North Creek

Thoughts on business and life

Well, I need to get a few thoughts down 'on paper,' so I guess this is where I'll start.

Seeing a business as a fixed entity, like a rock, is obviously incorrect. A business is alive. But is it alive like a tree? Is it like a person, with its own personality and dreams? I am thinking about a river or stream metaphor. There may be water on the brain, as it is really raining outside today.

What is a stream?

The stream bed - a static (over the short term) arrangement of dirt, rocks, and plant life, around which the stream arranges itself.

The water - a constantly renewed, but fairly consistent in terms of composition, amount of H20 and other dissolved material, travelling through a location on the way to wherever the stream goes.

The current - a set of forces combining gravity with the mass and characteristics of water, interacting with the stream bed.

A snapshot of a stream shows the water interacting with the stream bed according to the forces of the current, leading to a pattern of waves, ripples, waterfalls, eddies, areas of strong and weak flow, that together make up what we think of as a 'stream.' But as the proverb says, 'you never step into the same river twice,' even though the stream bed is recognizable (changing over a long time scale) and the water is following a similar pattern as it did the day before.

So is business like a stream? There are multiple time scales at work, and lots of different forces interacting, leading to an 'entity' that is only similar to itself over time. Customers, the marketplace, the competition, ownership, and staff can all change, but generally all of those things change over a longer time scale than hours or days, leading to the ability to approximate a business as a static entity, even though it is changing.

I was trying to understand time scales in chemistry class in university, and the professor made a good point. Monkeys swinging from tree to tree do not take into account the fact that the tree is growing. The difference in time scales allow the monkey to ignore the growth in the tree.

So a business is a changing collection of materials, forces, and people, that only maintains its identity because most of the factors that influence it are changing on a timescale much longer than the human scale of tasks, projects, hours and days. So a business as an entity is an artificial construct, but it is a useful approximation, since we can act in relation to that construct and it will react somewhat predictably. Understanding the business at any time will allow one to interact with the business (as an employee, an owner, a customer or client, a competitor) until the slow changes occuring within the business make ones understanding obsolete.

I am in the business of business process management, which is akin to redirecting a stream bed so that the water flows in some useful way. My son was just outside in the rain, digging channels so that the puddles developing in our gravel and mud driveway would drain into the surrounding trees. Businesses need to be aware of the forces within themselves. Rearranging some forces or environmental factors may lead to increased productivity, or may lead to a whole new identity for the business.

This post may need some editing, but it is good to at least get these ideas down so that I can develop them based on something concrete.

More Symfony, thoughts on PHP

Just finished my 4th day of the Symfony tutorial. It does pack quite a bit into a one-hour (supposedly) lesson, and if you cut'n'paste the code from the web page, things move pretty quick. But it looks like a pretty well-designed project layout, with lots of small folders so that things are put in the right place, and lots of convention-over-configuration. I'll keep at this, get through the tutorial, and maybe I'll write that music management app I've been thinking about once I get a handle on this.

I actually touched some php today. As a long-time Perl bigot, I wasn't sure I'd like it, but if you think of it as crippled, purpose-built web perl, it seems okay. Perl 6 is still not here, so I'll live with what I have access to on the server (as I said yesterday).

Now for some Magento, then I have to prepare for a real-life interruption - a ski trip, just when I was generating some momentum with this coding stuff. I'll bring the MacBookPro, and we'll see how much bandwidth (and time) I get on the mountains (Fairmont, BC).

PHP, Symfony, Magento

Welcome back to all of you who have missed me for the past 11 months :-)

I have done a few things - my house is now liveable (in the basement), and I have a GST # and a few clients. I am now working on a couple of proposed projects - I need to spend some time up front so that I have a demo to show them.

1) Magento - a free (to start with) e-commerce php package. Setting up at http://www.northcreek.ca/store, this will be a development web store. We'll see how far Magento can go.

2) Symfony - a PHP library that helps build web apps quickly and cleanly. I want to build a music management app for Onoway Baptist Church, where I am the worship leader, and possibly soon the webmaster. Symfony gives me a good starting point.

So why PHP? Well, I have a hosted server with GoDaddy (that you are reading this on), and they support PHP, not perl, java, ruby, or others. No root access. So I'll go as far as I can with this setup, then move to a java-supported server setup when required. In the meantime, I've installed the Entropy.ch php package from Marc Lyanage (www.entropy.ch) on my laptop, so that I can develop using php and mysql at home.

I will try to keep things updated - I'm currently on Day 3 of the Symfony trial. Lots of configuration headaches due to my laptop. However, with very little description of a model, I now have a database and a website that edits the database. Hooray for modern web frameworks, even in PHP! :-)

Agile Software Development

Registered with Elance

Book Review: The Pragmatic Programmer

I have begun a regimen where I read a chapter out of a book every day. This keeps a constant velocity, and lets me get through books that have been on my shelf for years. I have enough varying interests that I am reading 4 book chapters/day. This takes some time away from coding right now, but I am learning so much that I accept the cost. Eventually I will get disciplined enough to do my reading in the early morning, before the world awakes. I expect that will be later, though, when the log house is complete and I can stumble over to my office and sit in a comfortable chair.

