In one of my favourite books, the Pramatic Programmer, the authors Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas use the Broken Window Theory to illustrate the importance of fixing small problems in code before they become bigger ones.
Just this week I noticed how messy and cluttered our under-sized kitchen was becoming. We are struggling through a difficult time at work, hunting for some capital to get our operation rolling as it should be. Anyway, the kitchen was getting more and more cluttered, people were leaving plates out, dirty bowls in the sink - no-one seemed to care.
I spent about 15 minutes cleaning it up, putting stuff away, and generally removing clutter. I returned this morning to find the kitchen twice as clean as I had left it. More things had been moved away to cupboards. Some people had taken there old container home! Things looked cleaner. Wow - it really works.
Now - if only someone would clean the tea-towel! :-(
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
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Work
This article is espousing that the move from VB6 to .Net should be made using VB.Net.
When I made the move from VB6, for new projects I insisted on C#. My reason being, I had many fairly inexperienced developers, too well entrenched in the VB world. I wanted to really emphasise to different nature of the .Net world and drive home the paradigm shift that had to happen, when undertaking such a major change. We were talking about taking VB developers (and only VB developers) and trying to get them to build proper object oriented systems. So I wanted things to change a lot for them - including syntax, so as to over-emphasise the changes that we were undertaking.
More costly? I would argue not. A huge cost either way, but hwo costly would a move to VB.Net be, where you are just rehashing the same of stuff you used to churn out in VB6.0
Well we may find out, because that was about 2 years ago!! Now, that team of 12 or 13 has gone in two distinct paths.
One (a smaller C# side) has wound up working with me on a project at a new start up company and have built, (are building) much of the same functionality - "properly", throwing out old (sloppy) practices.
The other, fell back on VB.Net and are churning out the same of rubbish, but in .Net. Their project is now over 12 months late!!
As much of this would have to do with the development practices of a bunch of cowboys as opposed to our structured approach to development, but my point was, to change the culture of a bunch of VB6.0 guys, we need to change the language they "spoke", otherwise they think (maybe sub-contientously) that they're just doing the same old thing...
When I made the move from VB6, for new projects I insisted on C#. My reason being, I had many fairly inexperienced developers, too well entrenched in the VB world. I wanted to really emphasise to different nature of the .Net world and drive home the paradigm shift that had to happen, when undertaking such a major change. We were talking about taking VB developers (and only VB developers) and trying to get them to build proper object oriented systems. So I wanted things to change a lot for them - including syntax, so as to over-emphasise the changes that we were undertaking.
More costly? I would argue not. A huge cost either way, but hwo costly would a move to VB.Net be, where you are just rehashing the same of stuff you used to churn out in VB6.0
Well we may find out, because that was about 2 years ago!! Now, that team of 12 or 13 has gone in two distinct paths.
One (a smaller C# side) has wound up working with me on a project at a new start up company and have built, (are building) much of the same functionality - "properly", throwing out old (sloppy) practices.
The other, fell back on VB.Net and are churning out the same of rubbish, but in .Net. Their project is now over 12 months late!!
As much of this would have to do with the development practices of a bunch of cowboys as opposed to our structured approach to development, but my point was, to change the culture of a bunch of VB6.0 guys, we need to change the language they "spoke", otherwise they think (maybe sub-contientously) that they're just doing the same old thing...
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