Category Archives: productivity

How much code can a coder code?

Lines of code (LOC) is a simple way to measure programmer productivity. Admittedly it is a flawed metric. As Bill Gates famously said “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight”. But it is at least easy to measure.

So how much code do programmers average per day?

Fred Brooks claimed in ‘The Mythical Man-Month’ that programmers working on the OS/360 operating system averaged around 10 LOC per day.
Capers Jones measured productivity of around 16 to 38 LOC per day across a range of projects.
McConnell measured productivity of 20 to 125 LOC per day for small projects (10,000 LOC) through to 1.5 to 25 LOC per day for large projects (10,000,000 LOC).

It doesn’t sound a lot, does it? I’m sure I’ve written hundreds of lines of code on some days. I wondered how my productivity compared. So I did some digging through my own code. In the last 12 years I have written somewhere between 90,000 and 150,000 C++ LOC (depending on how you measure LOC) for my products: PerfectTablePlan, Hyper Plan and Keyword Funnel. This is an average of round 50 lines of code per working day. Not so different from the data above.

I also looked at how PerfectTablePlan LOC increased over time. I was expecting it to show a marked downward trend in productivity as the code base got bigger, as predicted by McConnell’s data. I was surprised to see that this was not the case, with LOC per day remaining pretty constant as the code base increased in size from 25k to 125k.

Some qualifications:

I give a range for LOC because ‘line of code’ isn’t very well defined. Do you count only executable statements, or any lines of source that aren’t blank?
My data is based on the current sizes of the code bases. It doesn’t include all the code I have written and then deleted in the last 12 years. I have just spent several months rewriting large parts of PerfectTablePlan to work with the latest version of Qt, which involved deleting large swathes of code.
It doesn’t include automatically generated code (e.g. code generated by the Qt framework for user interfaces and signals/slots code).
I only counted code in products shipped to the user. I didn’t count code I wrote for licence generation, testing etc.
All the code is cross-platform for Windows and Mac, which makes it more time consuming to write, test and document.
Programming is only one of the things I do. As a one-man-band I also do marketing, sales, QA, support, documentation, newsletters, admin and nearly everything else. I have also done some consulting and training not directly related to my products in the last 12 years.

Given that I probably spend less than half my time developing (I have never measured the ratio), my productivity seems fairly good. I think a lot of this may be the fact that, as a solo developer, I don’t have to waste time with meetings, corporate bullshit and trying to understand other people’s code. Also writing desktop Windows/Mac applications in C++ is a lot easier than writing an new operating system with 1970s tools.

50 lines of code per day doesn’t sound like a lot. But the evidence is that you are unlikely to do much better on a substantial project over an extended period. Bear that in mind next time you estimate how long something is going to take.

If you have data on LOC per day for sizeable projects worked on over an extended period, please post it in the comments. It will only take you a few minutes to get the stats using Source Monitor (which is free).

How to make difficult decisions

When you run a business (even a small business like mine) you have to make a lot of decisions. Many of these decisions are complicated and have to be taken with incomplete information. But you can’t take too long over them, or you will never get anything done. Here are 3 techniques I use to help with difficult decisions.

Break it down

This is a very simple method for breaking a difficult decision down into smaller parts using a spreadsheet.

Decide the criteria that are important for the decision. Add a row for each.
Add a weighting column. Assign each criteria a weighting in the range 1 to 10, depending on its relative importance to you.
Add a column for each option you are considering.
Set each criterion/option cell a value in the range 0 to 10, depending on the extent to which the choice for that column fulfils the criteria for that row.
Calculate the weighted sum for each column.
Choose the outcome with the highest weighted sum.

Here is an example for choosing between 3 different types of hosting:

It’s not particularly scientific, but it does force you to systematically break down the problem into smaller parts and justify your decision.

Take the long view

It sometimes helps to stand back and look at the bigger picture. I can think of no better way to do that than to ask a hypothetical (hopefully elderly) future me, lying on my deathbed, which option they approve of. For example, given the choice between adding an innovative new feature to my product or improving the conversion funnel by a few percent, I think future me would be happier that I chose to add the innovative new feature. It is also a useful reminder that many decisions probably aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Flip a coin

Sometimes you need to make a decision, but you don’t have enough information or the time taken to get that information is going to cost you more than making the wrong decision. In that case, don’t agonise over it. Just roll a dice or flip a coin and move on.

