Life @ NCP

June was the last month of the quarter and here in Stockholm, it was a hot one. We had a lot of parties, with a lot of people in it.

Despite the wonderful weather, sadly SI Toastmasters, a public speaking club that I usually go to, ran its last meeting before the summer break. The club will start again mid-August, and it will be run by a different group of people. I am very excited about this because I volunteered for the VPPR role. I think there are many things the club can do to get more people benefit from Toastmasters.

If you have never heard about Toastmasters, here is a taste of how a Toastmasters speech is like.

Throughout the year, the club introduced me to plenty of like-minded people and we hang out with them outside the club. One of them invited M&M (me and hubsy), to play VR on HTC Vive. It was released only recently, and although it was expensive, with a price tag of over 1000 USD in Sweden, the variety of games was already impressive. The gaming industry really know how to be productive. The quality on some of the games are far from beta, they are very very immersive.

It took a short time to get used to the goggles, and though at first it felt weird having a large video cable hanging onto my head, I got used to it surprisingly fast and maybe more importantly, I didn’t trip over it.

I am excited for the release of Sony PlayStation VR in October this year. With price half of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and with a large game developer community, it looks to me that Sony has won the first round of VR already.

Talking about winning, let me jump to another thing very different to VR. I like winning games (who doesn’t?) especially in badminton, but it’s hard to do with my current stamina. It’s common that I would win the first set, only to lose the second, sweating and panting, my heart beats over 180. As if I have a stamina of a four-year-old. A marathon-runner friend of mine convinced me that I should try out interval run to increase my stamina.

So, I did a “speed run” event, organised by Nike. And it was sooo tiring. I hated running, and after doing it, I realised why I hated running in the first place. I couldn’t breathe, and at one point of the 1.5 hour session, I thought I was asthmatic. My nose started to make sounds like a broken party horn. Oh no.

Nonetheless, the event was held nearby at the Stockholm Stadium. Little did I know that Stockholm held the 1912 Olympics, and just like every other buildings in Sweden, the stadium looked new despite its age. From the outside, it looked a bit like a medieval castle. Inside, the track went for about 400 m each lap, and the ground was soft and spongy. I loved the feeling running on it.

If only I don’t need to breathe when running.

P.S. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to this blog. It takes only a few seconds and it will motivate me to write more, big time.

This is a cop-out because it’s a rehash of my previous post, but as an added bonus, here’s a video of me delivering it as a speech at my Toastmasters club.

Toastmasters is a club for improving your public speaking skills. You give speeches and take on speaking roles, and get feedback about what you did well and areas for improvement at the end of the session. The club I go to is full of amazing people and certainly one of the reasons we’re still here in Stockholm! Of course, as you might expect, there’s an evaluation to go along with the video.

And my actual speech draft. When you’re up on stage, some things just don’t go the way you plan, and even from the beginning things started out slightly different 🙂

I work in IT as a software developer, but it’s hard for me to explain what that means to anyone else. A few years ago, to work in IT meant you were “good at fixing computers” or “installing antivirus”. Nowadays it means you’re “making the next facebook” or “about to become a billionaire”. There’s just so many facets to being a software developer that it’s sometimes easier to just grin and nod sagely rather than to explain exactly what I do.

One analogy I’ve recently found useful is a kitchen in a restaurant. No one knows how a software company works (unless you work in one), but everyone has some idea of how a restaurant works, even if they haven’t worked at one. You have waiters, you have the cooks and of course you have the customers. In such a setting, I’m one of the guys in the kitchen.

But this is where it gets interesting. Every kitchen is different. I work in a small kitchen where I have to share my tools, ingredients and space with other cooks. Everyone chips in for a dish, someone does the chopping, someone does the tasting and someone does the frying. Mostly. Some kitchens cook without tasting. Some kitchens have only one cook. Some kitchens have the best tools. Some kitchens have the best cooks. Sometimes the cooks are overwhelmed and overworked. Sometimes the cooks aren’t even from the restaurant, but from the pizzeria across the road. cough outsourcing

Many of the struggles I face are more easily explained as soon as I talk about a restaurant. When I tell people about how users of our software have unrealistic expectations of how it should work, or what can be changed, rather than empathy sometimes I get “but it’s just software, can’t you just change it?”

