul Makepeace sent the following bits through the ether: Y'all might find this excellent piece interesting, http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$287 Pretty darn interesting. Fogcreek sounds like a pretty cool place to work. I'd suggest that if we were thinking of doing something similar we'd need to build a product, or concentrate on a product or something like that. Do a MySQL or an AxKit, and get a couple of companies interested right from the start or there's no point. Hmmm. Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ yapc::Europehttp://yapc.org/Europe/ ... All new improved Brocard, now with Template Toolkit!
Re: Consultancy company
On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, you wrote: I don't see why you can't have a mix - it would be good to have a core group of people who always (nearl) work in the office so that if you usually work from home but need some face 2 face there will be people there (or in a pub nearby). things like IRC and email provide good communication about what is going on and can be used to acounce when and where people are. thats true enough .. although it doesn't fit in with the XP model that well .. but there is always MOTWTDI .. the basic problem is that 'office' workers see 'home' workers as a bunch of idle slackers who only pretend to work from home and really spend the day gardening, and 'home' workers see 'office' workers as bunch of people who;d rather spend the day arseing about and chatting than actually doing something .. Break down those totally incorrect stereotypes and you're on the way to a flexible poicy that allows you to retain the very best staff in conditions they enjoy. Shurely one of the driving decisions behind setting up a mutual business is not just financial success but also good working conditions and more freedom. I gladly trade lower income for better working conditions any day (to a point anyway). My basic break even is at about 30K a year .. once I get to that poijt I start taking holidays. Money is great, but chilling out by the pool is better and skiing is better still [speaking of which its Chamonix again in 2 weeks] just my $1 / (2500^0.5) -- Robin Szemeti The box said "requires windows 95 or better" So I installed Linux!
Re: Consultancy company
Piers Cawley wrote: Greg Cope [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: David Cantrell wrote: That should read there's too many distractions at home for me (or you as the case may be). I am about 150% more productive at home - 25 % because I save the journey, and the other 25% due to not having to go to meetings / going for long lunches / the chat that turns into a tangenical discussion on XZY / some Luser or PBH asking a stupid question that they could have worked out themselves if I was not there / insert any other activity that takes me away from the task in hand. The vision I have is of a team (or teams) working in *our* premises, with customers working with us. We avoid pointless meetings. The customer is there because they know what we're supposed to be doing for them, and they know what's important. When you're only working a 35 hour week (40 tops...) then you should have enough free time outside work that there's less inclination to piss off for a long lunch. And the whole point about setting this up is to get rid of the PHB. Sorry the above turned into a rant, I just get a bit pissed off with closed minds that assume that having people in an office = productivity. *Ahem*. Were I to be the sort of person who takes things personally, I'd take that personally. Or something. Seriously, I tried working from home when the trains were up the spout, and for a couple or three days it was great. However, one or two points. 1. As a sole developer, working from home is/can be good, especially when your head is down and you're turning out the code for a particular bit. But working from home means you're away from the customer, and the customer is the only person who can make business decisions about what your code is supposed to be doing. I've never said that I do not meet customers on a face to face basis arround once a week. Working as I do means that the customer and I focus on the specs, and iterative developement - as they need to be clear that I know what I am supposed to do. 2. You are away from the team. Again, sole developer, this is not a problem. Consultancy where we're supposed to be doing the synergy thing, not quite so good. Time you spend away is time in which you aren't plugged into what's happening and (and this is *really* important), time spent away is time in which you aren't doing the mentor thing. I strongly believe that, in a joint consultancy deal, it is *really* important that gurus help to enlighten students, otherwise how do we get our partners up to speed so we can go out and get more fun work and make more fun money? Agreed that if you need to teach - guru and student need to be in the same place. 3. Every time I need to ask you something and you're not there and I have to phone you, there's a chance I'll think 'ah fuck it' and not bother. And there's a chance that that will be a *really* bad idea. But if you are confortable phoneing (|emailing|irc) me then you would - as that is how we would need to comunicate. I've wasted so much time being in an office being asked and asking lame questions just because I am next to someone. I have much less distractions at home. I'm not saying that offices (especially client offices) don't suck. But they don't have to. If we're going to do this, lets do it right. Now, I freely admit that I have partaken of the Extreme Programming Kool-Aid, and dammit I want to do it. But dammit again, it makes *sense*. Also bear in mind that when I made the decision (having tried it) that I'd rather commute in and be near the customer rather than work from home (in my *very* comfortable home office...) that meant adding another 4 hours (count 'em) of travelling time to my day. If I work from home I work too long. If work too long my code starts to suck. If my code starts to suck I get embarrassed and my reputation starts to slip. I want to work with copilots. I want to be able to *have* that tangential conversation that'll turn out to be useful in six months time. And table football's no fun if you're playing with yourself. Yes there are advantages to working in an office - i.e the team can be greater than the sum of its parts. This is *so* important. But working from elsewhere also allows idividuals to be productive - often alot more. How are you measuring productivity? An assumption on real hours worked - i.e when I was in London I was ever working more than about 6 hours a day (on a long day) due to lost time ... At home I regualarly hit 6 hours on a day that is 4 hours shorter. I have not measured this as their is no use benchmark qw(:gregs_time); Why not combine the two - i.e have a day a week where everyone meets to brainstorm / ask questions / do what needs to be done to take advantage of a group. Because groups don't work like that. All of a sudden I'm taking notes. And trying to
