james mckay dot net

I came across this article today when I was googling for a link for another blog entry. I was flabbergasted to see that it was written by someone with a PhD, appears in a professional engineering journal, and is currently linked from their home page:

Over time, there have been many attempts to define metrics that effectively measure software development productivity. Most of the ones that I have seen are amazingly complicated and very difficult to apply.

I think there is a simpler productivity metric which should be used across the industry: the total number lines of code in the organization divided by the number of people who are working on that code (including QA as well as development). For short, I will call this metric the LOC per head.

I propose that this measurement is an excellent representation of the development organization’s true productivity. If the number rises, it means that the development organization is more productive. If it decreases, it means that the organization is less productive

Ah, the old lines of code chestnut again. For some reason, managers seem to love it. The only problem is, it’s totally brain-dead. Like government targets, any formal productivity metric can and will be gamed — usually with disastrous results, as Joel Spolsky points out.

You want lines of code? Be prepared for your code base to be poisoned with endless copy and paste code and needless repetition, which, as any competent developer will tell you, is a nightmare to maintain. Or you may even end up with a joker on your team who decides to script the process and produce a million lines of code a second without even turning up at the office.

Besides, some frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or jQuery allow you to accomplish much more with far fewer lines of code. The first release of 37 Signals’ Ta-Da List — a full-blown commercial product — contained less than 600 lines of Ruby code. So does that make DHH and colleagues unproductive? Of course not! On the contrary — it makes them brilliant.

You want lots of check-ins to source control? Fine, you’ll end up with dozens of them just to correct a single spelling mistake — and as a side effect, a version history that leaves everyone totally confused as to exactly what’s been going on.

You want lots of bug fixes in the issue tracker? Expect your developers to deliberately write bugs into their code so that they can “fix” them.

You want to compensate for this by penalising bug reports? You’re asking your developers to mislead your testers about what functionality is actually in the code base so they’ll pick up on fewer bugs.

And so on, and so on.

As the old computing adage goes, garbage in, garbage out.

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Posted at 23:25 on 31 May 2008.
Tagged: human nature, idiocy, metrics, productivity, programming

Now if things carry on the way they are going, one of these days, we are probably going to get an application for our developer position from Zefram Cochrane. He’d be more than welcome — I’m sure that someone smart enough to invent the warp drive should have C# pretty much figured out by now even though he hasn’t been born yet, though I shudder to think what his penchant for loud heavy metal music would do to our score on the Joel Test.

Of course, Dr Cochrane is just trekkie fantasy, but even so, reality at the beginning of the 21st century does occasionally send us applications such as one (with no CV attached) from someone claiming “Ihave 34 year experience in asp.net c#” (sic). Given that in the absence of time travel and warp drives, no-one will have 34 years of experience of C# until 2035 at the earliest, I think we’ll wait until then before sending that guy the coding exercise we use as a screener. However, by that time, chances are that C# will be the new COBOL, having been replaced by something more esoteric.

It also sends us ones such as this e-mail the other day that was simultaneously funny, annoying and at the same time rather sad:

This Email is to introduce my company and to ask, if you can give us a chance to prove ourselves and provide our recruitment services to your company.

My name is ______, I represent a Recruitment consultancy called __________. I am attaching my company’s Terms of Business for your consideration and rates wise we are flexible like 12 – 15%.

We mainly work in IT sector e.g, (Web Developers / Designers; Software Developers, Testers, Business Analysts and Project Managers).

You have written that you wont accept calls from AGENCIES so thats why I am emailing you to try my luck.

Please consider and respond positively & if you have any questions please feel free to ask.

In other words, “I see you’ve said no agencies, so I thought I’d write to offer the services of my … agency.”

It boggles my mind to think what was going through this guy’s mind when he drafted this e-mail up. Did he think that because we aren’t taking calls from agencies that e-mails are fine? Sorry, we don’t say “no calls from agencies” — we say “Strictly NO AGENCIES please.” That means no phone calls, no e-mails, no letters, no carrier pigeons, no agencies, period.

Or does he think that because he’s called his company a “recruitment consultancy” that somehow exempts it from being an agency? Sorry, it doesn’t.

If you are a recruitment consultancy, whether you like it or not, you are an agency.

If you are a headhunter, you are an agency.

If you are enquiring on behalf of anyone other than yourself, you are an agency.

(Strictly speaking, that means that even if you are somebody’s girlfriend, calling on behalf of your better half, you are an agency, though that is admittedly probably stretching the point. Okay — strike that, if you are getting paid to enquire on behalf of anyone other than yourself, you are an agency.)

