Redundancy is Repetitive, Inefficient and Counterproductive

But you already know that.

I've long been a supporter of free and open source software, even contributing to a few projects. However, my enthusiasm has cooled a bit in the last several years, as the time I've been able to devote to such projects has both dwindled and been divided among more projects.

I'm continually flabbergasted by the number of open-source projects that cover the same ground, ad infinitum, often with little to no apparent differentiation between them. By continually "reinventing the same wheel," these small projects usually manage to put out a small number of alpha- or beta-quality releases, and then cease to make visible progress. This could be because the original developer(s) became frustrated or distracted; because the project succumbed to internal politics (a leading cause of FLOSS project death); or merely because the developer(s) realised that they were deep in the rut of a path that has been travelled many, many times before.

This flash of obviousness came about as I've been researching and evaluating PHP frameworks for Web development. I've been developing and maintaining sites using a couple of these, notably Kohana 2.3, but for various reasons have been reluctant to make the switch to the now-current 3.0 release. I decided to do a relatively formal, structured evaluation of several of the frameworks out there, rather than just pounce on the first I came across that looked "reasonable." (Silly me, but oh well.) Of course, as my list of frameworks to look at grew from six, to twenty, to considerably more, I became uncomfortable; torn between the reality that I'm doing this all myself (and devoting significantly less than 100% time to the endeavour), but at the same time wanting to remain open to pleasant surprises. After all, "pleasant surprises" were how I stumbled upon Kohana in the first place, and though I am strongly considering using another tool in its place (again, for non-technical reasons), contributing to a megalithic monoculture is not my idea of "adding value."

Today I did something that I should have done a week or two ago: I went out to SourceForge and got a list of all the PHP frameworks registered on the site.

Oh, my effing $DEITY! "Searching gives 1316 results."

Obviously, not all of those are appropriate (there are numerous reinventions of the CMS wheel, for instance); many can be filtered simply because they haven't published updates recently enough to meet my criteria, and so on, but that's all rather beside my current point.

Open-source projects are (in)famously both insular and prolific, leading to the kind of nonsense I ran into on SourceForge. Commercial products have a built-in inhibitor of this particular pathology: if a market gets divided among so many competitors that nobody can cover their costs, then in very short order the existing products will either consolidate into fewer, more sustainable alternatives or die altogether. Open-source projects, particularly those started by people inexperienced in such projects, fail to realise that they too are competing for resources just as much as their commercial brethren. In the FLOSS case, the finite, competed-for resource is time, both of (potential) contributors and of passive users (what the commercial world calls "customers").

Some open-source projects recognise this. In the Linux and Unix/BSD desktop worlds, the "market" for desktop managers (that provide the windows, icons, menus, and so on that are the UI to the user) has been dominated by two projects, KDE and GNOME. Though there are other choices with solid offerings and active communities, a developer can choose to develop for either KDE or GNOME with the confidence that virtually anyone in his target audience will be able to run his software on their system of choice. Consequently, most projects that have to make a choice, choose KDE or GNOME.

The Web is a different beast entirely, and while standards are for the most part very well-defined, the "barrier to entry" for those seeking to do things (allegedly) differently is very low. Some in the PHP Web development community advise new developers to tackle creating their own framework, as a learning tool. I suspect that that's how many of the SourceForge listings originated. I also happen to think that the advice itself is naïve, akin to a new auto mechanic being advised to build his own engine to gain a better understanding of those from Toyota or Ford. What I would recommend instead is that a new developer learn one or two of the more widely-used frameworks, browse around for another two or three that seem interesting, and start contributing to the project(s) of her choice. Virtually all such projects recognise their need for more help, as well as the fact that "we were all newbies once."

Consolidation in the PHP-framework field, while maintaining the low barrier to entry, should be a Good Thing™: to a greater degree than commercial products, FLOSS projects should succeed on their merits, technical and otherwise. As more developers join a well-run project community, the project's software should continue to both improve and find wider user/customer use. The ability to "do your own thing" should be kept, if only as a check against the use of marketing hype over technical merit.

But I believe that relatively small, informal "A- and B-List" groups of selections would be good for projects and developers (and developers' clients); a lot of what I've come across in the last few days would be on my "P-List," if not "ZZZZ."

Oh yeah, by the way: this sort of maturation and shared effort would do wonders for our Craft's progress towards true professional status. Any of us who've had our schedules and budgets tinkered with by people who admit they know nothing of what we do should understand the desirability of that goal. Given the degree to which software permeates public life and policy, that "desirability" has become a dire necessity; it's just more expedient for people to pretend that isn't really the case. Stuxnet, anyone?

We Interrupt This Program...