The Pragmatic Programmer was written in 1999 by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. It has stood the test of time, mostly because it avoids too much specific technology and focuses on the principles of effective programming. I can see the influence of this book in the book I'm working on now, "Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices" by Robert Martin. "Pragmatic" has become a code word and has been branded as such in the industry. The "Pragmatic" authors have taken their own advice and started learning a new language every year, which is profitable for them, since they often get to write the book about said new language. They jumped on Ruby fairly early, if I recall. It makes sense: this book has a lot of Perl in it, and Perl is so 20th Century.

Metaprogramming is a big deal for them - getting scripts to write code. This has become standard in the industry, and .Net and Java annotations do this as part of their internal structure. However, that, and DRY (don't repeat yourself) are the big takeaways from this book.

They are fumbling about the agile way, but XP was just being articulated at the time, so things like Unit Testing and short iterations were still somewhat controversial. Now they are not controversial, just not done in practice. Hmmm.

Don't Repeat Yourself is a huge deal. If I could get my code to that level, I'd be ecstatic. Redundancy is a real enemy. It is the one thing that killed EJBs, I think. Spring is just so much more terse. It is also the reason I don't like Hibernate. I have a database schema that already exists; I don't want to repeat it in awkward XML. I also don't want to give a single application power over a database schema - often the data is much longer-lived than the application. So I want to work from the data out. That's what led me to the design for DBDB.

Getting good at an editor! What a good idea! I used to think in Emacs keystrokes, but I've been away from coding for long enough that the Mac way is more natural now. I don't know if that will stay, or if I'll get back to Emacs, which has so much more power available without lifting my fingers off of the keyboard. With this laptop, I have a touchpad not too far away, which makes things somewhat easier, but still, keeping the fingers on the home row is definitely a win overall.

I really appreciate the wisdom in "The Pragmatic Programmer," but I am nowhere near that level yet. I will keep working towards it - it feels like I may have to put this one in a rotation, and read it again in a year or so, to keep the target in front of me.

In the meantime, I have plenty of other books in front of me.

What did you think of "The Pragmatic Programmer?" What, you haven't read it yet? Or are you like I was, and felt so guilty about how you actually work that you never finished it?

Coding Options

A little progress

Well, a bit of an update.

I'm coaching a basketball team (my son's Grade 7 team), which takes up some brain space on Mondays (practice) and Wednesday or Thursday (games). They are just beginners, but that's fine, so am I :-)

So today I just got started on a database schema, and then had to plan my offense. The practice went okay, but the kids need way more repetition before they do the offense naturally. So hopefully they at least have fun.

  mysql> show tables;
  +----------------------+
  | Tables_in_northcreek |
  +----------------------+
  | event                |
  | participant          |
  | party                |
  | time                 |
  | type                 |
  +----------------------+
  

These tables will be the start of a generic framework that allows me to create business applications using metadata rather than code. At least that's the plan. I need a template system for the UI (View), a workflow system for the Controller, and an extensible, Universal data model for the Model. My goal is 1 day turnaround from requirements to prototype. So Monday requirements meeting with a client, Wednesday demo of those requirements in a production app.

If I can get this to work, then I should be able to undercut commercial business accounting software and still make money on support contracts. But we're a ways from having a Quickbooks feature set. That's the target, though.

I may use Qt as the development framework - cross-platform development including smart phones and Java. It depends on if I can figure out how to template a dynamic UI that runs off of metadata. I know I can do that using web technologies, but that introduces servers and browsers, etc., which is not all bad, but might be overkill for a small office.

I've also downloaded Scala to play around with - the alpha geeks have given it a thumbs up, and it runs in the JVM, so I can integrate it with everything else out there (including Spring). I'll keep this blog posted - I just completed a Hello World app that actually ran in Eclipse :-)

Bedtime for the kids. Out.

Comments!

So I'm attempting to install a commenting system - hope to hear from some visitors!

We'll see if it works.

I am using blogtools, which hosts the comments and just requires me to update my templates (well, Thingamablog's templates) to pop up a comment window.

Doesn't seem to be working yet - I will update soon.

Another attempt? YES!!! I plan to always celebrate little successes like this one - maybe by breaking for lunch :-)

Blogging with Thingamablog

I spent most of yesterday looking for a free desktop blogging client that doesn't rely on a blogging API to post. I have a hosted domain with GoDaddy (northcreek.ca) and I just want to ftp a rendered blog entry up to the host, without a lot of complicated installs (mysql, wordpress, etc.). I was using Radio Userland, but it seems to be abandonware (Dave Winer, I know you're busy, but Radio breaks my Mac!). I rebooted about 10 times yesterday, when usually I reboot only on Software Updates.

I looked around at Google's suggestions, and ended up with Thingamablog. This is a Java application that does exactly what I need. The only problem was that it was a .jar file with a bunch of associated lib jars, nothing like a Mac application. Apple has done a good job of making Java apps look "close enough" to real Mac apps that I can deal with the strange icons, etc., but I wanted a double-clickable .app bundle that I could move around.

So I made one! I got a lot of help from a bunch of websites that pointed out the basics, and I wouldn't want to rely on this app being distributed like this, but it seems to work so far.

I'll stick with this until (a) I find something better, also for free, or (b) I write my own. Of course, Thingamablog is free (GPL), so I can always pick up the source code and make it better.

I cut'n'pasted an icon from the splash screen - I am not a graphic artist! - but let's see how Thingamablog does with images:

Splash Screen:

New Thingamablog Icon:

And there we go!