My new product : Hyper Plan

scrum kanban I have just launched a new product. First some back story. A few years ago, my wife and I were renovating the house we live in now. Trying to schedule and track all the different tasks, tradesmen and quotes was a real pain. We stuck Post-it® notes onto a whiteboard to try to keep on top of it all. The Post-it notes represented the various jobs that need doing. We placed them in columns (representing what stage they were at: needs quote, accepted quote, scheduled, doing, done) and rows (representing the various trades: plumbing, roofing, electrical etc). It worked, but it was far from ideal:

I wanted to see status vs trade, status vs room and room vs trade. But changing the layout was a pain, so I had to pick one layout and stick with it.
Colours were useful for extra information. But we were limited to just the few colours that Post-it notes come in.
There was only limited space to write on the note.
My wife couldn’t read my handwriting.
We had to use a separate spreadsheet to track the budget.
Post-it notes would fall off and get lost after being moved a few times.
I ran out of Post-it notes.

That is when the idea of Hyper Plan first occurred to me. It has been burning a hole in my brain for the last 5 years. Now I have finally got around to implementing it.

Hyper Plan is Post-it note style planning, implemented in software. In software you are no-longer limited by the number of Post-it notes you can afford, the amount of wall space you have or the number of colours Post-it notes come in. You can even change the layout and colours with a mouse click. All with animation and easing curve loveliness.

The sorts of planning you can use it for include:

project planning
planning what is going into your next software release
event planning
Kanban / Scrum / Agile
planning a holiday
to do list (I know!)

Anything where you have discrete tasks that you want to be able to categorize (e.g. by person, status or type), schedule or track in a visual form.

Here is a 2:42 minute overview in video form (with audio):

Can’t see the video? Try this mp4 version (10.7 MB).

Hyper Plan is quite different to anything else I have seen. That could be a good thing or bad thing. I am putting out an early beta to try to find out.

Hyper Plan is not currently for sale. I don’t want to take the time to set up all the payment processing and licensing until I am confident someone might actually buy it. The current beta version will run completely unrestricted until 17-Jan-2015. There are Windows and Mac versions. Hopefully a commercial version will be available for sale by the time the beta expires. If not, I will release another free version.

Currently it is very much an MVP (minimum viable product).

The UI is a bit rough around the edges.
The logo was done in 5 minutes in Word.
The documentation is just a quick start guide.
Some important features are not implemented yet (e.g. printing, exporting and undo).

But I have tried to follow my own advice and resist foul urges to spend months polishing it (which is hard!). What is there is pretty robust though, and I think it demonstrates the concepts. Hopefully I will know in a few weeks whether it is worth taking the time to polish it to commercial levels.

I would love to know what you think. Particularly how useful you find it for ‘real’ planning tasks. Even responses of the form “I wouldn’t use this because…” are helpful. Please also email a link to anyone else you think might be interested. Particularly if you have ever seen them sticking Post-it notes to a wall or swearing at Microsoft Project! My contact details are here.

FAQ

Q: Why is it desktop, rather than SaaS/mobile?

A. I think stories of the death of desktop software are exaggerated. Also:

I can build a minimum viable product much quicker for desktop.
Differentiation. Some people prefer desktop apps, e.g. because they don’t have reliable Internet or don’t want to store their data on third party servers.
Less competition. Everyone else seems to be doing SaaS/mobile.

I might add SaaS and/or mobile versions later, if there is enough demand. Note that DropBox (or the Google, Microsoft or Apple equivalents) allow you to easily sync a Hyper Plan file across multiple computers.

Q: So it’s Trello for desktop?

A. Not really. I had the basic idea before I ever saw Trello. And I’m not stupid enough to compete with a free tool from the great Joel Spolsky! Trello is great at what it does. But Hyper Plan is different in quite a few ways. In Trello the emphasis is on collaboration and workflow. In Hyper Plan the emphasis is on visualization and planning. Hyper Plan allows you to present your information in lots of different ways with a few mouse clicks. It also has a built in ‘pivot table’ type feature that is much easier to use than Excel pivot tables. This is really useful for totalling effort and expenditure by different categories.

Post-it is a registered trademark of 3M.

