joker.iki.fi

I’ve been thinking lately of a problem that constantly seems to hit a lot of IT projects (and probably other projects) in the face. Basically, how to make the basic assumptions and done decisions most efficiently known throughout the team.

For example, if the lead developer or architect decides that a component called “engine” needs to do only thing A and B, nothing else, and he thinks that if anyone, ever, wants it to make C, they always need to understand the original rational for limiting the functionality to A and B, before making the decision to add C.

Problems like this can become tedious in larger organizations because many people only typically know that the “engine” exists, but nothing else. Without knowing the context and basic assumptions made when the original decision to keep the functionality to the bare minimum, that is, only to have A and B in the engine, many people waste a lot of time and effort to design stuff without complete information.

Clearly, traditional approach, meaning documentation and learning, is quite slow and inefficient. Worse yet, collective documentation and collective learning are even slower. People constantly are misaligned with their documentation and with the stuff they have learned.

Nevertheless, I think I have found out at least few items that can make this better and I hopefully can pursue them in the near future. Please let me know if you are interested in this topic, I’m surely going to need help.

It would be interesting to have a really deep and real recession. The economy is pretty shitty nowadays but I think it would be really refreshing to have a really good and deep nosedive which would render everyone unemployed and poor. I’m pretty sure that, unless something major would happen concurrently (like war, alien invasion or sudden outbreak of airborne deadly diarrhea), here in Finland, we would not run out of clean water, food and heating. Surely, all the secondary things would be unavailable. Things like cocktail parties, SUVs and gym memberships, but honestly. If I count the bare minimum that I need to live a happy life, and take care of the family, it’s easily done with fingers on my one hand.

1. Clean water
2. Food
3. Warmth/heating
4. Secure enough environment for my family
5. Availability of basic medical treatment

I have hard time believing that this could not be provided by the society even in the time of recession. This would be very healthy in my opinion. Just to let people understand that it really doesn’t matter that lot if you can’t get the latest iPhone and if your local food store doesn’t have just that particular cheese available. I am so sick of people whining to me that this and that sucks and it’s bullshit here and there. It would be so nice that these whiners would just end up in a situation where it’s a matter of sucking it up and surviving.

It would also be really nice to be able to somehow collectively measure people in things that really matter. Like the skill of being able to select a carpet that goes so well with the rest of the interior design would really not matter that much if the skills at demand were more along the lines of “ability to sew the damn carpet in the first place and be happy that you don’t need to sleep in direct contact with the frosty ground.

I know it’s wishful thinking since in a few years all this is forgotten and it’s all back to reality TV and investment banking again.

Ok, maybe I’m not serious, but I think it would be nice to have some kind of global reality check.

I can pretty easily summarize the average day of my life. The following things happen during the 24 hours.
8 hours or work. This includes the work done to earn the money to pay everything.

8 hours of home. This includes the household chores, like cooking, cleaning, going to the store to buy necessities like food and clothes and so forth. Also, taking care of the baby is part of this. Changing diapers, feeding her and so forth happens within this 8 hours. Then there’s also the maybe 1 to 2 hours (maximum) that I can actually spend with her. Like playing and going outside to play and walk and such things.

Then there’s the last 8 hours, which goes to sleep. Or should go to sleep. If I want to do anything extra, like play a game, write some open source code, watch a movie or read a book, it’s away from the sleep time and it’s not possible to do for a long time since at some point the lack of sleep catches you.

I’m pretty certain that this can’t be it. The content of life I mean. I also consider myself being lucky enough to have a work that every now and then actually feels like it makes sense. I couldn’t imagine what it would be if I just spend my working hours doing some repetitive trivial bullshit.

Many people say that after a while it all gets easier. I wonder if they mean like it gets easier like you accept it as a fact that this life only gives you so few hours of fun time and rest of it is just work. Or, do they mean, that there starts to be more good hours. I wonder.

Anyway. I would not like to live my life like this, really. I mean the ratio of fun, even if you count sleeping as fun, is just not good. I think I should write a facebook application where people could record their ratio and we could compare. If people constantly score the same figures as I do, let’s commonly agree that the world is royally fucked and call the UN.

