- Someone finally wised up and wrote a FireMonkey book. I gather its in German as well as English. The march of Delphi books continues. This is good news.
- I now am the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. What should I do with it? Currently it is merely acting as network storage.
- Jeff Weir is running a poll: Do you give Embarcadero a thumbs up or a thumbs down since they’ve taken over CodeGear? I voted “Thumbs Up!” No surprise there, I suppose.
- Probably the best part of reading the Martin Fowler Refactoring book is that it actually shows you how to do things right the first time.
- This is interesting. Microsoft is apparently creating an LLVM-based compiler for .Net. (Hat tip to Curt Krueger for the info).
Delphi-losophy
A Lover of Delphic Wisdom
Flotsam and Jetsam #100
- Well, here we are; one hundred Flotsam and Jetsam’s. I started this series just after I left Embarcadero. Here’s a link to the very first one on July 17, 2010. Short and sweet it was. Took almost five years to get here to one hundred. Thanks for hanging with me. Here’s to another 100, eh?
- Delphi XE8 is out. The main feature appears to be the Apple-mandated 64-bit iOS support. It has Castalia integration as well as an interesting new tool called “GetIt” that will install a various – and presumably expanding – list of third party component sets and frameworks. That’s pretty nice. The Data Sheet can be found here and the Feature Matrix is here. Give it a look. “Support and Maintenance” is now called “Update Subscription” which has the following interesting text in it: “…on-going maintenance on previous versions for up to 2 years from release..” That sounds intriguing. There is also a tool to migrate your settings from previous versions. I know I’ll be using that. Here’s the list of new things in XE8 – it’s pretty long.
- SD Tmes has a review of RAD Studio XE8. Lots of talk about IoT – “The Internet of Things’”. And here’s the article from The Register. My favorite quote from that article: “I ran up the RAD Studio XE8 IDE and one obvious benefit is the speed and responsiveness of the IDE compared to Visual Studio.”
- For some reason, VCL developers always seem to feel slighted by recent releases. No reason to feel that way, though: Marco has a nice list of things for VCL developers in XE8. I especially like the improved TField performance.
Flotsam and Jetsam #99
- Hey, look who’s the first quote in this list of programmer’s proverbs! Me! Thanks, Infoworld!
- Community Member Kevin Powick has created a slack.com group called DelphiTalk. Come join us!
- Primož Gabrijelčič has created a cool new tool for building SQL statements. I may have to incorporate this into my work project as – sadly – we do a lot of dynamic SQL and this would really be useful. Here is his blog post, and here is the code on GitHub. Thanks, Primož.
- Marco has announced what amounts to the Product Launch address for the next version of Delphi. You can sign up for the event here.
- If you missed any sessions of Delphi Week 2015, you can find all of the replays here.
Trailer Hitches and Software Development
When I was in the Navy, I had a friend named Tom. Not only a great naval officer, aviator, and all-around good guy, he was also a good husband. And by good husband I mean that he modified his beloved Ford truck to include a tow hitch for his wife’s horse trailer. It was a big horse trailer and he had to get one of those hitches that was attached into the bed of his truck. It was a major change.
Being the wise man that he was, he went to get some estimates. The first one he got was a reasonable price, but the second one was twice what the first one was. Tom asked why, since the first price wasn’t small, and the second guy’s price was pretty hefty. The guy said “Well, you can pay me to do it the right way, or you can pay that guy and then have your hitch rip off and have your horse trailer go careening off while you are cruising down the highway”. The point, of course, was that there is an upfront cost to doing things right that can prevent even more costs down the road (literally, in this case). Needless to say, Tom went with the second guy.
This quote came from a book I read yesterday called Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software.
It’s a short book – I read it in a couple of hours – but it is a good one. Full of wisdom about software development, it makes the point that no matter what, your software is going to change. And when it changes, you will introduce defects, so you need to make it as easy as possible to change your code in order to minimize the bugs you introduce when changes occur and decrease the difficulty of adding new features. It’s a really good book – give it a read.
The bottom line of the book: – In order to manage complexity in the large, you need to code for simplicity in the small. Complexity is the key, and how you manage that will dictate the long-term success of your project. It’s amazingly easy to create complexity, and it takes a lot of work to create simplicity.
So code is like the trailer hitch – you need to put your costs up front in order to avoid disaster in the future. As Kanat-Alexander says – we need to put effort into the implementation of our code in the beginning so that costs are minimized during the maintenance period. We need to plan for the long haul, designing our systems up front to be flexible and changeable and composed of simple modules. You can build complexity by combining simple modules into a complex system. Simple modules are easy to maintain. You can also build complexity by combining complex modules, but complex modules are difficult to maintain.
There is no up side to the “Get it done quick and we’ll worry about fixing bugs later” way of doing things. “You can pay me now or you can pay me later” is how the old saying goes, and it’s as true for software as it is for horse trailer hitches.