The scrum photo is licensed under creative common by Logan Ingalls.

80 useful tools and services for software businesses

Some of the most useful nuggets of information I come across in blogs and podcasts are mentions of tools and services used by other people to better run their software businesses. So I have put together my own list of useful tools and services to run a software business.

Feel free to recommend your own favourites in the comments below. Please include your relationship to the tool/service (e.g. customer, user, employee or owner). You can also comment below about your experiences (positive or negative) with any of the tools and services listed. Anonymous comments will be treated with suspicion and may be deleted

Buying a lean, mean, compiling machine

Nearly two years ago I wrote an article about speccing my ultimate development PC. Somehow there was always something more pressing to do. But I finally took delivery of my shiny new PC this week, partly spurred on by the fact that I wanted tried and trusted Windows 7 for the OS. Also my current development PC is getting increasingly crufty after 5 years of continual use.

I emailed my requirements to the top 3 custom PC companies in the UK as rated by PC Pro magazine : Chillblast, Cyberpower and CCL:

Hi,

I’m looking for a PC for developing software. Prime requirements in order of decreasing importance:

1. reliability
2. cpu + disk speed
3. quiet
4. value for money

Here is my wishlist of components:

-i5-3570K CPU
-an SSD (at least 128 GB) + 2 fast and reliable HDDs (7200 rpm, at least 1 TB each)
-ASUS, Gigabyte or EVGA motherboard supporting USB 3.0 and SATA/600.
-16 GB of fast RAM
-Windows 7 64 bit professional
-quiet is good, open to suggestions on sound insulation, fans and/or passive cooling
-AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics card
-at least 2 USB ports on the front and 2 USB ports on the back (ideally more, ideally including USB 3.0)
-DVD drive
-Gigabit ethernet
-full size case
-kensington security slot, so I can lock it to the ground
-I don’t need a monitor, keyboard, mouse etc
-I don’t need WiFi
-It has to be *super reliable* – I want reliable SSD + HDDs, good quality motherboard, good quality branded power supply etc.
-target price, not more than 1,500 inc VAT, less is better obviously

Can you build something to meet this spec or get close? Please send me the spec and your price (including UK delivery).

Both Chillblast and Cyberpower sent me quotes for a system fairly close to what I wanted within 1 working day. I then spoke to their sales people and went online to tweak their suggested systems using their web based system ‘configurators’. In the end I chose Chillblast over Cyberpower due to:

higher rating from PC Pro readers
cheaper for a comparable system
better warranty
better online configurator (I found the number of choices on the Cyberpower online configurator a bit overwhelming)

However there really wasn’t a lot in it. CCL took nearly 2 whole working days to respond to my initial email, so I discounted them as insufficiently responsive.

Following some suggestions made by the sales people I spoke to, this is the spec I ended up with:

Chillblast Fusion Longbow
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
Onboard High Definition Audio
Corsair CX 750W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified PSU
Sony 24x DVD-RW Drive
Seagate Barrcuda 2TB 7200RPM Hard Disk
AMD Radeon HD 6850 1024MB Graphics Card
Intel 120GB 520 Series Solid State Drive
16GB Corsair PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 Memory
Asus P8Z77-V LX Motherboard
Akasa Venom Voodoo Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
Intel Core i5 3570K Processor 3.40 GHz (No Overclocking)
Fractal Design Define R3 Low Noise Case – Black Pearl – USB 3.0 Edition
Total price: £1089.80 + VAT (inc MSOffice Home Edition)

I take security fairly seriously. I have a motorbike style ground anchor in my office and I want my shiny new box physically locked to it. But I was told that almost no PC tower cases have a Kensington lock slot. This seems crazy to me. My current Dell tower has one and the cost of one tiny little extra slot in the chassis must be pennies. So I had to buy a lock adaptor kit. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works fine.

I ordered the system on 02-Oct and it arrived on 22-Oct. Here are a couple of photos of the new system with the side panels off.

The PC took a few days longer than the originally advertised time to arrive. This wasn’t a big issue in my case. But I only found out it was going to be late when I emailed them after the expected completion date. It would have been a lot better if they had been more pro-active and emailed me first. Other than that I am fairly satisified with the service from Chillblast so far.

