Two excellent days!

Yesterday's training was excellent regardless of the cramped conditions. There were nine of us packed into a tiny meeting room with a table taking most of the place and a whiteboard on one of the wide walls, which meant that I was the only one on the whiteboard's side of the table and the eight participants were squeezed on the other side of the table.

Today's open training was excellent and I could have continued it much longer. It seemed that all of the participants grasped my ideas with enthusiasm. I hope the enthusiasm sticks as they go back to their organizations.

Fun weekend

I'm in Finland, preparing for a training week, recovering from a very fun weekend with friends in Helsinki and Hämeenlinna. There was bowling, sauna, good food and some Monty Python. I drew one picture, which didn't quite come out as well as it could have, but I'll post it on Deviantart as soon as I get it scanned. I still have a lot to learn. The first round of bowling was my best and I scored 140, which isn't much but it was best of our group, which tells that it didn't really go that well. But it was a lot of fun.

Thank you, Sini, Marko, Sammy and Taina, for your hospitality and a very fun weekend! Bark, bark for Otto!

Now I'll Skype a minute or two with Virpi, who's staying at home. Then I'm off to catch a bus and drive to my accommodation.

Off to Finland

I'm flying to Finland today. Here the weather turned warm again, the sun is shining again today, although yesterday evening we had a massive rain fall.

This week, I've been mostly tinkering on the www.tick-the-code.com. The Info part is starting to be under control. Take a look and send me good constructive comments. It is supposed to be informative, accessible, enticing and usable. I'm sure it isn't perfect, so tell me what you don't like and how it could be better. There's even a video I produced.

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I started thinking about freedom of choice and how errors affect it. I'm trying to draw a graph including the Window of Opportunity, the ticking Timebomb of Failure and the Handcuffs of Find and Fix. The idea, which I might have mentioned earlier, is a part of the DayTick course and I try to use it to motivate people to act for quality NOW and not cry about errors later.
In the beginning you can choose to tick as much source code as you want and you do get rid of unnecessary complexity. Having less complexity in the software reduces the number of errors you are going to make, but the probability won't go to zero. This is partly because there's never quite enough time for quality and the essential complexity still remains. Software programming is hard. But in the beginning the Window of Opportunity is wide open.
So at some point you do make an error. The Timebomb starts ticking. Nobody has noticed the error yet, but eventually somebody will. That is when your Window of Opportunity for Ticking closes. You can't keep blindly ticking and hoping that the error will go away. Now you HAVE TO get rid of the error. It has to be exactly the one fault causing the failure somebody spotted, no other will do. You are handcuffed to finding and fixing the error. Your freedom returns to you only after you have managed to find and fix the reported error. The Window of Opportunity starts opening again. You can start ticking instead of the Timebomb.

When does the Timebomb of Failure go off, you ask? When a customer finds your error, instead of an internal team. The blast will shatter your and your company's reputation.

Building Castles in Sand

The summer seems to be over for now. Unrelated, there's a sand sculpture exhibition at Kemnader See lake, which is worth visiting. It is open until 22 o'clock and if you go in after 21 o'clock, you get in half price (3€). I thought of putting here some of my own pictures, but the official website seems to have very nice pictures indeed. Just check under "Bilder" and you'll find them.

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The trip to Finland approaches and the last preparations are under way. Even though we planned a lot of training sessiosn during the next two weeks, I hope to get some writing done, too. I've heard that there are still places free in the open sessions both in Tampere and in Helsinki. Check the invite and act accordingly if you want to learn to be more effective as a software developer.

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I received today new software! Apple Software's newest iLife '08 and iWork '08 are waiting to be installed. I almost can't wait to try the new features out. When I bought my iBook and iMac they came preinstalled with iLife '05 and I later bought iWork '05 (probably a day before '06 came out...). The iWork '08 contains the first version of Numbers, the spreadsheet program. I've been waiting for Google to release their spreadsheet application for Safari, but so far I've been waiting in vain.

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I've been pondering my business recently. Essentially I want to help software developers, who are clever at what they do and don't normally believe that others could teach them anything. They often have intellectual pride. In businesses they are surrounded by managers who don't necessarily understand at all what the software developers are doing. To them it is a miracle what happens and that something gets produced at all. They certainly couldn't do it themselves. It is extremely hard for the managers to go and tell the developers to do something differently especially in the technical matters.
The software developers don't necessarily have any contacts outside of the organization, because their work is more inwards. They focus on getting the code out, it is somebody else's concern to find the customers for it. The managers on the other hand can't see inside the software, they focus almost completely outwards. What does this have to do with my business model?
Well, when I contact companies, I often bump into managers who have no idea how much more better technically their developers could be. I don't normally get to convince the developers who should recognize a good idea when they see one. The managers might have a vague idea that things could go smoother and the deliveries from the software department could be more reliable and have less bugs in them. They just don't know how.
Sometimes it feels like I'm building castles in sand trying to reach people who don't want to be helped and reaching people who don't know that they could help.
I hope I reach the right people with the material that is slowly coming together in www.tick-the-code.com.

Conference paper submitted

I just submitted the conference paper. There's still some time left if my reviewers want to have something changed, but mentally I have released it. The next step is to change it into a presentation until October comes around. Virpi gets to book the trip next week, which is nice.

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Today's movie is "Saw II".

Miscellaneous little news

Topics today: conference paper, website, Stefan's birthday, planetarium.

The conference paper is proceeding very well, thank you for asking. Rachel helped me to improve the writing a lot. As a native speaker, she could point out weird constructions I had managed to build. I think the paper is now much better and ready to be submitted. I hope the reviewers agree as the camera-ready paper must be available by 19-Aug-07.

www.Tick-the-Code.com is halfway through its migration. Most of the graphical components are in place, most of the content is still missing. There's some new automatically changing content, like the coding rules on the home page and the excerpts from the book draft on the Material page. It will be the best source of information about Tick-the-Code soon.

Stefan celebrated his 40th birthday on Tuesday. Yes, this is the borrowed-Watchmen-the-comic-several-years-ago-and-still-hasn't-finished-it Stefan. I've heard he has started reading the comic and found it exciting enough to finish, I hope.

Yesterday we went to see a show in the Planetarium of Bochum for the first time. They had a special presentation called Eclipse, where the showed astrological images and played the music of Pink Floyd. It is well worth visiting. Find the show times here.

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Tick-the-Code -viikkojen myynti Suomessa on alkanut kiivaana. Viikoilla 35 Tampereella ja 36 Helsingissä on mahdollista osallistua Tick-the-Code -kurssille tai jopa järjestyttää sellainen firman sisäisenä. Katso kutsu ja ota yhteyttä. Paikkoja on rajallinen määrä, samoin kuin päiviä.

Homecoming

The trip to Finland is over. We took a cargo ship from Helsinki to Travemünde and I have to say that it was a very comfortable way to travel. There wasn't much to do, but we didn't need much. We watched an episode of "Green Wing" on QualiBook and went to sauna. There was breakfast, lunch and dinner from a buffet and not too many people. Everybody had their own tables, which kept everything in order. It was excellent!

We got out of the ship around 9PM and had still over 400 km to drive. It was full moon and the pictures Virpi took with long exposure from the moving car are hilarious. Rarely can you see a stretched moon. We reached Bochum well before 2AM on Monday morning.

I've been working on the two websites. Www.Tick-the-Code.com is still very much under construction, but I've also made (invisible) changes to www.qualiteers.com.