Best Book About Software Development Process in 2010

Over the years, I have read many books on software development methodologies. Some are good, some are totally useless, but even the best one still makes me feel something is lacking. In the early days, they tried to make make the "unpredictable" thing "predictable" (which may be idealistic but  is never realistic). Worse, by making things predictable, the software development process became too rigid. The agile movement recognized this error and started to anticipate change as an important element in software development process. However, whether it's scrum or extreme programming, the agile practice still focuses on the technical side. A metaphor for how changes and collaborations can successfully work in the software development process is missing. Now, I finally found the missing piece in "the Jazz Process".

Reading this books is like having many "aha" moments.  So much "implicit knowledge" I have learned over the years fits perfectly with this metaphor. For example, how does team dynamics impact a software project? In what way? (The issue becomes obvious to me since our team is going through fast growth now.) How can a bunch of smart people collaborate (without keep fighting each other with their big egos)? "The Jazz Process" provides a very convincing model (how Jazz improvised) and simple guidelines based on it. The writing is never dull, the examples covers a lot of interesting topics (such as how a special operation force team is organized), and if you are a Jazz fan, it's also full of interesting stories about Jazz performers. After reading this book, I think I will never listen to a Jazz performance the same way again.

 

   

Heading Home

Now I have had things packed, my D3x sent back to Nikon for sensor cleaning, I am ready for my yearly trip back to Taiwan. Though my time in my parents' place sometimes felt more like a house arrest than a vacation, last year I managed to get some work done and found it very productive. Compared to the daily conflict with my mom, working feels like a vacation.   

The King's Speech

I managed to go to this movie before heading home. Other movies (black swan, true grit, etc) will have to wait until I am back from Taiwan.

The Sorrow and Joy of Working at Startup

 Today is my last working day of the year. Because our company is preparing to move to a new building next week and I will be on vacation by then, I stay late to pack my things. Looking around the empty building (everybody gone, packing boxes scattered everywhere), knowing that I will be starting a new year in a new location, I can't but look back and reflect on the passing year.

It's quite a rocky year. More than 30% of the people I had worked with in 2009 were gone in 2010. Some left because work was too stressful, some left for better opportunities, and some left for other reasons. I had my moments of doubts too. Yet against all odds I stayed.  A coworker (who left last week) once asked me and another coworker, what motivated us to stay in this company. We couldn't give him a good answer. We knew it was not money since we hadn't gotten any salary raise for 2 years and probably wouldn't get one any time soon. (I even got a cut when I joined.) The working hours were long. The future was uncertain (whoever thought he could make quick money working at start up probably hadn't worked at one for long). So why did I stay? Or, change the question slightly, what kept me going?

It took me quite some soul searching to find the answers. They are:

- the people I work with. When I worked long hours, I knew my other coworkers worked just as hard (if not harder), and no matter what challenges I was facing I knew I could always get good advices from them. I was not alone. (I sometimes even feel slightly guilty because most of them have families and are making more sacrifices working at a start up.)

- the sense of accomplishment. To write the first line of code in many modules and see them grow, to master things I doubted I would ever be able to learn, to overcome my fear of talking to strangers and help on customer support, the action of accomplishing things becomes its own reward.

- the sense of adventure. Just one year ago we didn't even have a customer, now we have doubled our revenue for four consecutive quarters. How's that possible? Will we be like that next year? Honestly, I don't know. Yet I now know why epics like Iliad and Odyssey are relevant after two thousand years. We are all living in epics of our own.

Maybe the answers are not good enough for my parting coworker (he will laugh his head off and tell me I am too naive), but they are good enough for me. At least for now.

P.S. I started this post yesterday, so the "today" is actually yesterday.

QE Explained

Surprise Birthday Gift from the Interns

Our company hired two interns from Sweden lately. They are young, full of joie de vivre, and super passionate about programming. They also care a lot about engineering practice. To promote unit testing (they are helping us on test automation), they even hand-made some badges and gave one to us if we wrote more tests. (I got the first badge and felt so honored.) Working with them really teaches me to be humble.

Several days ago (my birthday), I was going out to have tea with Chinchih (as a celebration) and  told them it was my birthday on my way out. When I was back, I noticed a print-out on my desk with a book cover and a happy birthday mark from the interns. "Thanks for the print-out, why there's a book cover on it?" I asked the interns. "Oh, we thought you would like the book so we bought it as your birthday gift. You will receive it in 5-8 days. It's shipped to your home." A bit surprised, I asked them, "But how do you know my home address?" "Oh, we asked the HR. She told us." Wow, I was speechless. Never in my life had anybody gone through so much effort to send me a gift (let alone someone I barely know). I was moved, I could even feel tears in my eyes.