There are a few issues with the case, which aren’t really Chillblast’s fault. It looks rather lovely in its big, black, minimalist sort of way, a bit like an obelisk from ‘2001 a space Odyssey’. But the case scratches rather easily if you lay it down to change a component on my laminate floor. The side panels are also a bit fiddly to get on and off (my old Dell PC is better in this regard). Worst of all, it has rubber grommets (is that the right word?) that fall out into the case (and potentially into the fan or heat sink) if you even look at them funny. This means lying the case down to retrieve them, struggling with the side panels and more scratches. I have had to do this at least 4 times so far. It seems that they have made them of rubber that is far too soft for the job. Grrr.

How fast is the new PC? It certainly feels very snappy. I benchmarked it against my old Dell development PC (Dual Core 2.13 Ghz, 4GB RAM) building my event table planner software from scratch. This is 83k executable lines of C++ according to SourceMonitor:

Build time	Old PC	New PC
Debug build	6 minutes 56 seconds	1 minute 32 seconds
Release build	6 minutes 23 seconds	1 minute 28 seconds

So it is more than 4 times faster than the old PC at its key task – building software. Admittedly it isn’t a ‘fair’ comparison of the hardware. The older machine has a different version of Visual Studio, a different OS and probably some unnecessary services running in the background. But it is the best I can do in the circumstances and I doubt a ‘fair’ test would be much different. Despite the fact that I only went for a mid-range graphics card, the new PC can also handle playing Half-Life 2 on full 1920 x 1200 resolution without any noticeable issues. Hopefully the faster build times will give a significant boost to my productivity (as long as I don’t play too much Half-Life 2).

The new PC is also eerily quiet. I would guess more than 4 times quieter than my old PC. Even when it is doing a build, all you can hear is the faint whir of a fan.

Only time will tell how reliable it is.

Pivot Tables demystified

Online businesses generate a lot of data. Sales data, marketing data, traffic data etc. Pivot tables can be a useful tool for analysing and extracting useful information from this sea of data. A lot of people seem to have heard of Pivot Tables without understanding what they are or how to use them. Despite the slightly cryptic name they are really just a way of summarizing tables of data. Nothing to be intimidated by. I’m going to try to demystify them here with a simple example.

Let’s imagine you have got an Excel spreadsheet with a month of (fictitious) sales transaction. It looks like this:

You want to find out:

The total value of sales of each product
The number of sales of each product
The total value of sales of each product by country
The total value of sales of each product by day of the week

How would you do it? You can crunch the numbers using a calculator, but that is very tedious and error prone. If you are a programmer you can export the data to a .csv file and write a small program in your favourite language to read it in, crunch the data and write the results out. You probably think you can do it in 10 minutes, but I bet it will take you at least an hour to get it working and debugged. I did all the above in 1 minute and 20 seconds using Excel pivot tables.

Here is how you can do it (screenshots from Excel 2007). You can download the spreadsheet if you want to try it yourself.

Select all the data, including the header (A1 to D222).

Click on Insert in the Excel Ribbon bar.

Click on PivotTable.

The Create Pivot Table window will appear. Click OK.

The PivotTable Field List will appear. We want to find the number of sales for each product. Drag the product field to Column labels and the value field to Values. This gives us the total value of sales by product.

To change this to the number of sales pull down the Sum of value drop-down list and select Value Field Settings….

Change Summarize value field by from Sum to Count and click OK.

The number of sales of each product are now shown.

Now drag the country field to Row labels. Then click on Count of value, select Value Field Settings…, change it back to Sum and click OK. The total value of sales of each product by country is now displayed.

We now need to add a day of the week column. Click on Sheet 1 and add a new column as shown.

Now select all the data from A1 to E222 and insert a new pivot table, as before.

Drag the fields as shown to get the total value of sales of each product by day of the week.

(We’ll quietly ignore the fact that the number of days aren’t divisible by 7 in the data.)

We can even display by product, day of the week and country with one more drag.

Excel also supports pivot charts if you prefer your results in graphical form.

Obviously this is a very simple example, but pivot tables can be used to quickly analyse much larger and more complex data sets. Next time you have got some data to analyse consider whether you would be better using pivot tables or pivot charts.

*** UPDATE ***

You can also use my Hyper Plan software to create pivot tables. It is a lot simpler than the above! There is a free trial.