But when I tell people about unreasonable customers at a restaurant they go, “yeah, I understand”
Imagine a restaurant where customers walk in, and they tell the waiter what they’d like to eat. “Can I have this but vegetarian?” “Can I have truffles on the side?” “Can I have the pecan pie, but no nuts?” “Can I have fried rice, but without the rice?”

We’re more familiar with the idea of an unreasonable customer at a restaurant than an unreasonable user of some software application. In both cases, the customer has no idea how hard their request actually is. They think they have an idea of how hard it is, but without actually having worked in a kitchen, they haven’t got a clue. Of course they might have been chefs before, or formed their estimate based on visits to other restaurants, but that’s kind of irrelevant because there’s someone between the customer and the cooks.

It’s the waiter.

Most of the time the waiter says “sure we can do that”, sometimes he says “that is impossible Madam”, but it’s really up to how well he understands what’s being asked. Often he has other agendas. Maybe he would like to please a really important customer, sometimes he is wildly optimistic about what his kitchen can produce. Whatever the case, he converts a customer request, into a slip for the kitchen.

And this is where I come into the picture.

The slip arrives at the kitchen and everyone scrambles. We look at the slip and go “What the? How could we possibly make this in time?” There’s a deadline to meet, sometimes you’re still dealing with the fallout from the last dish and what sometimes ends up being put on the plate is something thrown together in a rather haphazard manner. Along with prayers that all of the stuff went in. No one likes a meat pre without the meat. Unless they asked for it of course….After all no one likes a meat pie without the meat…unless they asked for it of course. Sometimes it’s so bad the waiter simply rejects it outright.

Assuming that it’s decent enough to be served, and the waiter has written the slip correctly (certainly not taken for granted in many places! sometimes what you asked for is not what you get…), you eventually receive your dish. Sometimes when you see it on the plate it looks delicious, but you bite into it and you find an eggshell or bits of plastic (remember the haphazard assembly?). Sometimes it tastes fantastic but when you arrive home, you spend the next week camped out in front of the toilet.

You might think there are food inspectors that go around restaurants, making sure something like this doesn’t happen, or that offenders get punished and blacklisted…. but there are areas where the analogy becomes a little more absurd. All that for the next speech.

In the meantime I hope I’ve helped provide better context into how a software developer fits in to a software company, and the kinds of challenges we face. How about you? Do you work in a hypothetical restaurant? Are you a cook? A waiter? Or perhaps the person standing outside the restaurant, touting customers and trying to get them in. I’m looking forward to hearing about your restaurant stories.

This is part 2. Part 1 is here.

So this is where the software development as a restaurant analogy starts getting a little weird. To be fair, these examples are more quirks of the industry more than the profession itself.

A customer at a restaurant

Customer: “There’s a fly in my soup”
Waiter: “Oops, that must mean there’s a fly in everyone else’s soup”
Customer: “What are you going to do about it?”
Waiter: “Well, if it’s a big enough fly, tomorrow’s soups will not have it. Otherwise everyone will have to live with it for a few months.”
Customer: “Eh?”
Waiter: “Well, even after a few months, it’s a Maybe. Depends on if there are also roaches in the soup”

If you’ve ever watched a restaurant service challenge on Masterchef (try the Australian one, it’s much better :P), producing dishes for a bunch of people is back-breaking work. Even if it is the same dish over and over again. If we think of software as food, producing a copy of the software requires little-to-no effort. One consequence of this is if there’s an eggshell in one dish, all versions of that dish probably have the eggshell too. The exact same one.

Not all eggshells are created equal though, a single dish has a unique combination of flies and eggshells. Some are known, and some are yet to be discovered. There’s an ongoing struggle in the kitchen between removing the undesirables, and adding more flavour to the dish. Or some other dish variation…

A customer arrives at a restaurant.