Re: Consultancy company
Robin Szemeti [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Client has no concept about what software development is like and within a week or two cancels the entire thing 'some of those guys spent a whole week working and half the time couldnt even get it to run, by the end of the week all they'd done was write some strange "library" code and even that doesn;t seem to do anything' Doesn't happen with XP. "Least necessary". You have the scheme of the library in your head, agreed by the team, but you're coding visibly from the outset. -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- pitfalls of scaling consultancies
Leon Brocard [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Pretty darn interesting. Fogcreek sounds like a pretty cool place to work. I'd suggest that if we were thinking of doing something similar we'd need to build a product, or concentrate on a product or something like that. Do a MySQL or an AxKit, and get a couple of companies interested right from the start or there's no point. Hmmm. Talk to Gunther. This is what Extropia tried to do. -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
"Dean S Wilson" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: -Original Message- From: Aaron Trevena [EMAIL PROTECTED] I did a little pair programming at emap - I probably wasn't doing it right tho'. even so we did get thru the hard bits quicker and could split up to do the easy stuff. I think it made a difference but then I was mostly being a backseat coder so either we did okay or stuart was very tolerant indeed. How did you establish who would make good pairings? Was it done by trying to place two equals or was it done more on a mentoring level of a very experienced coder and a less experienced one? (I've not read that much on XP) The latter. You mix skills. And the second isn't idle. He's coding up the test cases. Is the Monday night meeting still on for those of us who can't make the lunch time one? Oh, yes. Leon, are you acting as scribe? -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 11:42:52PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: * Paul Makepeace ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things are way more important than a faster chip or RAM. your right of course, however all of those things are more expensive and in some cases involve disgarding existing equipment and at the end of the day its a hobby machine that currently is lucky to have an average CPU usage of 0.1% per hour But when we start using it for the web site and the mailing list and that jobs thing I think jo is working on we're all gonna get really annoyed if it breaks... Michael
Re: Extreme Programming (was: Re: Consultancy company)
Dave Hodgkinson sent the following bits through the ether: Leon, are you acting as scribe? Yes. Don't expect a masterpiece though. Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ yapc::Europehttp://yapc.org/Europe/ ... All new improved Brocard, now with Template Toolkit!
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
[1] My first name is actually Christopher, but handily my parents changed
[Oddly enough, same here. I'm Chris Paul ... It's an absolute pain in the
arse. Note to parents: don't do this.]
I know a Andrew Christopher Jackson that's known as Chris. So it's not
just Christopher that's shunned...
128MB RAM and a K6 is quite enough to run a decently hammered mod_perl site.
You only need more memory if you end up using a large database or doing
something rash like install Oracle. Assuming you're not on an OC-12 backbone
and you're not doing finite element analysis of an F15 jet per form
submission, your IO bottleneck will be the net.
I would think that more RAM is a good idea. This is because:
1. It's cheap right now
2. We're a varied range of people so will probably want to load a whole
host of modules in mod-perl. This will probably make our httpd
rather fat and take up a lot of memory - much more if it was a simple
production machine.
Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it
have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things
are way more important than a faster chip or RAM.
Along these lines I'd buy another hard drive. Having lots of hard drive
space is good for backups - most time data is lost not due to hardware
failure but the directory stucture it's in being trashed through
human/coding error. Simply back up to another area.
Also if we keep the original drive we can simply backup to that
nightly. Quicker and easier than tapes - and as we've said any long term
data should really be backed up by individual users anyway, so we need not
worry about things like state51 burning down (well, as far as the server
data is concerned)
For the record, my box, heavly used used by myself, Leon, Simon, Shevek,
and Magnus for 2shortplanks.com / astray.com / huckvale.net / anarres.org
is:
model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
stepping: 12
cpu MHz : 501.143806
total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 264376320 208822272 4048 47583232 25063424 128712704
Swap: 542826496 32563200 510263296
(Leon, thanks for the memory)
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6821340164 816634860 3890812 100% /
/dev/hda115522 3540 11181 24% /boot
(actually, that's a lie - df very broke - it's only 18GB - but you get the
idea)
Later
Mark
(off to see the offspring)
--
print "\n",map{my$a="\n"if(length$_6);' 'x(36-length($_)/2)."$_\n$a"} (
Name = 'Mark Fowler',Title = 'Technology Developer' ,
Firm = 'Profero Ltd',Web = 'http://www.profero.com/' ,
Email = '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', Phone = '+44 (0) 20 7700 9960' )
Re: TPC5
From: "Paul Makepeace" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Where you'll be consulting for a munitions firm? :-) Nah, I don't know enough about encryption ;-) But then again, ignorance doesn't seem to be an obstacle to most lobbyists or salesmen! Reminds me of ye olde joke: Q. What's the difference between a used car salesman and a software salesman? A. A used car salesman knows he's lying! Andrew.