Is it possible to run a successful software business with a 4 hour work week?

Tim Ferriss’ ‘Four Hour Work Week’ is a thought provoking, but controversial, book. One of the central ideas he promotes is that you should be able to use outsourcing to create a money making business (‘muse’) that you can run in only a few hours per week. Leaving you with enough free time and income to travel the world, learn to tango or otherwise amuse yourself. But I am highly sceptical that anyone can sustain, let alone grow, a software business long term, working only 4 hours per week. I have run my own business working less than 10 hours week for a month or two at a time while travelling or doing house renovations. But it only gave me enough time to keep things ticking over. I wasn’t able to improve my product or marketing. I am sure my business would decline in the face of technological changes and hungrier competitors if I kept this up for too long. I have spoken to other owners of small software businesses and they were of a similar opinion.

So I was interested to see a case study on the Four Hour Work Week blog from someone running a software business. Brandon Pearce owns musicsteachershelper.com, a slick-looking web based app for music teachers.

He says that after 5 years he is making $25k in sales per month with $10-12k in expenses per month[1] and no employees[2]. So that is a net profit of around $168k per year. That’s not too shabby, especially when you consider that he lives in Costa Rica and says he works just 5 hours per week. That’s nearly $650 per hour!

But he doesn’t say how many hours per week he worked to build the business. He also says in the case study:

With a complex web application, you can’t write it once and be done; you need to continue making enhancements and listen to user feedback in order to have a successful product.

I couldn’t see how this squared with working only 5 hours per week. Even if you are outsourcing everything you still need to manage the outsourcing, which can be time consuming in itself. I emailed him for some clarification and he was kind enough to give some more details:

It’s hard to give an average time worked over the past five years, since it’s changed so much. The first two years I was also working full-time as a programmer, but spent most of my free time working on the site – probably 10-20 hours per week. Once I quit my job (years 3-4) I worked probably 40 hours per week on the site. The past year or two, it varies from week to week. Some weeks I’ll only work 2 hours on it, some I’ll work more like 15, if I’m preparing for a new feature, special offer, or doing a big launch of some kind. But these days I’m averaging about 5 hours per week, and it’s been that way for well over a year.

Yes, I can definitely sustain and improve profit levels at this number of hours. The business is a well-oiled machine, and I have teams that are working to help continue to improve and grow the business in various ways, largely without my constant supervision. The business continues to grow every month, regardless of how much I work.

What do I spend these 5 hours doing? Mainly reviewing the new features or bug fixes the programmers have been working on, the requests from customers that the support team has submitted, and determining which items I want the programmers working on next. I also spend a little time handling some of the more difficult support or billing issues, paying my workers, managing a few PPC campaigns, answering e-mails, and checking stats. Recently, I’ve also been writing the scripts for some new video tutorials, and finding people to help produce the videos, too.

So, pretty much everything I do at this point could also be outsourced, allowing me to work even less, but at this point, I still enjoy this work, and it allows me to keep some important aspect of control on the business. Some day I may decide to work even less, but I’m pretty happy with 5 hours at the moment. :)

So, unsurprisingly, it took a lot more than 5 hours per week to reach this point. And only time will tell whether he can continue to maintain (let alone grow) this business with such minimal input. It will be an impressive achievement if he can. But I think Brandon is the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps he is particularly talented or lucky. Very few of the successful software business owners I know work short hours for extended periods. Also I have no way to verify Brandon’s numbers. So I would recommend viewing Brandon’s case study as something to aspire to, rather than a likely outcome.

Brandon has a blog and is writing a book about his experiences creating MusicTeachersHelper.com “in the hopes that it will help others who want to do something similar”. It should be an interesting read. Given all the spare time he has it shouldn’t take him long to finish it!

Where I program

whereiwrite.org is a photographic project showing science fiction writers and their offices. I started wondering what the offices of other microISVs and small software companies look like. Were they Zen temples of minimalism, with just a desk, a chair and a laptop? Or were they mad scientist labs, piled to the ceiling with obsolete equipment and empty pizza boxes? I rather hoped it was the latter, so I wouldn’t feel so bad about my own cluttered little office. I asked for photos of offices on some forums frequented by independent developers. I got a great response. Click the images to see larger versions.

