My new favorite site on teh intarwebs is the Mt. St. Helens Volcano-cam. So serene! So pretty! So different from the view out my office window, which always seems to include at least one screaming firetruck, particularly during conference calls!

Ahem. Anyway, the volcano-cam picture on the main site is updated every 5 minutes (ish). I wanted it to be my desktop background and update more or less in sync with the online version.

To my surprise, I could find no way to set this up in the OS X control panels. Read the rest of this entry »

The ACM has just announced that Fran Allen has won this year’s Turing Award. The Turing is computing’s Nobel Prize, and Allen is the first woman to win it. In the 1970s she did pioneering work in compiler optimization and parallel execution that made supercomputing possible. The availability of supercomputing, in turn, led to scientific breakthroughs in many other fields. Here’s a fluffier piece with a nice picture.

I don’t know why this made me so happy this morning. I usually roll my eyes when I see “The first woman to X! Omigod!!” news releases, but this one I forwarded to my mom and said “this is the award I’m going to win someday.” I never even thought about the Turing before, but now I feel strangely empowered.

I guess I better get working on that PhD.

When I graduated with a CS degree, lo these many years ago, I had no idea how software was actually built, despite several quarters of “software engineering” courses. These classes covered the classic “waterfall” model, in which a list of requirements leads to an architecture leads to coding leads to testing leads to release (and woe be to the project that does these out of order or interspersed) and also the slightly newer “spiral” model, in which a little bit of requirements analysis leads to a little bit of architecture leads to a little bit of coding leads to a little bit of testing leads to more requirements analysis and so on until you’re dizzy.

So I went out in to industry, and discovered that how software is actually built has nothing to do with a waterfall or a spiral. It is, in fact, much messier.

The spiral model is, however, the basis of Scrum and XP and other agile methodologies, in which you do a little bit of work, make sure everything’s OK with your customer, change direction if necessary, repeat until you’re done. What agile methodologies add to the spiral is the explicit acknowledgment that creating software is a social act. Communication at the right time with the right people often makes the difference between building the right product and building the wrong product.

The waterfall and the spiral and other formal models such as the “surgeon” don’t model real-world software development very well because they ignore the impact of communication skills. The agile methods do not. XP, for example, sets up a formal channel of communication between the customer and the programmers. It also sets channels within the programming team via pair programming, nightly check-ins, and automated builds.

I recently started reading current academic papers on software engineering again, and discovered that many researchers still use the process model of “requirements -> architecture -> coding (repeat as necessary).” They think it is how software is built. They look for ways to improve a particular phase of that process.

In general, they completely miss the social aspect of software production, which is really what determines whether a project succeeds or fails. Creating software is inherently a chaotic event that depends on forces we can’t (currently) model formally. Perhaps they’re uncomfortable with something they can’t reduce to a diagram, but if they continue to ignore it, the gulf between what academia thinks we’re doing and what we’re actually doing will continue to grow.

Last year at RailsConf, there was exactly one presentation by a woman. I think we can do better. Head on over and pitch them your idea for a talk.

At this point, 6 months in advance, they’re just looking for ideas. You don’t have to have the talk already written. And yes, I’m writing a proposal in another tab!

C’mon, you know someone had to call their post HW.

Howdy from the west coast. I’m Sarah, and I hang out in San Francisco and related environs.

My expertise these days is in server-side Java in small- to medium-sized systems. I’ve worked on a lot of different things, though — development tools for MS Office, 3D graphics for virtual reality, automation for eBay sellers, dev tools for software companies in the developing world, and lots of assorted web apps and sites.

Right now I’m a consultant for Colorful Expressions, and my current project is a shopping cart, which has some interesting and surprisingly complex problems for something so mundane. And it’s in Rails, which is to Java what my neighborhood hardware store is to Home Depot.

(I mean that as a compliment.)

As for the rest of my personality, I dance, play Puzzle Pirates, study Japanese, do fabric-related crafty things, have a toddler, am superwoman, etc. Ha ha. Actually, I spend most of my free time poinging around with my daughter, largely at the expense of laundry and housecleaning and all the above-referenced fascinating things I used to do.

Though I do still play Puzzle Pirates. Yarrr!