Re: TPC5
From: "Nathan Torkington" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Timing in London is hard, because there aren't very many hotels capable of supporting such an event. It's quite amazing to us, in fact, how difficult it has been to find a place to hold it in London. What sort of numbers are we talking about then? If you're prepared to consider locations a little out of central London there are lots of large hotels around Heathrow that have sizeable conference type facilities (also handy for the airport!). There are also a number of large and large-ish venues in London offering a variety of halls and facilities, e.g. Earls Court, Olympia, Wembley Conference Centre[1], The Business Design Centre in Islington, The Royal Horticultural Halls, Queen Elizabeth Conference Hall, Church House (or whatever it's called) etc. etc. HTH, Andrew. [1] Possibly closed just now for redevelopment.
Re: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- pitfalls of scaling consultancies
From: "Robin Houston" [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/ I particularly liked: "Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office. " This is so extraordinarily obvious (about aesthetic rather than the living bit -- that's extreme) and hadn't yet occurred to me -- I look back at the places I worked that sucked and they all were shabby unkempt or tidy but amazingly dull. Hmm. PS I *really* recommend going to a plant shop and putting even just a few plants around the home office. Maybe just me, but it makes the environment so much more pleasant. The whole "Turning good programmers into good managers" section was good with its decoupling scheduling responsibility and review responsibility. Neat idea. Even if that article is slightly tongue-in-cheek, it disturbs me :-) Really? Why? Scary -- it mostly seemed pretty sensible to me! Eek. The bit I disagreed with was more hours always equal more productivity. There is definitely an upper limit I have. I can certainly sprint (and am best probably at bursts) but above a certain point (200hr over a month or so) my code quality and concentration declines. I'm sure this is broadly true of everyone for different upper limits. Discover what works best and do that, while trying to also continuously progress. Having a life is important - I honestly think the brain works better if it has to deal with something completely different for a while. Search for user comments on the neurological effects of overstimulation. Paul
Re: ArsDigita working practices (was: Big Macs v The Naked Chef -- )
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 09:04:24PM +, Robin Houston wrote: On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 08:01:51PM +, Chris Benson wrote: Another link is http://www.arsdigita.com/careers/ They seem to be a very good model for a consultancy business Personally I wouldn't like to work anywhere that thinks like this: http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/ Even if that article is slightly tongue-in-cheek, it disturbs me :-) I suspect it is *not* tongue-in-cheek -- he wants only the best and does expect 70-80 hour weeks ... during a project. In some discussion I saw about this he justified it two ways that I remember: (1) not everyone worked on projects all the time and (2) if people did work full time on projects they'd be getting about ~us$500k / year. (Having spent the entire 80's doing 70-80 hour weeks for less than gbp10k I'd liked to have had the chance!). There are also good bits there which have been mentioned in other threads: quote The average home cannot accomodate a pinball machine. An office can. The average home can have video games, which are very popular with young programmers, but not people with whom to play. The average home cannot have a grand piano but almost any office can. Attractive A worthwhile goal is to have at least one thing that is extremely attractive about the physical enivronment for any particular prospective software engineer. Here's a possible list: * dog-friendly policy * grand piano * climbing wall * indoor garden * aquarium * koi pond * exercise room with fancy machines * pinball machine /quote I don't think I'd like to work for them though ... I'm getting old'n'soft :-( and I find the attitude that comes over in Phil Greenspun's writing rather (very!) arrogant. And of course they use shudder TCL. But the organisational structure and strategy/vision *is* interesting. Who might come to PO on Monday night (with chqbook for the machine) to see what people are thinking of doing. -- Chris Benson
Re: TPC5
On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 11:28:06PM -, Andrew Bowman wrote: From: "Nathan Torkington" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Timing in London is hard, because there aren't very many hotels capable of supporting such an event. It's quite amazing to us, in fact, how difficult it has been to find a place to hold it in London. What sort of numbers are we talking about then? If you're prepared to consider locations a little out of central London there are lots of large hotels around Heathrow that have sizeable conference type facilities (also handy for the airport!). FWIW, I know my mother has booked some largish meetings outside of London. Of course, I don't remember offhand how large, or, for that matter, what kind of numbers you're looking at. dha -- David H. Adler - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.panix.com/~dha/ Any sufficiently advanced technology is compatible with magic. - The Doctor, Seeing I
Re: TPC5
Timing in London is hard, because there aren't very many hotels capable of supporting such an event. It's quite amazing to us, in fact, how difficult it has been to find a place to hold it in London. One of the hotels in London I have had dealings with has conference facilities and over 2000 rooms. I could look up their details should you wish.