This is my own cluttered office. The image comprises 6 photos stitched together using Autostitch to simulate an ultra wide angle lens. This makes it look bigger than it is. My unexciting view of suburban Britain is enlivened by regular sightings of Red Kites. I resisted the temptation to tidy up, beyond emptying the overflowing wastepaper bin. The garage is full of envelopes and CDs and there are lots of programming book’s in my son’s room. We are in the process of selling the house, partly so we can buy a house with a bigger office. I like the idea of a treehouse office – one where I pull up the ladder when I need some peace and quiet.

divider

“In my office, I kind of try to separate the digital and analog worlds. Some days I’ll be coloring with my kids at the oval, English partners-desk in the center and helping with homework, but most days I’m doing software development to the right. I love it here in the Pacific Northwest; if I’m awake early enough I can catch a beautiful sunrise over the lake right outside my office, and even go for a swim by afternoon in the summertime if it gets too hot.”

Steve Murch, www.bigoven.com

“This is my temporary office while on the road. I use the TV as a monitor for the second computer (Windows 7). The normal monitor can be switched between either computer. I sometimes miss the third monitor, lazerjet printer and other stuff but not often.”

A roving microISV, who doesn’t want his customer to know he (temporarily) has no fixed abode

“Living in Hong Kong, where residential and office space is so scarce and expensive, I work in a small corner of my small apartment. However, I have everything I need: my trusty two years old MacBook Pro, a not too comfortable chair, and a couch where I can take as many naps as I want. Oh, and a nice view of the mountains outside!”

Cesar Tardaguila, www.bambooapps.com

“This is me at my desk at the Collectorz.com HQ. As you can see, I am a Nintendo gamer, vodka drinker and Porsche fan. Now I must say that this not a real ‘where I program’ pic, because I don’t do a lot of programming any more. Check the 2nd pic for my developer team.”

Alwin Hoogerdijk, www.collectorz.com

“I *hate* having clutter on my desk. You’ll notice that I didn’t show the rest of the office. It’s pretty messy! I started with two monitors several years ago and then moved straight to 4. I can’t live without at least 3 and the 4th makes a nice place to stash IM windows while I’m working. My music computer is on the left side (yes, it’s a Mac!), and I’m not sure that it isn’t the most important computer I own since I could never work without music playing.”

Mitchell Vincent, www.ksoftware.net

“As you can see the office is as crammed as possible, and the distractions are pretty obvious — the wine is waiting for its place in the cellar, and there is a bottle of whiskey on the shelf. Oh, and there are two Commodores C-128 behind the desk (invisible on the photo, they worked the last time I checked) along with 1081 monitor and a Playstation or two. And yes, there is a guitar behind the chair. The bad news is that the plans for the new house are ready and the next office will be four times as big! Regarding the workplace as such — I have two 19′ monitors and a computer box under the desk. I spent a lot of time making it silent, which really improves work comfort, especially during quiet night shifts.”

Piotr Kuzora, www.powerkaraoke.com

“This is my home office, in the city center of Vitoria-Gasteiz. Nowadays I spend as much time, if not more, at the J1CK office, my other entrepreneurial project, but this office is great for ViEmu and Codekana work: a lot of light, and the irreplaceable Dell 2408WFP in vertical position. The chair and the table are from Ikea, nothing fancy there.”

Jon Beltran de Heredia, www.viemu.com and www.codekana.com

(who can apparently control his own opacity)

“This is in my office looking out on the larger office area. Our office is in a modern, purpose built office complex just outside the beautiful historic Saxon hilltop town of Shaftesbury in rural Dorset.”

Marcus Tettmar, www.mjtnet.com

(under monitors – where obsolete technical references go to die)

“My home office is a large basement, it has windows and good light, but it’s very cold. I am a very messy person, it’s full of books, boxes, old computers and even toys my kids left there. Luckily, it doesn’t show in the photo but my dog left some bones under my desk in the morning!!”

Javier Rojas Goñi, www.tekblues.com

“Melbourne city skyscrapers in the background – I’m 26 floors up. I should have done this yesterday when the sun was shining.”

Tony Bryer, www.greentram.com

“There is one thing that is missing in the photo. That is my two year old daughter. She likes to sit on the table and pull out the books from the rack. Unsurprisingly, her favorite is ‘MicroISV From Vision to Reality’ by Bob Walsh. Somehow she enjoys tearing papers off from the book while her father is busy coding.”