We interrupt this tutorial to interject an observation about goals, methods and promises. Goals we have for ourselves as people and as professionals; the method we use to pursue those dreams; perhaps most importantly, the promises we make, both to ourselves and to our customers, about what we're doing and why.

I consider this after reading the Website for some consultants who've done some (relatively nice, relatively low-key) link-dropping on LinkedIn. I'm not naming them here, not because I don't want to draw attention to them (their own site is very clean and well-done), but because the point that I'm going to be making here isn't just limited to them - we, as a craft and an industry of Web development, have some Serious Problems™.

The "problem" is nicely summarized by this group's mission statement:

Our mission is to produce the perfect implementation of your dreams.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

As a goal, implied but left unspoken, absolutely nothing; both as practitioners and as clients, we tend to set ever-higher goals for ourselves. Indeed, that's the only way the "state of the art" - any "art" - can advance. But we who practice the art and craft of software (including Web) development (as opposed to the engineering discipline of hardware development) have a history of slashed-beyond-reality schedules and budgets coupled with a tendency for stakeholders not to hear "if all goes well" as a condition to our latest schedule estimate. We have a history, perceived and actual, of promising more than we can deliver. Far more attention is paid by non-technical people to the "failures" and "broken promises" of software than to things done right. For a craft whose work is accruing increasing public-policy and -safety implications, the effect of unrealistic expectations, brought about by poor communication and technical decisions being made by people who aren't just technically ignorant but proud of the fact, is disturbing. What started as a slow-motion train wreck has now achieved hypersonic speeds, and represents a clear and present danger to the organisational health and safety of all stakeholders.

I don't mean to say that projects always fail, but an alarming number of them do. If, say, dams or aircraft were built with the same overall lack of care and measurable engineering precision that is the norm in commercial software development, we'd have a lot more catastrophic floods, and a lot few survivors fleeing the deluge by air. When I entered this craft thirty years ago (last May), I was soon led to believe that we were thirty to fifty years away from seeing a true profession of "software engineering". As a time frame beginning now, in 2009, I now think that is almost laughably optimistic.

Why have things gotten worse when we as a tool-building and -using society need them to get better? Some people blame "The Microsoft Effect" - shipping software of usually-dubious quality to consumers (as opposed to 'customers') who have bought into the (false) idea that they have no realistic choice.

It's more pervasive than that; commercial software development merely reflects the fashion of the business "community" that supports it, which has bought into one of the mantras of Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of Innovation", namely "don't worry, be crappy." Not that Kawasaki is giving bad advice, but his precondition is being ignored just as those of other software people have been: the key sentence in his "don't worry, be crappy" paragraph is "An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative" (emphasis mine). In other words, if you really are going to change the world, nobody will notice if your Deus ex Machina 1.0 has clay feet as long as you follow up quickly with a 1.1 that doesn't...and follow that with a 2.0 that changes the game again. But that space between 1.0 and 1.1 has to be fast, Kawasaki argues (in the next paragraph, titled "Churn, Baby, Churn"), and the version after that has to come along before people (like possible competitors) start saying things like "well, he just brought out 1.1 to fix the clay feet in 1.0." If the customers see that you're bringing out new versions as fast as they can adapt to the previous ones, but that each new version is a vastly superior, revelatory experience compared to the earlier release that they were already delighted by, they'll keep giving you enough money for you to finish scaling the "revolutionary" cliff and take a (brief) rest with "evolutionary" versions. Business has not only forgotten how important that whole process is to their continued survival, but they've removed the capability for their bespoke software (and Web) infrastructure to use and reuse that model. All that remains is "it's ok if we ship crap; so does everybody else." That's the kind of thinking that made General Motors the world-bestriding Goliath it is today - as opposed to the wimpy also-ran it was (emphatically NOT) half a century ago. We really don't need any more businesses going over that sort of cliff.

What we do need, and urgently, are two complementary, mutually dependent things. We need a sea change in the attitude of (most) businesses, even technology businesses, towards software - to realise and acknowledge that the Pointy-Haired Boss is not merely a common occurrence in the way business manages software, but actively threatens the success of any project (and business) so infested. Just as businesses at some point realise that "paying any price to cut costs" is an active threat to their own survival, they need to apply that reality to their view of and dealings with the technical infrastructure that increasingly enables their business to function at all.