Flotsam and Jetsam #98
- I’ve been whining about my difficulty in writing a book chapter about the Parallel Programming Library. I’m getting the hang of it, though, and it is as cool as it’s been touted to be. In fact, I’d venture to say that once you start using it, you’ll never really need to use `TThread` again. The PPL is a nice abstraction of threading, with the notion of a `TTask/ITask` taking over the role of `TThread`. You can pretty much parallelize anything you want with ease. Very much worth the upgrade, if you are still on a pre-XE7 version. And completely cross-platform – with nary an `{$IFDEF}` to be found.
- As many of you know, I work on my book at my local Burger King on Saturday and Sunday mornings. As a result, I drink a lot of iced tea. This is fine – I enjoy a good caffeine buzz – but the down side? All that iced tea makes me cold, despite the fact that I have a heavy fleece jacket on most of the time. And the iced tea in the container is warm, so you have to use a lot of ice to get it cold, because no one wants warm iced tea. I wonder if I could give myself hypothermia. I mean, I drink a lot of iced tea while I’m writing, and I am definitely lowering my body temperature.
- Here’s a wish that I have for Delphi: That the default behavior for many of the VCL components be changed to not include the caption in the initial component. Does anyone want the `TPanel` caption to be anything other than blank? Does anyone want “Memo1” in a TMemo? “Edit1” in an edit? Maybe there was a time for that, but how tough can it be to change that and save us all the aggravation? VCL team – make this happen!
- I get the sense that Delphi folks don’t make use of environmental variables like they should. Am I right? When I find a new library that I want to use, I put it in a directory called `c:\code`. For instance, I have `c:\code\duckduckdelphi`. Then, I create an environmental variable called “DUCK” that equals the source directory for DuckDuckDelphi. Then I add $(DUCK) to my Delphi path. That way, it keeps the path short and sweet and less awkward than a hard-coded path. In team environments, this works great too, because then people don’t all have to have exactly the same directory structures. Do others do this? How do you guys handle your Delphi paths?
Flotsam and Jetsam #97
- Well, the next release of Delphi must be getting close. The Delphi Insider has information about Skill Sprints that will show some of the new features. Mitov Software has an interesting screen shot that looks like it has some sort of multi-view for mobile apps. Cool. Here’s a community post on what it is – the Multi-device Preview. The Code Sprint are showing off new features as well. Marco has a video about EMS Notifications. EMS is a very under-appreciated feature if you ask me.
- I endeavor to write clean code. I hope you do, too. One nice measure of that the Embarcadero has given us is “Can Castalia properly parse your code?”. I submit the following statement: If Castalia has trouble parsing your code, then the first place you should look to solve the problem is in your code. Code that gives Castalia – which has a pretty good parser – a hard time is maybe just a touch over complicated or not well formatted. Just a thought. Just my personal thought.
- Yesterday I attended the Philly.Net Code Camp. There were at least 500 people there, including a larger percentage of women than I’ve seen before – or at least it seemed that way to me. I spent the entire day in the same room on the “Scripting” track, learning about node.js, “this” in Javascript, more about what TypeScript is, and what is coming in ECMAScript 6. It was a good time and I learned a lot. These events occur twice a year, and the Philly.net crew do an amazing job putting the event together. Did I mention that these events are totally free? I’ve spoken at the event in the past, mostly on non-technical topics. I’ll try to do that for the next one. In any event, it was a good event. If you are in the area (people came from as far as New York), I’d recommend it.
- I’m plugging away on my next book. Two areas that are giving me – ahem – “challenges” are the Parallel Library and MVVM. Coming up with good examples leads the difficulty. Just getting my head around all the stuff in the Parallel Library is proving difficult, I must confess. I don’t want to do any code with `Sleep` in it, so finding a good example of code that take up time is hard. MVVM is proving difficult to find a good example using LIve Bindings, and actually doing the “true” MVVM way as defined by Rob Eisenberg. I also have to get this chapter past Stefan Glienke, too. Hehe. In any event, I promise by the time I publish, you’ll have a good solid chapter or two on those subjects that will make you smarter for reading them.
- As I mentioned above, I’d like to learn Typescript, mainly because you can apparently not have to learn many of the vagaries of Javascript while being able to achieve the same result. However, Amazon seems a little thin on books. Anyone got any good resources for Typescript? I found some good resources for node.js, the avenue that I want to approach Javascript from, but the resources on Typescript are a bit lacking.
Flotsam and Jetsam #96
- Quote of the Week: “In general, you should always strive to eliminate the passing of null rather than checking for null.” – John Sonmez
- #DelphiWeek was fun. I followed the hashtag on Twitter, and saw all kinds of fun stuff, from people posting pictures of their old versions of Delphi (all the way back to floppies that held the very early versions of the beta. I still have some of those –) to Ray Konopka’s Borcon buttons. I was also honored to be interviewed for the event, talking about the early days of TSmiley and something I’m still proud of to this day – the fact that I was at the original launch event for Delphi. It’s hard to believe that as I type this, that was twenty years ago today, but there you have it. Delphi really is twenty years of continuous innovation, and it continues to prove worthy of that moniker.