Prasanth, www.simfatic.com

“I recently cleaned up my office so I took these photos… but my office is slowly returning to the big mess that it usually is. I need to do a tidy-up before things get out of hand again. I really like my Vornado 542B that’s clipped to a bookcase and set to blow air on me! Really cools me off. I have it on a remote control so I can easily turn it on and off from my desk. I am near Dallas, Texas.“

Albert Wiersch, www.htmlvalidator.com

“This is one of the offices at Gurock Software here at the Technology Park in Paderborn, Germany (that’s Tobias in the picture). When we originally looked for office space, we wanted bright rooms with enough space to accommodate large desks and small reading corners. Getting our new office space (and 3×24″ monitors ) was easily the best investment we’ve made productivity-wise.”

Dennis & Tobias Gurock, www.gurock.com

Tim Haughton, www.homedocumentmanager.com

“This space suits us perfectly. It fits everyone very comfortably. It’s very, very bright, with lots of natural sunlight. The outdoor patio is perfect for morning group breakfasts and afternoon lunches when it’s warm. And … there’s a great pub downstairs to celebrate the days when we ship a new software product or a major update release.”

Andrey Butov, www.antair.com

“My office is a mess because I’m a very passionate person. I love my work and when I’m not doing that, I’m out doing something else I really love. I have no love of cleaning and organizing though. In fact, 99.9% of the time I prefer chaos. The other .1%, I purge my mess and the cycle starts again. I know this isn’t a good system, but for now it works.”

Ian Drake, www.notifywire.com

“My office is never really very messy… sorry.”

Ian Landsman, www.helpspot.com

“Here’s where a real code monkey works.”

Dan Hite, www.spellquizzer.com

“I work with specialized hardware for my software and there’s a school bell and a siren/strobe light flashing on the desk. On the far right side of the desk, I have a couple of IP phones and an IP speaker. I want some additional monitors. The two I have are a 23″ and a 24″, both at 1920×1200. I also use a second room as an office in my house and have another PC and a Mac. Below is the view from the window. The trail behind the house connects into a 300 acre park and there are usually mountain bikers and hikers on the trail on the weekends.”

Danny Weidig, www.acrovista.com

“Mine’s a bit messy. I stare out the window to distract me from it.”

Doug, who doesn’t want his blue chip clients to know he works from a messy home office

“The 16th fairway of the golf course is just through the trees. The group of 3 trees on the left is actually one tree and it is a magnificently old (opinions vary from 100 to 600 years) Moonah Tree. Below is an Echnida which waddled past on Monday.“

Neville Franks, www.surfulater.com

Not had enough yet?:

Mitch Haile’s home office

Scott Hanselmann’s home office

Home office snapshots

I am not sure which is more diverse, the offices or the software that gets written in them. Thank you to everyone that contributed.

Have you got a bigger, smaller, untidier or more stylish office than any of the above? Do you have a better view out of the window? Add a link to your photo in the comments.

Lazy instantiation marketing

lazy instantiation It is often hard to know what sort of additional services customers will be interested in. Might they be interested in:

a yearly subscription instead of a one-off payment?
hosting their own server?
paying extra for 24 hour support?
a port of your product to Mac OS X?

You can implement the new service and then offer it to customers. But this can be a huge waste of time and money if it turns out nobody wants it. An alternative approach is to borrow the idea of “Lazy instantiation” from programming (also called RAII – Resource Acquisition Is Initialization).

Programs need to initialise various system resources, such as databases, files and hardware devices. It is generally considered good practice to only initialise these resources as they are needed. This is called “lazy instantiation” and results in faster start-up times and no wasteful initialisation of resources that turn out not to be needed. For example in C++ (glossing over various details of cost, smart pointers, copy constructors, error handling etc to keep the example code simple):

So we can only access the resource by calling MyClass:getResource(), it will get initialised on first use and it will be cleaned up when MyClass goes out of scope. This much more elegant, efficient and less error prone than always initialising the resource at start-up or adding lots of checks throughout the code to see if the resource is already initialised.

A similar approach can be applied to marketing. For example, instead of spending days sorting out the intricacies of subscription payments, you just add the following to your purchase page:

Please email support@acme.com if you are interested in purchasing an annual subscription instead of making a one-off payment.

