Will Knott

I’m not the type to fill in those “what type of X are you” surveys, but when Sean McNamara wrote about his programmer personality type I thought I’d give it a shot. The output is similar to the Myers-Briggs Personality Test but I think the questions are a little too simplistic.

Anyway here are the results of my programmer personality test.

Your programmer personality type is:

DLTB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

–Will here. The alternative to a doer is the planner. I will plan but sometimes a prototype is needed to make sure that you are doing the right thing. Personally I’d do after I make sure the requirements are in place. And that’s just the prototype that’s willing to be changed. I suspect I’m right on the edge of the two states in this case.

You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

– I’m comfortable with high level coding and scripting but that last 5% is a bit on the mark. There is an old quote which goes “Art is never finished, its just abandoned”. The same is almost true of software. The almost is because software has a “next version”. Getting something working out there is one if the basics of rapid prototyping. Technology changes, requirements change. Having said that, there is a point when a new feature shouldn’t go in, but become a new tool. Keep an eye on that.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

– I like working with people. Solo works for me when I’m deep in a function, doing that 5%. The rest of the time I like to be able to bounce ideas. Software needn’t be lonely.

Besides, I do believe in code reviews. You tend to be too close to the code to see something is missing or wrong based on the reqs. Other eyes make sense. That way you can ensure the comments match the code if nothing else, see below.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

– This is a mix of a learned and an acquired taste. Write a piece of un-commented code. Leave it alone for six months (or six days). Then come back and look at it. Unless you’ve written very accurate function names and variable names, the code will take a while to sink in. Its better explaining in the code (as comments) what you want it to do, in case someone else thinks its meant to do different, and how it works. Its the team programming thing mixed with the big bus theory (which roughly goes as “Splat! Oh noes, that’s the only one who can fix the code”.) And remember to change the description if you change the functionality of the code.

Its also that if you are indispensable, you can’t be promoted.

If you are a coder, or a tech person who has to write at least one script, give the test a shot yourself.

Every so often you discover that some programmers are cool.

I don’t mean in the really skilled (can write a million euro application in 10 lines of code) but actually cool.

For example Luis be Bethencourt Guimerá one of the presenters at OSSBarcamp. No only is he a talented coder and software designer (who worked on the forthcoming Ubuntu release), but he also wrote his own VJ software (being released in the Jaunty Jackalope release of Ubuntu Studio) and digital DJ software, complete with intuitive interface, to help his gigging around the world.

That is cool! I’ll cover more on this later.

This OSS Barcamp was less like most other Barcamps I’ve been to in that the schedule was locked down in advance. It made an interesting change, but it didn’t stave off everyone’s technical difficulties.

OSS Barcamp has its worthy side too. Éibhear Ó hAnluain took the opportunity of a number of skilled and focused minds to look at “How to present a political party’s FLOSS-friendly IT policy to the electorate” or rather, what are the benefits to the country for using free and open source software. What I loved about this talk was actually Enrico Zini and the impact that open source software had on the Italian political scene and its civil service.

The lightening talks were fun, I missed part of James Larkin’s “Intro to CSS Frameworks”, but there should be a video of his talk (and I’m sure he’ll release his slides). One other thing which stood out is the effort to translate or localize Ubuntu to Irish. If you are a native speaker, talk to them.

I’m also fascinated by the formation of TÓG, hackerspaces in Dublin. In the same way that co-working has benefits, I can see similar benefits with co-hacking. And folks, this is the old style of hacking as in making things work, work beter, or creating something new out of other products. Not cracking which is breaking in to things. Think more of an organised “voiding your warranty”.

Due to the lighting talks I ended up missing David Coallier’s “Get Ready for web 3.0 talk”

Now, back to Luis.

First off watch this video.

Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video

Looks pretty good. Not too fancy and suits the song.

Now just think that this video was created with

• one $160.00 disposable pocket video camera
• one batch of Free Software, most of which is in Studio Ubuntu
• two hours of shooting
• four hours of production

Cheap? And good looking too.

And then there is “Big Buck Bunny” created by the open source Blender tool. Now it took a long time to put together, but the Peach Movie Project Team include tutorials on how they did it.

Just remember kids; software is an art as well as a science. And artist in one field tends to have skills in other fileds.

Take care, and enjoy the short movie below,

Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video

Thanks to Laura Czajkowski and Jaime Hemmett for putting the whole day together.

Will Knott

“Being an idiot, means losing the sense of self-criticism that is often found in programmers, sysadmins and engineers and truly learning.” — Noah Gift

Thanks to Gordon of Yell if it Changes for passing on to me Noah’s article called The Importance Of Being An Idiot which as you can tell from the blog title, its something I believe in.

Admitting that you are not an expert, or don’t know everything is hard, however, if you are an indispensable expert… you can’t get promoted. And I certainly hope that all CEOs are jacks who hire experts rather than being an expert who only looks at one thing (usually that quarter’s bottom line).

And Noah’s article has a nice quote from The Edge — “Most people lost in the wild die of shame. They didn’t do the one thing that could save their lives –thinking”

Being an idiot means not being ashamed to ash the questions stupid questions.

Like how do I…

Will

tags : overheard, idiot, programmer, sysadmin, engineer, o’reilly, Noah Gift, Yell if it Changes, jacks, thinking, stupid questions