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with agencies per se, other than that the quality of developers that they come up with can be pretty unpredictable, but as with all things such as these, we have a strict company policy in regard to these things of “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

However, that aside, does someone who doesn’t understand that “no agencies” means “no agencies” really have the right stuff in his head to find us a competent developer? Methinks not, somehow…

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Posted at 14:00 on 30 May 2008.
Tagged: recruitment

We got an application in from a seemingly very talented web designer the other day in response to our job posting. With some pretty impressive artwork on her online portfolio, she might be a serious consideration if we were looking for someone to fulfil a role involving primarily graphic design.

However, there is just one question. We are looking for a developer, rather than a designer — so will she make the grade in that particular department?

I get the impression that the difference between web developers and web designers is somewhat lost on many people. This is probably quite understandable — the edges between the two is a rather blurry one, with a good deal of overlap, and both require a lot of creativity — and many people manage to handle both roles remarkably well. However, they involve completely different skill sets and aptitudes.

Designers tend to focus very much on the front end. They are (or at least they should be) good at art and graphic design, and if they are designing for the web, they should know HTML and CSS. They will be able to produce great WordPress themes, Flash animations and other eye candy. They most likely also know some basic PHP, MySQL and JavaScript.

The great unknown, however, is how well they can handle the more technical aspects of building a web application. Some of them are good at this, some are not so good. It is all too easy to forget that web development is software development — as a web developer, you are concerned with the much more technical aspects of the job. You need to understand database normalisation and object oriented design patterns, for starters, otherwise you will end up producing unnecessary duplication and bad code. You also need to have a firm grasp of security — at the very least you should understand topics such as SQL injection, cross site scripting and defence in depth. Then there are other aspects such as data structures, string manipulation, regular expressions, web services, scalability, caching, threading, concurrency, transactions, and so on. If any of that sounds like Klingon to you, then either you are not a developer or else you need to mug up on a few basic essentials.

Indeed, since you have to understand fairly difficult concepts such as concurrency, scalability and threading, web development can actually be harder to get right than traditional desktop development.

I sometimes wonder if web development gets such a bad reputation for the quality of code sometimes because there are a lot of people out there describing themselves as web developers when actually they are better suited to working as web designers. In order to be a good developer you need to be able to think at multiple levels of abstraction at the same time, pick up on patterns in things, and so on. Not everyone has the brain circuitry that enables them to do this.

By all accounts, a good test of this is how you handle recursion. Many people — even some computer science students — simply can’t understand it, viewing it purely as a bug that causes a stack overflow and therefore needs to be avoided. However, being able to use recursion effectively is a fundamental skill that crops up over and over again in programming. Traversing a directory tree, the nodes in a DOM document, or the page structure in a hierarchical content management system, should be second nature to all developers everywhere.

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Posted at 14:00 on 29 May 2008.
Tagged: design, programming, recruitment

We’re looking to take on another developer.

The majority of our work is in C#/.NET, so obviously we’ve adjusted our skills requirement accordingly. However, what we are really looking for are smart people who get things done and have a real passion for what they are doing. If you’re smart and passionate, it isn’t a disaster if you don’t have two years of .NET experience, because smart, passionate developers can pick up pretty much anything very quickly, and besides, in this game you have to be learning very quickly all the time.

So, how can you identify the passionate ones?

For starters, I personally think that CVs tell you very little. When I see your average developer CV, my eyes tend to glaze over and all I see is white noise. They show that you have x years of experience in y platform, and that you know what all the current buzzwords are, but that is about it. They don’t tell me whether you spent those x years cutting and pasting code snippets out of those stupid PHP tutorials that teach you to write SQL injection vulnerabilities, or whether you were implementing recursive algorithms and Markov chains in your sleep.

No, the easiest way to get a decent first impression is to Google them and see what their online footprint looks like. You can typeset your CV in Comic Sans for all I care, but if we find you have a blog, we will sit up and take notice. Merely the fact that you are going beyond the 9-5 mentality and showcasing your skills to the world puts you head and shoulders above the crowd.

However, even then, there are blogs and there are blogs. Some developer blogs are very dry indeed — they consist of little more than a string of deadpan howtos and regurgitations of whatever SDK you are using. I’m not saying your blog shouldn’t contain any of those at all, but you need to convey some life with them. What’s the story behind the bug you’re blogging about? What’s your opinion on Hungarian notation? I don’t care if you say something I don’t agree with — the very fact that you actually have an opinion and aren’t being totally insipid is worth a tremendous amount.

Even better are contributions to an open source project. They don’t have to be in .NET — if all your publicly showcased code is in PHP, that’s fine. Rails is even better, simply because Rails developers seem to be the most passionate ones of the lot. One of the best conversations with another developer that I’ve had in a long time was with a Rails developer at MiniBar about a year ago. His enthusiasm was infectious.