OK, maybe life is not that bad after 41. Sometimes even a small gesture can lighten up other people's life. That's probably the most important thing I learned from the interns. 

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Announced

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/onlineGallery.do

This most prestigious award for wildlife photographers around the world...

Wu Yen - The Funnest Chinese Movie I Have Seen in Years

I noticed this movie after reading someone's blog (http://blog.chinatimes.com/georgegray/archive/2010/11/26/570568.html). I rented it from Netflix mostly because I missed the late Anita Mei. I didn't expect much. But, what a hilarious ride it is! So many gender changes in this movie, just like Shakespeare's comedies "Twelfth Night" and "As You Like It". The palace set reminds me how King Hu borrowed set design from the Chinese Opera. The use of puppet show to do battle scene is also ingenious. Needless to say I am now a fan of Sammi Cheng. (Why Hong Kong movie stars are also singers? Is it a requirement?)

P.S. the Cantonese version is much more fun to watch than the Mandarin speaking version.

Amazing Landscape Photos from UK

Take a view - Landscape Photographer of the Year

Black Swan Is in Theater This Friday

Chinchih has been waiting for it for a long time. Finally it's in theater this Friday. Also, congratulate on her to be the 10000th clicker in this blog. She will get a surprise gift from me.

All About Love

Hard to believe the last time I saw Vivian Chow in movies it was almost 20 years ago. How she had aged! (Her "come-back" would definitely break the hearts of many fans.) Strangely, Sandra Ng now looks much better than 20 years ago (remember her in "洪興十三妹"?) and has proved to be an excellent actress ever since. Still, it will be an interesting movie to see, even just for nostalgia's sake.

The interview by SS Chang about the movie is also interesting:

Sunset at Point Lobos

I planned to go out shooting on Thanksgiving, but changed my mind. The day after Thanksgiving turned out to be an extremely popular day for Point Lobos. When I was taking photos, I could even see the flash from someone's point-and-shoot camera. Pretty crazy.

Ginkgo Tree in a Church Yard

  Spotted this Ginkgo tree while driving.

Mitty at Home

Cats are wonderful models with personalities of Hollywood movie stars. Like stars, they always know how to make an impression.

Japanese Maple After Rain

Though it rained most of the day, the sun showed up once a while. When that happened, the light was warm and dramatic (yet soft enough to bring out all the colors). It would be a perfect day to go out and take photos, if only I had the rain gears prepared. Instead, the lazy me just took a walk around the neighborhood. For now, I just had to make do with the Japanese maple in my neighbor's backyard.

P.S. my lovely Zeiss 50mm really brings out those beautiful colors of the maple.

Dry Plants on Highway 1

Going Home

What an amazing weekend! The weather was perfect and I witnessed two incredible sunsets. Sometimes I questioned my decision to choose photography as a hobby. (Not only it is expensive, it is time consuming too. I could hardly do anything else in the weekends.) In moments like this, all is forgiven.    

A Bridge Too Far

Sunset Variations

The End of Fall

Notes to myself: I should use a polarizer.

Submarine Rock

Playing with Big Stopper

Big Stopper is a lot of fun. Notice the color shifted to the cold side. I had to compensate it by setting the white balance to extremely warm. Things look so different in long exposure. In the 6 minute exposure below, the cloud seems to be moving fast while the water stays still. It's actually very relaxed to take long-exposure photos. After setting the timer, I just walked around and enjoyed the scene. Sometimes I even forgot I was photographing.

Got My Domain Back!!!

I was experimenting with different hosting service providers and it somehow screwed up my domain name setting. I couldn't access my own domain any more. At first I thought it was due to the 24 hour dns sync time, but after 24 hours, things still didn't improve so I finally wrote an email to the tech support. After some tuning, I finally got my domain back. Yeah!!!!! 

Granite Point (from Last Week)

Not a good shot to use the big stopper (this is a crazy 6-min exposure), but I finally got the proof that the "leaking light" issue was caused by my misuse of the filter holder. After switching the screw-on to the other side if the holder, the problem was resolved. Now I can hardly wait to go back and try my other ideas.

P.S. the 24mm is incredibly sharp. I love it more and more.

Back to Point Lobos (Granite Trail)

Halloween turned out to be an extremely beautiful day. I chose a different trail to photo this time. After weeks of no practice, I felt pretty rustic. The L-plate was harder to use than I imagined (and very heavy). However, the new trail is full of photo potentials. It will be the focus of my next Point Lobos trips.