- Rob Love has a really nice article on the Parallel Programming Library and using TTask properly. Good example of how tricky parallel programming can be. I’m working on that chapter for my new book and it is indeed a challenging topic, but one worth the effort. Good reason to upgrade to XE7.
- Andy Hausladen dog-fooded a new JSON parser for Delphi. Worth a look, for sure. I downloaded it, looked at the unit tests, and now I know how to use it. See? it really works that way.
Coding in Delphi $10 Off During #DelphiWeek
To help celebrate #DelphiWeek and 20 years of continuous innovation, my book, Coding in Delphi, is $10 off for the next week. Just use the link below to receive the discount:
https://leanpub.com/codingindelphi/c/delphiweek
Thanks!
Flotsam and Jetsam #95
- Last week I sang the praises of Stefan Glienke. Well, he has done it again. He’s released TestInsight – an IDE integration for unit testing. This is really cool – you can run your tests automatically right in the IDE. Give it a look – very, very nice stuff. Plus, it works with all the major unit testing frameworks.
- Tweet and Quote of the Week: “As long as managers think programmers are young interchangeable pizza-fed cheaply hired commodities, buggy software will rule the world.”
- Glad to see that this website is still alive and kicking: http://www.isdelphidead.com/ Hehe.
- Work on my new book continues apace. I’ve just started showing chapters to my “beta testers”. I’m grateful for all the feedback I get. If you are interested in reading rough drafts of my chapters, you can join the Coding in Delphi group. It’s a private group, so I’ll have to approve your entry, but that’s usually not a problem. I welcome and am grateful for any help in making the book better.
- Next week is Delphi Week. You can register to participate. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years. Seriously? Great that the product is still rolling along as strong as ever. I’ll have few thoughts, tweets, and other things to offer as we celebrate. Keep an eye on this space and the #delphiweek hashtag, as well as the presentations from Embarcadero. Should be fun.
- Jim McKeeth does a nice interview with Darren Kosinski, who is a member of the FireMonkey R&D team. Darren is a friend of mine from my days at Embarcadero and a good guy as well as a brilliant developer. Give it a listen.
Targets and Estimations
We’ve all been there. “How long will this take to get done?”. The answer they are looking for is “by this afternoon,” but most often the real answer is longer than that, often much longer. In fact, the real answer is “I don’t know”. But you have to give an answer. This is where you hear tales of people rolling dice or making something up or saying “six weeks” no matter what. In the end, you can’t know for sure because you’ve never done that project before, and so you make your best guess and it works out somehow most of the time.
But a lot of developers and managers fail to realize that there are really two different kinds of answers you can give. If it is Monday, you can say “I’ll have that done by Friday”. Then you work like crazy, and just before you go home on Friday, you deliver what you promised.
The other type of answer you can give is “That will take 40 hours.” And so if it is Monday, and you say that, then the manager will hear “I’ll have that by Friday”. So then you go and you work like crazy, and just before you go home on Friday you deliver what you promised. But when you’re done clocking all your time, you put in 50 hours to get the project done. That’s a 25% overrun, and your manager wants to know what happened and why you took so long.
There are a lot of things going on here – but the point I want to make is that there is a difference between an estimate and a target. An estimate – “How many hours is this going to take?” – is very difficult to get right. There are always unknown unknowns that enter in to make the total number of hours that something will take. We are notoriously bad at making estimates. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the fact remains that we are not really capable of making accurate estimates. But “I’ll have that by Friday” is easier to say because you have flexibility in the amount of work it takes to hit that target.
But note well that an estimate is not a target. A target is when you say “I’ll have that by Friday”. Saying that on Monday morning is not the same thing as saying “It will take 40 hours to do”. In fact, it’s a very, very different thing. Saying “I’ll have that by Friday” actually means “I’ll do whatever it takes – put it however many hours it takes – to get this done by Friday.” It might take 20 hours. It might take 60 hours. But you didn’t say anything about how many hours it would take, you gave the target point when it would be delivered.
So if you are a manager, recognize the difference between a target and an estimate. If you are asking for an estimate, understand that software estimation is still something even the most seasoned developers do very poorly. If you are asking for a target, realize you may be asking someone to put it a lot of hours to hit that target. Or not – maybe they say “Friday” and it only takes half an hour. Who can say for sure? If Friday is good enough, then you shouldn’t care how many hours it ends up taking either way.
And the one thing you shouldn’t do is ask for an estimate, take it as a target, and then get upset when the developer hits the target but runs over on the hours.
Targets are not estimates, and estimates are not targets. Understand the difference, and you’ll have happier developers and happier managers.