/\ndy

Are you working beyond your means?

While doing some writing this morning, I came across this quote:

“You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.” — Picasso

Interesting, especially when you consider that most of us probably do the opposite, constantly stretching to handle 12 things when we're really only capable of handling 10 effectively, and maybe 5 with mastery, if Pablo was right.

And I suspect that he was. We know that multitasking, in general, costs you more time than you save—perhaps 20-40% of your productivity, in fact. Interruptions that disrupt your concentration can cost you 20-30 minutes as you reload deep context.

I've talked to a number of folks who've instituted "email-free" days or half-days, where the team simply shuts down their email clients and focuses on their real work. To a person, they've found this to be an incredibly rewarding and productive experience.

So here's my first New Year's resolution: Work Below My Means.

Yeah I know, there's still a few weeks before New Year's, but there's a lot that needs fixing, so I better start now :-)

New podcast: Johanna Rothman on how to Manage It.

What should a manager actually do? What does multitasking really mean? What does an MBA qualify you for? Learn the answers to these and other critical questions as Johanna Rothman, author of "Manage It", explains how to really make teams go faster, and discover the importance of practice, feedback, and fun. Plus Johanna reads an except from her Schedule Games chapter, in this latest podcast.

Google Web Toolkit Conference

If you’ve read Ed Burnette’s Google Web Toolkit: Taking the Pain Out of Ajax or are interested in GWT, there’s a conference coming up you might want to look at.

The Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference will take place December 3-6, 2007 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

They’ll have JavaScript and Ajax workshops, and a keynote by Josh Bloch.

Be sure to register using priority code GWT3363 at checkout for a $100 discount for Pragmatic Bookshelf readers.

Enjoy!

Andy keynoting at Oredev conference

I'm honored to be speaking at this year's Oredev conference in Malmo, Sweden. The conference runs November 13-15; I'll be delivering a keynote and a couple of tutorials. For more information, see their website at www.oredev.com.

I'll be making a few side trips on the way, so if you're in Copenhagen or Stockholm, we might run into each other!

New podcast: "Are you sure you thought of everything?"

Check out our new podcast series at http://pragprog.com/podcasts.

In this interview, Michael Nygard explains that just one hour of downtime on a Fortune 500 website can cost $300,000 or more. Mike explains how to use stability and capacity design patterns to avoid expensive, public disasters.

Interview by Daniel Steinberg, theme music by Andy Hunt.

GIS for web developers

GIS for Web Developers: Adding 'Where' to your Web Applications is now available in paperback—in glorious full color!

This is our first full-color book, and it's a real treat. We might be running a little short on copies, so if you are interested, you're better off buying sooner rather than later.

Congratulations to author Scott Davis on a job well done.

99.9999999 uptime (nine nines)

Concurrency, scalability, uptime. As internet-based computing and the internet grow in ubiquity, these characteristics become much more than buzzwords or sales points—they become vital to the life of your company, whether you are hosting or using web services, selling or buying.

Uptime is often stated in terms of a percentage of availability, something like 99.99% (one hour downtime a year) is desirable, or perhaps even the fabled "five nines", 99.999%, which comes out to something around 5 minutes downtime a year. Hardly worth monitoring :-).

But how would you like "nine nines" reliability? That's 99.9999999% uptime, which pretty much means that if you blink sometime over the next year, you'd miss the downtime completely. It can be done, and apparently has been done, in Erlang.

Steve Vinoski mentions this in his article in IEEE Internet Computing, where he talks about his own introduction to Erlang:

Unfortunately, the more I learned about Erlang, the more I also had that sinking feeling about how much time I’d spent over the years trying to (re)invent the wheels that *Erlang/OTP already provides*.

Historically I think many project teams have ended up with a pile of re-invented wheels over in the corner. Most folks have wised up over the years, and no longer embark on disastrous errands such as re-inventing their own object-relational database mapping layer, etc. But these core problems of high concurrency, fault tolerance, and reliability really cry out for a new approach. These are particularly hard wheels to manage, especially in standard environments such as Java or C++, and re-inventing them is less appealing than ever.

And of course, as with all languages and technologies, just seeing what's possible—and how others have solved these problems—can help you directly, even if you never use the technology itself. Steve sums it up nicely at the end of the article:

Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and get a copy of Programming Erlang. Even if you never write a single line of production Erlang code, reading and understanding this excellent book and the language it describes will make you a better developer.

On Social DRM, Pragmatic style

This blog posting on teleread has a nice discussion of Social DRM. I particularly like this quote:

"We could take e-books more seriously as a medium if we could truly buy them, especially for future use on new machines with different operating systems. Or present use on the cellphones, PDAs and other gizmos now proliferating in many households."

I think that's the real issue. As a consumer, I do not want to rent or subscribe to media, I want to own it. Period. I want to own it and use it any way I see fit—no matter whether it's on a Linux box, or a Mac notebook, or whatever. I think that's the key aspect to downloaded music files, and I think that's the key aspect to eBooks.

As the article mentions, the PDF eBooks we sell from the Pragmatic Bookshelf are not encumbered in any way with DRM. You're free to print sections off, have a backup copy, one on your laptop and hard drive at work, and so on. You're not free to share your PDF with others, that's all. Your name is encoded within the PDF, and also stamped on every page, so it really helps to keep honest people honest.

We're also trying to set an example, and I really hope this one sticks.

Why Ruby?

In this podcast interview by our own Daniel Steinberg, Glenn Vanderburg explains why you should make Ruby your "go to" language, and some of the ways that Ruby will expand how you think about programming and programming languages.

The coming multi-core crunch?

According to this article in the Arizona Daily Star, the new generation of multi-core CPU's poses a daunting challenge.

Experts, quoted in the article, predict dire consequences if software for more complicated applications doesn't arrive soon. One even saw the need for some Manhattan Project style efforts to help solve this pressing problem.

Well, for the here and now there's always Erlang. It was designed from the ground up to address exactly this sort of problem, and it handles concurrency naturally and effectively.

Sounds like a good start to me; no bunker required.