I have to say that the last thing I am interested in is the global economy. I find the theoretical side boring and the practical side very distant. When it comes to investing to stocks and soforth, I am not really doing it. Partly this is because I’m paying the mortgage more agressively back whenever I have loose money and partly this is because I just don’t have the energy to invest and then aggregate a solid base of knowledge aroung the investment to actually maintain the investment.

This can be pretty stupid and surely it is against the principles of market economy. I already know that I’m the worst consumer there is (I don’t really consume that much because I don’t need that much) and I don’t invest my capita efficiently, which probably in few years will be counted as an act of terrorism.

Still currently I have been listening to the world’s finance news more closely. Typically I ignore the “OMG the nasdaq has fallen/risen this much and that much” type of news since I think that most investors and analysts are a bunch of control freak monkeys whose blood pressure is directly linked with market tickers. And I found the “Jump You Fuckers” comment hilarious. Anyway, it is looking like this one can get pretty nasty and since I work as an IT consultant, my work is quite sensitive to economic hiccups.

While it would be quite bad to get fired (I don’t think it’s very likely currently, although working for a US-based company can be problematic currently…) but also that would be my first time ever. Well, in the case that I would get sacked, I think I would use at least some of the time paid by the union to actually do some serious introspection and career moves. Personally I would be very interested in starting to work with only open source products. I am currently quite sick with the problems associated with commercial software. I would like to code, but with the way the current consulting engagements have gone, It’s been powerpoint only. This makes my coder heart cry in pain every time I need to “restructure” or “fix” or “generate” another slideshow to explain some topic. Granted, some of the things I work with are conceptually quite hard and since it’s the customer who pays the bills and has to live with the solution, it’s only fair that I explain what I do. Anyway, this probably deserves another posting.

But the point was, economic meltdown may actually be a good thing for me. I get to go back to the basics if shit hits the fan in a big way. Of course this would mean that there’s a way to feed the family and stuff but I don’t really think that shit’s going to be hitting the fan so hard that food production stops. And if it will, then I can become a part time farmer. That would be kind of cool too.

As a testimony to how Helsinki likes to piss on their own back yard, the man wants to build a garbage-burning “energy” plant to eastern Helsinki, more precisely, in Kivikko, quite near where I live. To prevent this from happening, please sign the petition against the project (in finnish)!

If you need more reasons to sign, here you go:

• This well be even worse environmentally than burning coal or oil. The waste is incinerated using oil, coal or gas to achieve a high burn temperature. So not only you get the traditional problems with these fuels, you get the toxins that result from burning plastics and various other materials found in common household trash
• Net energy output of this power plant will be negative (meaning that it uses more energy than it produces). The trash is carried there from various places using diesel trucks and then incinerated using gas and oil. They keep the burn temperature very high, because this way you are supposed to get less pollutants (except that you don’t really). At these temperatures the efficiency of the heat-to-electricity conversion is very poor.
• Like I said, the trash is carried there using trucks. Guess which is the road they’ll be driving to Kivikko? Right. Kehä (Ring) I, which we all know is crowded in the first place, and now they are aiming to cram hundreds of trucks more there.
• Burning trash does not solve the trash problem and it does not solve the energy problem either. It is just politically more pleasant to generate invisible toxins and greenhouse gasses than it is to have, well, dumps and landfills.

So there you go. Sign the petition, vote against ALL elected representatives that are involved in stupid plans like this and write to the involved parties (more info here).

There are alternatives to this plan, it just means that some suits are going to have to work a bit harder.

During this week, a group of people has been gathering funds to publish an ad in the largest newspaper in Finland, that is, Helsingin Sanomat (well, ok, not in the main paper but still). The ad is not obscene or very provocative even. It basically says “These people (who are the ones now running for parliament) voted for the law, and these people voted against.” Read the scoop from the Vaalimasinointi.org, who are the ones behind the ad.

Since I believe that passing the law was a stupid mistake and Finland is going to pay dearly for that, it is very frustrating to see that Finland’s biggest newspaper which, grated, has a very bad track record of being truly independent and party-neutral publisher, turned down the ad.

Well. even though it’s morally wrong, I guess it’s their right to team up with the Finnish equivalent of the MAFIAA. Probably makes a good business sense if you optimize for the past and stagnation. Good thing that I don’t subscribe to expensive partisan probaganda that is the HS.