After Dark

A walk around the neighbor hood after dark. A lot of people gathered around and chatted. It actually felt more like Christmas  than Halloween.

Preview to the Halloween

A few fun shots from my neighborhood. Will post more photos after dark.

Dead Blue Whale

I first saw a photo of this dead blue whale from my coworker Mark's laptop. (He visited Bean Hallow State Beach and took a few snaps.) It was unbelievable! What a pity that such a beautiful majestic animal had to perish from the ocean hit-and-run.

Made in Dagenham

The funny-goofy Sally Hawkins in yet another interesting role, as inspiring as Poppy in "Happy Go Lucky"

Rearranging My CDs

My CD collection, plenty of space to grow now.

After moving to her new house, Chinchih gave me her old CD shelves (which store more than 600 CDs), so today I started the "rearrangement of the decade". It was the first time I merged the CDs of my college years with the CDs I acquired in the States. It's quite interesting to see how my taste has changed over the years.

1. Almost all the CDs I bought in Taiwan were from "the old masters". Now I prefer listening to new recordings, even though I may have to take some chances with the performer.

2. I must dislike Chopin a lot. I have more Biber CDs than Chopin's. How is it possible?

3. I rarely listen to Opera. Most of the opera CDs I have are Baroque Operas and half of them are by Handel, though I do have a "diva" section which rivals the Opera section. (That's where you will find my Kate Royal.) None of those CDs were bought when I was in college.

4. I have a small section reserved for composers who are still alive. However, Glass, Pärt, and Gorecki* now sit with those "dead" composers. I guess they have made it to my personal canon.

5. Too many B composer (Bach, Bartok, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, etc) CDs. They occupy almost 1/3th of the shelf. Actually I find almost all the new recording of those B composers are quite disappointing. It's hard to have a refresh Beethoven after so many master recordings. I think I will avoid buying those B composer CDs from now on.

6. I finally found the Heifitz's Sibelius recording. (I thought I lost it.) Played it again. I have to say even after listening to so many "fiendish young" violinists, Heifitz still sounds like an old devil.

* Interesting enough, the three composers are all famous for their music used in movies. Who can imagine the movie "The Hours" without Glass's music? You can also hear Gorecki's Symphony No 3 and Pärt's "Tabula Rasa" in movie "Fearless" and "Nosferatu" (the remake).

Interesting News

http://udn.com/NEWS/NATIONAL/NAT5/5916692.shtml
Wow, that's how you can get the payback from all the red-bombs you had received in years...

Detour

 Ecstasy of St John the Baptist?

My original plan was to take some photos at Point Lobos. However, as I approached the destination I felt such a strong repulsion. I couldn't go on. (I guess I haven't fully resolved the anger of paying the $265 fine yet.) On my way back I decided to salvage the trip by taking a detour to Mission San Juan Bautista (the religious context was probably a side effect of watching the movie "The Secrets").

It was near sunset, most of the tourists were gone. I felt quite comfortable walking around with my camera and tripod. A friendly priest in green robe tried to talk to a group of  young people near me. I managed to stay away from his attention. The light was wonderful. I was able to shoot the famous John the Baptist statue from a much more interesting angle. It looked almost alive!   

Ha-Sodot (The Secrets)

This is probably the only Israel movie I had ever seen and definitely one of the most strange. The Jewish religious rituals are really eye-opening. Watching it is really like going to a strange new world.

Bought a L-Bracket for My D3X

L-Bracket is a useful tool to allow photographer to shoot horizontally and vertically from the same angle without adjusting tripod. It's extremely useful for the pros (who usually have to shoot in both formats since they don't know which one will be used by their clients). However, it's hard for me to justify spending $200 to buy "just a piece of metal". After all, how excited it can be to buy a metal plate?

Still, it's something on my "tools to have" list so I put it on the "wish list", reserved for the time when I need a "shopping" therapy. (Those therapies never worked. They are more like a fix to a drug addict.) Anyway, the time had come. After a few chaotic weeks at work I decided it's time to order a L-Bracket. It will arrive next week. Let's hope I will not get another ticket when I use it at Point Lobos.

Driftwood

Not a good day for photo, the weather was too foggy. The driftwood in weeds reminded me Andrew Wyeth's tempera painting.

Excellent CD from The Sixteen

Just the track of Barber's "Agnus Dei"(adapted by the composer from his famous adagio in his string quartet) is worth the money. You can listen to samples here.

