Andy's Mind

Not even two weeks have passed since I wrote here about why the ubiquity of Google worries me and now Yahoo is falling into Google’s hands as well. TechCrunch first broke the news yesterday and now is reporting about the conditions of the deal (which are much better for Google) and criticizing Yahoo executives for, basically, giving up on their company and its fight for a place in the Net.

In any case this is clearly a step in the direction of Google becoming the only search engine known worldwide. That would mean a single entity having monopoly over who gets traffic and who doesn’t. Or, in other words, deciding which content is visible and which is not. And this is for sure bending the worldview of its users – if not intentionally then as a result of the SEO experts’ efforts.

This is why I did choose to use Microsoft’s Life Search instead. Joe Ziz commented asking why switch to a search that is not better and is run by a corporate behemoth too.

You see – the point here is not using something technically better but different. If my worldview – as affected by search results – has to be skewed I prefer it to be skewed in a different way. And the problem with search is that with current technology a good search engine requires resources no startup can build. That leaves Microsoft as the only viable competitor – they can match Google’s resources because they can afford it. Probably no one else in the industry can.

And I’m less afraid of Microsoft’s domination of the past than Google’s (near)monopoly of the present. Microsoft just reaped huge profits by selling low quality software, Google is dealing with a much more delicate matter: information.

Now, the big picture behind all this is whether freedom of speech on the Internet will be preserved or not. It is much more likely to survive if there is not too much concentration – that is if the Internet is indeed a neutral pipe connecting small and big alike and putting them on equal footing. If Google (and a few sites like it) dominates and if Net neutrality goes away (which is something all telcos would love to see – selling access to major sites like TV channels is a great idea for Mammon worshipers) then Internet will become as much a censored propaganda channel as TV and radio have became already.

And this is not impossible – the naive thinking of the early 90ies that because the Internet was designed to function after a series of nuke blasts it will be impossible to censor it was proven wrong by China and its Internet Police. In the end it turns out that even if it is technically doable to go around Internet censorship it doesn’t matter if it is too difficult for the majority of the population.

This is a grim vision. It might or it might not become reality. But it is worth knowing how much the shape of the Internet will affect the shape of the society in world’s industrial nations. Google’s influence is not to be underestimated.

I’m switching to Microsoft Live Search. I’ve changed the default search engine in my browser and I vow to use it as my primary search engine from now on. And I think my reasons for doing it are worth sharing here.

First, make no mistake: I’m not a Microsoft fan and I never was. I was a Linux evangelist about 12-10 years ago and I’m an avid Apple and Mozilla user now. I think MS’s operating systems suck and always did – they are in fact responsible for entrenching bad software as a standard and degrading people’s expectations about software quality in general. And as a company they are as bad as you can get.

So I’m not doing it because I love Microsoft or because I think Live Search is a better search engine. I’m just fed up with Google – and also a bit concerned: my concern is that relying exclusively on Google’s search results affects my worldview too much.

Google has a de-facto monopoly on web search. Therefore everyone fights (with all kinds of SEO techniques) to be on top of Google’s ranking (because almost no one looks further). The effect is that on the first page of Google’s results you are more likely to find someone actively pushing his mediocre content than people who just have good content and no active “SEO strategy”. Also, Google has been known to censor its search results in the past. No matter what reasons they have and whether I agree with them by doing so they try to shape the worldview of millions – including mine – by removing some sites and through that some points of view. Now, that is not ok.

So, I want to see the world through a different lens – not necessarily a fundamentally better one, but at least a different one. And I’ll be actively encouraging others to do the same thing – not necessarily switch to Live Search, but at least throw away Google-Matrix glasses and look at the web from different angles.

In any team work a certain level of discipline is necessary to achieve organized progress. In creative work, however, too much discipline can hinder both the progress and the quality of the results delivered by the team. It has long been known that software development attracts a certain kind of individuals. Usually above-average intelligence comes with an above-average ego plus (usually) some weird interests and kinks. And a certain obsession with tools combined with the love for the art and craft of building software.

