A Sprint to the Finish?
June 15th, 2008
I’m writing this from a hotel conference room in London where we’re in the middle of a development sprint. We’ve gathered a random mix of two dozen people drawn from our community together with folks from the Ingres engineering and services teams to see what we can achieve in a three day code sprint. We started the event with a brainstorming session where we came up with dozens of ideas of things that we could undertake and narrowed the list down to about a dozen projects that we hope to complete before Roy’s opening session at the Ingres User Association meeting on Tuesday. By the way, if you’d like to attend the UK IUA there’s still time to register at http://www.iua.org.uk
Saturday was spent brainstorming and prioritizing project ideas, setting up build environments, along with a smattering of training. Today we got down to the task of coding. It’s now lunchtime on Sunday, and so far today we’ve addressed a usbaility issue with the Ingres terminal monitor, produced a proof of concept for an incremental back-up feature, extended row-level security auditing so that it now audits selects, inserts, updates and deletes, posted a new version of Ingres CAFE which is optimized for performance of web applications, and have half completed the code for a few other projects including the ability to generate a shuffled sequence of values.
It’s now 4pm on Sunday afternoon and the substantial Sunday lunch we enjoyed a couple of hours ago is starting to take its toll on developer productivity. There are many ways to a developers heart, and most of them are through their stomachs. Since it’s a little early in the day to introduce alcohol, I’ve decided to pop across the street to Marks and Spencer’s and buy icecream bars for everyone. A mid-afternoon sugar rush should push the productivity levels back up to where they were this morning.
It’s now 5pm and the ice cream treat definitely pushed the productivity levels back up to the pre-lunchtime levels. We’ve declared victory on pretty much every project that we undertook today, in fact we’re feeling so smugh that we’ve decided to add a stretch project or two into the mix for tomorrow and will probably wrap things up shortly and head out for some well deserved beers. Which reminds me, one of the projects for tomorrow is to add beer as a native type to Ingres…
It’s now 6pm on Monday and the day seemed endless - I shouldn’t have had that last dozen Heinekens. Ugh! I had an awful hangover this morning, but thankfully it had lifted midday and I had a wonderful lunch with Jessica Twentyman, the author of that wonderful FT article on Women in IT. Andrew Lloyd Webber was dining at the table next to us and I resisted the tempation to tell him how much my mom dislikes him since he decided against the Irish contestant in “I’d do anything” That WSJ blog finally made it to slashdot today and I’ve been flamed all afternoon, some of it gentle, some of it more like taking a walk on the sun. Today we wrapped up a number of yesterday’s projects and tackled some new ones - Doug added the syntax for renaming a column, we made some progress on the beer type, added locale information to the unload and copydb scripts. We’re prearing a build which combines all of the new features and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a live demonstration will be possible tomorrow.
June 15th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Dear Miss McGrattan,
We read the article “Men Write Code from Mars, Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus” and realized we would have to contact you as it seems we have similar goals. We are the founders of an organization called Duchess, which is a network for female Java programmers. One of our goals is to get more women to program in Java. It would be nice if we could exchange ideas sometime.
Kind regards,
Clara Ko and Linda van der Pal
(the Netherlands)
June 16th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I would be very interested indeed to hear if the female Java programming community in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) have had a look at the Ingres DTP plug-in for Eclipse (see http://www.ingres.com/downloads/developer-resources.php). In conjunction with the DTP project at the Eclipse foundation (http://www.ingres.com/downloads/developer-resources.php), we are working towards a Ganymede compatible plug-in and I’m sure that there are many contributions that could be made to the project. Please take a look and let us know what you think! Jeremy Peel (at Ingres)
June 16th, 2008 at 8:46 am
I read the same article that Linda van der Pal refers to, and I have to say, your statement, if it was accurately quoted, is ridiculous. I’ve worked with plenty of female programmers, and there’s nothing that makes their code particularly different from men’s.
If a male tech executive were to make a similar remark, implying that code written by men tends to be superior to code written by women, it would ignite such a firestorm that he would be driven from his job, as happened to Larry Summers at Harvard. You needn’t worry, however, because gender stereotyping is always acceptable when it casts women in a more favorable light than men. Just note the approving tone of the article that was written about your remark.
June 16th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
It’s good to see ingres/OpenROAD development continuing apace, but somewhat sad to see that the development is pretty introspective and unlikely to make ingres a more attractive proposition to those who don’t use it currently. I’d have preferred to see development that promoted ingres as an integrated platform rather than the island it has become.
Paul
June 18th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Paul: we intend to continue doing sprints; it is my firm intention to have one again next year ahead of the 2009 IUA conference. Everyone will be welcome to come to that event as they were this time. If our calls for participation are not reaching the right people I am very anxious to hear ideas for how to promote these events more widely. Can you make specific suggestions for what you’d like to see attempted in next year’s sprint? Are there particular people we should invite?
June 18th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Non-sequential sequences, eh? Jolly good show on that one!
And I’m curious as to whether the rename column alluded to is rename restrict, or rename cascade; the latter ought to be a good trick!
As for the men vs women coder thing: aside from the fact that the WSJ blog entry doesn’t appear to quite match up with what you said in your own blog entry (journalists at work!), I’d have to say that in my experience over the last thirty-three-yikes years, gender is of much, MUCH less relevance than basic coding competence. I.e. the spread between good and bad coders is huge, orders of magnitude larger than the spread between good men coders and good women coders. I have a notion that at the top end, men have a very minor “goodness” advantage in my experience, but I’d be hard pressed to prove it. This pales in comparison to good-vs-bad coders, which can cover several orders of magnitude range in just about any metric you care to imagine.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[...] This year’s conference was preceded by an experimental three day development code sprint. Read about the sprint, A Sprint to the Finish. [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 2:51 am
Geode Dag Linda and Clara,
It would be great to get contributions from you and other women. There could be a number of projects which include front end tools to enhance Ingres usability.
Cheers,
Dean
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 am
Hi Emma
I had a terrific lunch, too. Your hangover didn’t show, you were great company! Still think you should have had a word with Lord Lloyd Weber, though, ha ha. Now go and have a well-deserved holiday! Best wishes, Jess