This will take you a few minutes. If someone emails you that they would prefer a subscription you reply along the lines of:

Thank you for your interest in purchasing Acme server via an annual subscription. We are currently assessing the commercial viability of a subscription approach. We will contact you if and when we decide to make Acme server available through annual subscription. But, for now, you can only purchase Acme server through a one-off payment, as detailed on our purchase page. … etc

If you get enough interest you go ahead and do the work to implement subscription payments. If you don’t – well, you didn’t waste much time on it.

MyClass::MyClass()
{
   myResource = NULL;
}

Programming with your feet

foot I started feeling a mild burning sensation in my left wrist a few weeks ago. This is a classic early sign of Repetitive Strain Injury. Uh-oh. I had an email exchange not long ago with someone who now has to use voice activation because typing is too painful. I can’t imagine how frustrating that must be. I decided to ignore Jane Fonda’s advice to “feel the burn” and looked for a way to alleviate the problem.

One approach is to reduce the amount of typing I do. But that is tough when you are running a microISV and writing a blog. I already use the text expander capabilities of the excellent Direct Access software to save a lot of typing (it tells me that it has saved me 51 hours of typing so far). I decided to try an ergonomic keyboard.

I bought myself a Microsoft 4000 Ergonomic keyboard. This is shaped to allow more natural positioning of the forearms and elbows.

Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000

For more comfortable wrist positioning it also has a built-in wrist rest and the front of the keyboard is higher than the back.

Note the front of the keyboard (right) is higher than the back (left)

I was quite surprised how physically large it was when it turned up. The shape of the keyboard felt very strange to start with and it took me a few days of slow typing to get used it. The feel of the keys is nothing special and I haven’t yet used the extra gizmos, such as the integral zoom button. But I feel it is an improvement in comfort over the conventional keyboard I had before.

An unexpected advantage of the new keyboard is that it has improved my typing. If you watch a good touch typist, their hands hardly move. I (unfortunately) never learnt to touch type, I just didn’t have the patience. The clearer separation between keys for the left hand and keys for the right hand on the new keyboard made me realise that I was moving both hands left and right, more like a concert pianist than a touch typist. I am now moving my hands less and I think my typing speed has improved as a consequence.

I didn’t feel the new keyboard on it’s own was going to solve my impending RSI problems though. The major problem seems to be the continual Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Windows-D, Windows-E and Alt-Tab key combinations I do with my left hand, hundreds of times a day. Using the right hand Ctrl key instead of the left one helped a bit. But it occurred to me – why are my hands doing all the work? My legs are doing so little that I often feel stiff when I stand up from a long programming session. Why not put them to use?

I Googled for foot pedals for computers. After wading through lots of hits for music and dictation foot pedals I finally found the Savant Elite Triple Foot Switch. This is a programmable 3-pedal foot-switch that plugs into a USB port.

Savant Elite Triple Foot Switch

At £86.00+VAT it isn’t cheap. But what price do you put on your health? I ordered one.

When it arrived I wanted to program the pedals to map to the Ctrl, Shift and Windows keys. But I couldn’t install the device driver to program the pedals. After a call to the retailer it turns out the device driver doesn’t work on Vista, despite assurance on the website that the pedals could be used with “virtually any computer”[1]. Grrrrr. How long has Vista been out? I finally managed to program the pedals using my wife’s laptop – my last remaining XP box.

So now I can type using my feet for most of the modifier keys. I am using the pedals as I type this. I am still getting used to them, but the burning in my left wrist has definitely reduced. I think I can also type a little faster, but I am too lazy to do the speed tests with and without the pedals to verify this. On the negative side:

Working out where to put your feet when you aren’t typing can be a little awkward.
The pedals tend to move around the carpet, despite being metal and quite heavy. Some small spikes might have helped.
Although the travel on the pedals is small, they are surprisingly stiff.

When I told a friend about the pedals he asked – why stop there? I could also be using my elbows, knees and head like a one-man-band. I could be working-out and typing at the same time. It is an intriguing prospect.

I just hope I don’t end up with burning ankles.

[1] System requirements have since been added to the website.

Successful Software

…requires more than just good programming.

Category Archives: productivity

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Programming with your feet

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