afongen

Not what you think.

I am visiting artima.com more frequently. I’m particularly fond of the great interviews, such as the latest, an interview with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer. I am enamored with their broken window analogy: if a little something is broken and not fixed or flagged, it sets in motion a cascade of disrespect and carelessness.

It comes down to showing that you care. Take for example some code that is kind of shared among the team, but primarily is mine. There’s some code in there that is obviously bad, but it doesn’t look like I care about it. I’m just leaving it bad. Anybody else coming into that module might say, “Well, Dave doesn’t care about it. It’s his module. Why should I care about it?” In fact, if you come into my module and do something else that’s bad, you can say, “Well, Dave doesn’t care. Why should I care?” That kind of decay happens to modules as well as apartment buildings.

On the other hand, suppose I notice an edge condition that doesn’t work in my code. I know it’s a bug, but the bug is not critical to the application today and I don’t have time to fix it. I could at least put a comment in there. Or, even better, I could put assertion in there, so that if the edge condition ever hits, something’s going to happen that shows I’m on top of it. By doing that, first of all I make it easier to identify the problem. But I also show other people that I care about that enough that they will fix problems too when they encounter them.

This man is talking to me.

Email’s been down at work the past day or so. If you’ve been trying to reach me there, I’m not ignoring you. I’m just enjoying the feeling of being out of touch, tinged with the dread of what awaits me when the server’s restored.

The oddly named Nemesis Project looks like something to bookmark: a good collection of information and links for CSS and XHTML.

I keep coming across mention of how important it is for dads to read with their kids. Since I read to Owen every day, I never gave this much thought except to wonder why the big push for dads in particular.

At early childhood class on Friday, Kiara found out why: studies indicate that by the time boys are in third grade, they get the idea that reading is a girl thing and resist doing it. Encouraging fathers to read with their kids is an effort to counteract this trend.

Kiara, bless her heart, did not mention just how compulsive a reader I am. I’ll grab anything in sight, especially at breakfast: cereal boxes, of course, but it might just as easily be magazine subscription cards or terms of service for her brother’s cell phone. She caught me at the breakfast table the other day reading the inside of a roll of masking tape. Hey, there was nothing else within reach! I can imagine the discussion:

Teacher: …so it’s important for fathers to read.
Woman: Even if it’s a fishing magazine? That’s about all he reads.
Teacher: Yes, even that’s good.
Kiara: Masking tape rolls?
Teacher: Er, say again?
Kiara: Because my husband won’t read anything unless it’s from 3M.