For those reasons managing developers has been jokingly compared to herding cats. The manager has to strike a balance, constantly, between the discipline and freedom. This requires discerning what is crucial and has to be monitored closely from what is incidental and can be left for the team to decide or do.

Agile methods make this much easier because they focus on what is really important and really needed for orderly progress. For example Scrum calls for a Daily Scrum each day and besides that it is left for the team to decide how they will work to achieve the goals they committed to during the Sprint Planning. Also, technical level methods like XP or TDD focus more on how the code being built should look like or how should it be built rather than with what, when etc. The rest is and should be left for the people to decide. Some of this deciding will take place on the team level, some will be up to individual developers.

I believe that this is indeed the right way forward and this is how we work at Code Sprinters. We maintain a very disciplined process coupled with lots of freedom in the choice of tools and a very relaxed, informal atmosphere.

One of the things we don’t force on our developers is the choice of tools. They can use Windows or Linux if they want (I wish we could afford to give everyone a Mac as an option too, but this is not possible yet) – and whatever distribution of Linux they want. They can use a company laptop or their own. They can use an IDE like Eclipse or they can use traditional but powerful tools like VI or Emacs. It is so because for the good quality of the end product – software – the developer has to feel comfortable with the tools he uses. Forcing them to use the same “standard” tools would be as wise as forcing them to wear the same size of shoes. I’ve seen comments that “lack of unity in tools” is a bad thing – I strongly disagree with that. I think diversity in the tools used is a sign of a good, creative team.

Of course, there is a minimal set of tools everyone has to have and use, but all are independent of the OS/platform used. Everyone has to use our Banana Scrum tool to manage their tasks and update on progress, do planning it, register impediments etc. Everyone has to have Skype running on their laptop to stay in touch with others and the clients. Everyone has to use Google’s Calendar, our SVN repositories, project wikis etc.

We also don’t strictly enforce working hours. What is enforced is presence on the Daily Scrums – everyone on the given team has to be there – and there are penalties for being late. Besides that it is just said that being in the office is expected and encouraged, but there are no set hours. So we have people running in just before the Daily Scrum and people who sit in the office from early morning. Surprisingly, even without a card-clock etc. most of the time whole teams sit together in our “war room”. It turns out making it both enjoyable and palpably productive to be here works much better than enforcing presence.

Finally, there are certain standards re. the coding style, the test coverage, the way repository is to be used (what is acceptable as commit and what is not), a procedure for starting a new project etc. They are applied universally and teams working on a given projects may (and frequently do) add on top of that additional standards that for their particular project. Good example is the release procedure which looks different in each project and ranges from just tagging the release in the repository to working with the client’s server(s) to actually put the new release in production.

This approach – enforce strictly few key things, be relaxed on others – has worked extremely well for us. I’m not going to say everyone should do it exactly like we (it might be for example a tad difficult with larger teams from the logistics point of view) but I think the general principle is sound and should be part of good practice in any agile team.

I just realized today why I like going to conferences so much. It allows me to think.

This is so because usually getting to a conference involves travel and traveling has always induced high quality thinking in my brain. I don’t know why, but I find the whole experience of moving very inspiring. No matter if this is by plane, train or car my mental gears spin faster. This is a creative time also because this is usually a when I can’t use my computer, I’m not answering phone calls and generally I have less distractions.

In any case I’m finding out, that without a few hours of travel every month I’m deprived of some of my quality thinking time I used to have.

But the conference experience doesn’t end there – it also gives me time to actually listen to people talking about subjects of interest with full concentration. And ask them questions. Not possible with some interesting lectures available on Google Video and other sites. First, because it is surprisingly hard to find a free hour within a day to listen to them. Second, because there is no interaction.

Finally, on a conference I get usually a few hours of very good work on my computer in the evening. Again, precisely for the reason outlined above – less distractions.

Seems like I have to cut down distractions to move faster, the problem is that Internet is just one huge distraction. And with a laptop and Wi-Fi it is almost everywhere now.