Both dependent on that and as an enabler of that change, the software and Web development industry really needs to get its house in order. We need to get away from the haphazard by-guess-and-by-golly estimation and monitoring procedures in use by the majority of projects (whose elaborate Microsoft Project plans and PowerPoint decks bear less and less resemblance to reality as the project progresses) and enforce use of the tools and techniques that have been proven to work, and have an organised, structured quest to research improvements and New Things.. Despite what millions of business cards and thousands of job advertisements the world over proclaim, there is no true discipline of "software engineering", any more than there was "oilfield engineering" in widespread use before the New London School explosion of 1937. Over 295 people died in that blast; we have software-controlled systems that, should they fail, could in fact hurt or kill many more - or cause significant, company- or industry-ruinous physical damages. We should not wait for such an event before "someone" (at that point, almost certainly an outside governmental or trans-governmental entity) says "These are the rules." While I understand and agree with the widespread assertion that certification tests in their present form merely demonstrate an individual's capability to do well on such tests, we do need a practical, experiential system - probably one modelled on the existing systems for engineering, law or medicine. Not that people should work 72-hour shifts; there's enough of that already. But rather that there should be a progression of steps from raw beginner to fully-trusted professional, with a mix of educational and experiential ingredients to ascend that progression, and continuing educational and certificating processes throughout one's entire career. The cost for this is going to have to be accepted as "part of the system" by business; if business wants properly competent engineers, and not just the latest boatload of unknowns with mimeographed vendor certs, then they're going to have to realize that that benefit does not come without cost to all sides. The free ride is over - for all the stakeholders at the table.

It's Time to Grow Up

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet has a very interesting post up, titled "Sticking with XP / Upgrading to Vista / Waiting for Windows 7 / Switching to Mac or Linux — There’s no single right answer". He puts forward the blitheringly-obvious elephant-in-the-room answer to the perennial food-fight question, "Which system is best?" Namely, "use what works for you."

As I read through the post and the comments that had been added to it, I thought about all the man-centuries (if not -millennia) that had been "invested" in the topic. Naturally, I had my own two rupiah worth to say on the topic. Following is the text of the comment I left at approximately 1645 GMT on Friday 27 June. Let me know what you think. (There aren't any links in the post reprinted below; to the best of my knowledge, ZDNet's commenting software hates links, and it definitely hates Macs; every single comment I've posted has given me the error "You must enter the text to post" — on a clean, empty comment form — after I've hit the "Add your opinion" button. Fix it, guys!

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"Use what you like, and like what you use."

That's excellent advice for those of us who've been bouncing around in the funhouse for a while, who know which mirrors make us look weird (or, worse, are broken and likely to cut us if we're not careful)...and, granted, there are blessed few truly "new" users now; statistically, nearly everybody's used a PC with one form or another of Windows, and increasing numbers of us have used Mac and/or Linux, but...

We still do have the FNG syndrome with folks who haven't upgraded for a while, and finally they get tired of their molasses-slow Win98 box when they see this zippy new PC or Mac they've been handed at work. "Gee, we use XP at work, but I heard Microsoft isn't going to sell it anymore... what should I use?" Many of us, professionally or otherwise, are tasked with advising those people. Too often, the advice becomes "this is what I use; try it" without really understanding the (often vast) difference between the adviser and the user in question. And when "advisers" try and hash things out among themselves, it almost universally degenerates into an Animal House food fight scene — which doesn't bring any value to the discussion and actually makes us LESS able to give good advice.

Mental hands up: How many of you reading this have ever spent a month using Leopard? Vista? At least two of Ubuntu, Fedora or SuSE Linux? How many raised your hand all three times? Yeah, I see you, way back in the back.... but blessed few others.

In any other endeavour that dared call itself a craft, let alone aspire to an engineering discipline, this would be malfeasance if not negligence; you just DO NOT give advice on matters in which you are not qualified — and if you don't have experience and/or training with Technology X, you're NOT qualified to present advice as being any more valuable than used toilet paper.

In that light, Adrian has performed a major public service here. Given the reality that most people whose job relies on using and/or developing for one of the major platforms are quite unlikely to be as current and proficient on any of the others, this is the best advice that will just let us get along with our jobs without pissing in each other's lemonade each and every single day (Mike Cox and No_Axe, you know who you are).

But in the increasingly unlikely event that we're ever to make something professional out of this hobby that we are lucky enough to get paid for, the fact that this "solution" is seen as viable to any degree, let alone the MOST viable solution, is absolutely, reprehensibly unacceptable. And since computers and software have become absolutely central to nearly everything in modern life, including not least public policy, if we don't get our house in order under our own power, sooner or later some governmental organization or group thereof is going to step in and exert adult supervision. Is that what we want?

The days when Windows geeks and Mac users and Linux hackers could happily putter away, each in their own walled garden with tactical nuclear landmines guarding against any encroachment by reality, are gone as surely as the clipper ship. In the world of the Internet, where information is what's important and how it's processed/generated/visualized/stored is at best secondary, we're faced with the same choice as every biological or cultural organism at an evolutionary shift: adapt or die. Keep the lemonade clean, or drink the purple Kool-Aid. Our choice. Each and every one of us.