Julie Taymor Takes on Shakespeare Again

Rest assured a Julie Taymor movie will be a visual feast (Titus, Frida). Though I probably wouldn't understand more than 10% of the dialogues, I wouldn't want to miss it either.

Thinking In Pictures

The amazing story of Temple Grandin. Claire Danes really did a fantastic job to play her.

New Movie

Diane Lane is getting more and more ravishing as she ages...

Nostalgia (Part II)

Nostalgia (Part I)

Gee, I like her hair style (how come I never noticed it before). I wonder where I can get a hair cut like that in the bay area.

First Try of Lee Big Stopper

Things look tranquil when time slows down 1000 times.

A quite foggy afternoon. This is without the Big Stopper, or the warm colors will be gone.

Not a good day for photography but I was determined to try the Big Stopper anyway so I headed to the coast. The filter was much easier to use than my B/W screw-on stopper, but it caused such a terrible color shift. Even after I set the white balance to "shadow", all the warm colors were gone and the photos all had a blue cast (in black and white it looked ok). I also noticed some serious "ghost" effect (probably because I was not use the Lee holder so the filter was not properly sealed in the holder). Looks like I will need some fine tuning with the filter for a while.

One Hour Late for Photo

I totally forgot now the sun sets 2 minute earlier every day and thought the sunset time was 8pm. Needless to say, I was 1 hour late. It was too late to try my new 10f stop ND filter. Only got time to snap a few shots. It was a warm day and the afterglow was beautiful. On my way back I noticed the moon was in orange and looked just like a pumpkin!

Contour Mouse

I noticed this interesting mouse when visiting Chinchih yesterday (she had back problem so she couldn't use the normal mouse):

http://ergo.contourdesign.com/products/product-detail.aspx?id=2

Flood!!!

The new typhoon brought a lot of rains to Taiwan and my home town was in one of the most flooded areas. This place showed in the video is quite close to where we lived. My parents moved to a new apartment building two years ago so they were not affected this time. Otherwise, I would probably see our home in the news too.

Visited Chinchih's New Home

My friend Chinchih moved to Redwood City recently and today I was invited to visit her new home. (No photos since they hadn't finished unpacking.) To someone who's afraid of height like me, the house looks a bit scary since it's on the hill. The land is large and there's a creek going through it (I was not able to access it due to poison oaks on the ground). I can imagine it will be very nice to build a trail around it and have BBQ there. I will post more photos when the owners finished repacking and landscaping the backyard.

Waiting for Superman

An important film for any parents in the U.S.

Pollock in Bird Drop

Spotted this in the parking lot. Wow, those birds apparently know modern arts.

Playing with Kindle 3

I bought a Kindle 3 as a birthday gift for my best friend. After some waiting (it was out of stock for a while), today it finally arrived. I already had a Kindle DX and didn't expect much for Kindle 3. To my surprise, I found it quite an improvement. The display was way better (more contrast and detail), page turning really fast, and download was much faster. You can also change the fonts of a book (only a few selections now). I had to say I almost felt tempted to order one for myself. Hmmm, maybe it's time to sell my Kindle DX... 

Salt Pond

[通天神探狄仁傑]第一支預告(高畫質HD版)10月8日上映

Hark Tsui's Judge Dee has more resemblance to Sherlock Holmes than the real Dee in history. (He probably got his inspiration from Robert van Gulik's "Judge Dee" series*.) Never mind the historical details, you know it will be entertaining. (Look at those costumes!) My only complaint is, how come Empress Wu looks like Lao-lao in "A Chinese Ghost Story"?

* My favorite van Gulik is the "Nail Murder", followed by the "Bell Murder".

Fleeting Moments: The Most Expensive Point Lobos Photos I Ever Took

I finally received the letter from the Monterey court. The fine is $265. I don't think I can afford to visit Point Lobos for a while.

Fleeting Moments: The Most Expensive Point Lobos Photos I Ever Took: "I got a ticket for 'staying out of trail and stepping on plants' for these photos. Don't know how much fine I will have to pay. I wonder if..."

Black Swan

The movie actually reminded me the interesting backstage tour at Covent Garden (my friend Chinchih is a ballad aficionado and insisted we took it during our London trip). We actually saw a beautiful dancer wearing a black swan dress doing some photo shoot, but, alas, nothing as sensational as the movie.

A Stroll Around the Bay

Objects on the Beach

Crab Shells on Driftwood (no, I didn't put them there)

I just wanted to sit here and watched the sun set, but alas I had photos to take.

Passage to Unknown

Last shot of last weekend. It was the first time I was able to go out and take photos on both Saturday and Sunday since I joined my current company. Something must be wrong.