Waiter: “Welcome Madam, we have the clam chowder, Florentine steak and vegetarian lasagne available today”.
Customer: “That sounds interesting. I’d like a clam chowder, but I’m actually lactose intolerant. Can you do something for me?”
Waiter: “Certainly Madam, but you will have to come back later. Maybe we will have it on the menu by then”
Customer: “How much later?”
Waiter: “Maybe a few months. Maybe a year. It depends. In the meantime, maybe you can try removing the cream yourself.”

If you’re in a restaurant, you’re expecting some flexibility. Small variations are taken for granted. In a software restaurant, since you’re getting copies of stuff, you’re not getting changes until the “master” copy is updated. When does the “master” copy get updated? Remember that we’ve already got flies to squash and eggshells to remove, in addition to flavours to add. And that’s not the only problem.

In the kitchen

Waiter: “We have 100 more orders of the clam chowder coming through.”
Cook: “The clam chowder from last month is the one you want. Just make a 100 copies of it. You know where the food cloning machine is.”
Waiter: “Guys, there’s lots of flies in that one…”
Cook: “We’re trying to fix the recipe. We only have the old one to work with. It’s a hundred pages long, full of corrections and hard to know what’s needed for what taste anymore.”
Waiter: “Do we have something for lactose intolerance?”
Cook: “Erm… maybe in a few months. Could they take out the cream themselves?”
Waiter: “Seriously?”

Software developers aren’t really cooks. They “cook” the “master” copy of the dish, but really, they spend most of their time refining recipes. Software developers are more like recipe authors than cooks. Except the recipes are hundreds of pages long, often passed down from generation to generation without much explanation; and steps interact with each other in strange and wonderful ways, where it can magically give rise to eggshells and roaches along the way.

Just think about what kind of process someone refining recipes has to go through to “test” their recipes! Say you’re trying to refine a recipe. Maybe make it more spicy, for your friends from Indonesia. How would you go about doing it?

If you’ve tried to put a dish together, and had to improvise, you know how hard it can be to work your way back to what went into that one amazing dish. When you’re trying out different things, sometimes it can be hard to keep track of what taste was the result of what magic ingredient you added. And you can never create that one amazing dish. Ever again.

In the kitchen

Waiter: “Someone’s found a roach in the lasagna”
Cook: “Did it come from the bechamel sauce?”
Waiter: “Maybe. How would they know?”
Cook: “If it did we may have a bigger problem. That bechamel sauce is used in the fish pie and croquettes as well.”
Waiter: “So they’ve all got the roach?”
Cook: “Yessiree. Actually if they don’t have it, it means it’s a problem only with the lasanga recipe, not the bechamel”
Waiter: “Seriously?”

In any normal kitchen, if a batch of sauce is bad, you just make a new one. In a software kitchen, if a sauce is bad, everything it’s gone into is bad. Every single dish with it. And there’s nothing to be done till the sauce recipe is fixed.

It also highlights a problem common to both kitchens. It’s sometimes pretty hard to figure out what caused a problem! (Think masterchef taste test… what went into a dish to cause a particular taste?)

Surely this can’t be the way software is made! There’s got to be food inspectors coming in occasionally right? Well… tune in next time to find out why, despite what seems like a pretty crummy state of things, more established software kitchens have their own secret sauce recipes … for making secret sauces…

I often have trouble explaining what I do to someone outside of IT, especially for the first time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not embarrassed to be a Software Developer (certainly not a Software Engineer, but that’s another topic for another time), but more getting across all the nuances of what I do across. Anyone who’s worked in say databases or devops knows what I mean, just saying you work in IT is much easier than explaining what is it you do.

One analogy I’ve used in the past is a kitchen in a restaurant. Most people have some idea of how a restaurant works, even if they haven’t worked at one. There’s a difference between a small mom-and-pop operation and a michelin star restaurant though, from the food itself right down to where the ingredients come from. The supply chain and the processes involved in turning the raw ingredients into an amazing dish are quite different. The interesting part is how far you can really stretch the analogy, and get across the nuances of your workplace 😉 An interesting exercise is to compare what you do to the appropriate area of the restaurant.