And this is where my gripe is. Why don’t we see the same passion and enthusiasm in .NET land?

This is something I’ve noticed in general. PHP often has a reputation for producing a lot of bad code, but PHP developers are much more likely to blog, and their blogs frequently seem to have a lot more sparkle to them. The PHP guys that I know may not necessarily be brilliant coders, but they almost all have much more passion and drive than their .NET and Java counterparts. I think it’s fair to say that this exhibits itself in higher standards too, particularly visually: more often than not, PHP and Rails blogs are pure eye candy, and you certainly never see any of them producing anything as gross as purple and blue Lucida Sans.

You see it in the open source world too. My friend Sam McGeown recently lamented the fact that there are no real .NET WordPress killers. I don’t think it’s likely that there ever will be either: open source is generally acknowledged to be very much a second class citizen in the Microsoft ecosystem, and far too many open source .NET projects simply peter out and die completely after a year or two.

Some people think the problem is that Microsoft has been dragging its heels over open source for far too long. This is true to an extent, but apart from that, the problem is that the .NET (and to a lesser extent, Java) ecosystems are just too enterprisey for their own good. They tend to find their niche in large development teams in large companies, where developers are generally small fish in a huge pond. In the enterprise, you are spending all day every day implementing frustratingly crazy business rules, and you are not writing code for the end users but for their bosses, who often won’t sign off on an Ajax drop down search if it costs them an extra five hundred pounds. In an environment such as that, code gets written to the lowest common denominator and there can be little impetus to pull out all the stops and go the extra mile. The way up the career ladder is not to become a better developer, but to step off the coding ladder altogether and into project management, or enterprise architecture, or an MBA, and make way for another generation of mediocre programmers.

Unfortunately, nearly all the developers in the .NET ecosystem seem to have most of their commercial experience in that kind of setup. They can maybe offer us seven or eight years of experience as 9-5 developers, but the passion just isn’t there. Sure, there are people who buck the trend, but I can’t avoid the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of smart, passionate, enthusiastic developers work with PHP, Rails and Python.

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Posted at 08:19 on 20 May 2008.
Tagged: .NET, enterprisey, programming, recruitment

It turns out that the WordPress Syntax Highlighter plugin that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has some rather nasty artifacts. One in particular is that when you try to display HTML — or any code containing HTML — WordPress tries to “fix” this by adding extra tags that you may not want to make it valid XHTML, and it b0rks your nice tidily formatted source code in the process. Another problem was that it converted emoticons to images — a big no-no when you’re writing source code.

Yeah, maybe I should have been using the rich text editor, but that caused other problems. Rich text editors generally wreak havoc with source code, so it’s best to turn them off when you’re doing anything of that nature.

This was the reason why I stuck with Code Auto Escape for so long. Entering source code is awkward, to be sure, but nevertheless the plugin is pretty robust and does a good job. I did try a few proper syntax highlighter plugins way back, but I didn’t find any of them all that satisfactory. However, Code Auto Escape is a plugin that Just Works™.

It also turns out that Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter JavaScript code allows you to set various options for your code blocks, such as hiding the toolbar or the line numbers, or starting numbering at a number other than 1. The WordPress Syntax Highlighter plugin does not expose these options.

Sooo… why not combine the two approaches?

Over the Bank Holiday I’ve spent a few hours writing a new plugin that does precisely that. I took Code Auto Escape as the baseline, and added a whole bunch of extra code to plug in the syntax highlighter scripts.

Interested? Get Coder 1.0 alpha 1 here.

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Posted at 13:41 on 5 May 2008.
Tagged: JavaScript, syntax highlighter, WordPress

There is a little gotcha with JavaScript regular expressions. The . (dot) character, which supposedly matches any character, does not match newlines.

Now this is actually standard (if somewhat counter-intuitive) behaviour in regular expressions in most languages, but it can be changed, for example, by setting the RegexOptions.Singleline option in .NET, the /s modifier in Perl, or the PCRE_DOTALL option in PHP.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding option in JavaScript.

However, there is a workaround. The \s character class matches any white space character (including carriage returns and line feeds), whereas the \S character class matches any non-whitespace character, i.e., anything not included in \s. So… if you want to match any character in JavaScript, including newlines, using [\s\S] instead of the dot should do the trick.

For example, to extract the contents of the <body> section of an HTML document:

/<body[^>]*?>([\s\S]*)<\\/body>/.exec(html)

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Posted at 12:19 on 4 May 2008.
Tagged: JavaScript, regular expressions