Imagine a restaurant where customers walk in, and they tell the waiter what they’d like to eat. Most of the time they’re familiar with the menu, and they want the same thing, but with a little twist. “Can I have this but vegetarian?” “Can I have truffles on the side?” “Can I have the pecan pie, but no nuts?”

Now the customer has no idea how hard their request actually is. They think they have an idea of how hard it is, but without actually having worked in a kitchen, they haven’t got a clue. Of course they might have been chefs before, or formed their estimate based on visits to other restaurants, but that’s kind of irrelevant because it’s now the responsibility of the waiter.

Most of the time the waiter says “sure we can do that”, sometimes he says “that is impossible Madam”, but it’s really up to how well he understands what’s being asked. Often he has other agendas. Maybe he would like to please a really important customer, sometimes he is wildly optimistic about what his kitchen can produce. Whatever the case, he converts a customer request, into a slip for the kitchen.

Every kitchen is different. I work in a small kitchen where I have to share my tools, ingredients and space with other cooks. Everyone chips in for a dish, someone does the chopping, someone does the tasting and someone does the frying. Mostly. Some kitchens cook without tasting. Some kitchens have only one cook. Some kitchens have the best tools. Some kitchens have the best cooks. Sometimes the best cooks are overwhelmed and overworked. Sometimes the cooks are from the pizzeria across the road.

The slip arrives at the kitchen and everyone scrambles. In many software kitchens, particularly the small ones, everyone is pretty good at making the dish, but no one wants to know how to put the dish together. It’s often seen as “not interesting” or “not as glamorous” as doing the actual cooking. Consequently, the dish assembly is usually thrown together in a rather haphazard manner. Sometimes it’s so bad the waiter simply rejects it outright.

Assuming that it’s decent enough to be served, and the waiter has written the slip correctly (certainly not taken for granted in many places!), you eventually receive your dish. Sometimes when you see it on the plate it looks delicious, but you bite into it and you find an eggshell or bits of plastic (remember the haphazard assembly?). Sometimes it tastes fantastic but when you arrive home, you spend the next week camped out in front of the toilet.

You might think there are food inspectors that go around restaurants, making sure something like this doesn’t happen, or that offenders get punished and blacklisted…. but there are areas where the analogy becomes a little more absurd. That, and how developers aren’t really cooks in the next instalment…

Suppose your friend’s birthday is coming up. You see it in your calendar, and you’d like to congratulate him/her on the day itself, but you know you have a horrible memory. Or perhaps you’ll be travelling and won’t have access to a phone or the internet. So instead you write a nice message in advance and schedule it using something like Mixmax or Boomerang to be sent on the day itself. Joy and appreciation ensues, and you gain brownie points and goodwill in spades.

This is so effective that you decide to do the same thing for every single friend in your address book. In a fit of exuberance you schedule the same email to be sent to every friend on facebook, helped largely thanks to mail merge features.

One day you’re telling a friend about Mixmax and the penny drops. She asks you if the email she got for her birthday was scheduled. Question is, should she be angry?

I’ve been on both the giving and receiving end. I help run a local Toastmasters club and send copious amounts of canned emails to new guests. I also receive my fair share of canned spam, and I really doubt there’s someone writing and sending each of those personalised marketing emails!

Phrased one way, it seems absurd. Does planning for something in advance cheapen its value? More emotively, is the quality or meaningfulness of a message reduced.

I was trying to figure out why the idea of someone sending canned emails annoyed me so much, and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the relative ease which gets my goat. It takes me ages to write a simple email, so much so that sometimes I just give up and say I’ll make a mental note to catch up next time instead… which I never do. So hearing someone else barely lifting a finger to do it doesn’t sit so well.

But there’s more to it. If Martha sent me a scheduled email on my birthday, I think I’d be pretty uncomfortable, even if I could rationalise why she did it. I’d be doubly pissed if I recognised the contents from other canned emails she’d sent out.

Who it’s from, and how personal the message is makes a big difference. Not to mention how efficient you are at dealing with birthday cards yourself.

But if getting annoyed at something like this really means not being able to stay in touch with as many people, setting up a system doesn’t seem that bad after all. Just maybe not to everyone and a little less canned…