Knitting breakthroughs

Ahh, the joys of being self-taught.

This week while poring over diagrams of a new knitting stitch I'm trying to learn, I realized that for the five years I've been knitting, I've been doing the most basic stitch—"the knit"—wrong.

Sigh. At least I figured it out before making a mess of my latest project. This is the first time I've tried anything that wasn't just a basic stockinette or seed stitch, so it never really mattered before.

Incidentally—although I don't think this had anything to do with my learning the stitch wrong—I taught myself to knit while I was in Paris, so my book is all in French. This means I don't really know any knitting vocabulary in English. For those interested, here's my new stitch:

The yarn is Plymouth baby alpaca grande paint, #8819. It's a bit expensive but is gorgeously soft (and the color is much better than this photo makes it out to be). Here's the stitch ("Grille ondulée"):

Cast on a number of stitches evenly divisible by 12.
1er rang: *4 mailles croisées à droite (glisser 2 m. en attente derrière le travail, tricoter les 2 m. suivantes à l'endroit, puis les 2 m. en attente), 4 m. endroit, 4 m. croisées à gauche (glisser 2 m. en attente devant le travail, tricoter les 2 m. suiv. à l'endroit puis les 2 m. en attente)*, répéter de * à *
2e et tous les rangs pairs suivants: à l'envers
3e et 7e rangs: à l'endroit
5e rang: *2 m. end., 4 m. croisées à gauche, 4 m. croisées à droite, 2 m. end.*, répéter de * à *
Répéter toujours ces 8 rangs.

Mimes as traffic cops

I know it's a blogging no-no to just republish stuff if you don't have original commentary to add, but I was so floored by learning about this yesterday that I just have to share it with you:

[Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogotá, used] mimes to improve both traffic and citizens' behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who didn't follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people were trained as mimes.

NPR story—which is even more compelling than the above article—here, starting at 34:00.

Lessons Learned while Indexing the Web

If you know what I've been working on for the last nine months, you might (correctly) suspect that I've learned a few lessons about developing large-scale (highly scale-able) and complex software. Let me share some thoughts I've got about the subject.

But before I begin, I should point out some aspects that make this a special project. I can't speak for the UI, and while everyone on the engineering team worked on the project in the final months, the development team—especially in the early stages—was small. Ben Hendrickson and I headed up architecture and the software efforts. We were the "core" team for the back-end efforts. So this made some things a lot easier. I'll comment more about this later.

Be Bullish (but Realistic) in the Planning Stages

One thing that helped us tremendously was to be broad and optimistic in the early stages. Doing this gave us a large menu of features and directions for development to choose from as plans firmed up and difficulties arose. I know the adage, "Under-promise, over-deliver." And there's a place for that mentality. When we did start to firm up plans, clearly we were not going to promise everything. But we tried to keep things as fluid as possible for as long as possible. This worked out for almost all of our features, and by the time we were half-way through with our project we had the final feature set nailed down, and prototyped out.

There was one substantial feature that we had to cut just a few weeks before launch. Perhaps we were too bullish, but I believe that this kind of thing is fairly normal for large software projects. I'm looking forward to working on that for the next release. ;)

Have Many Milestones and Early Prototypes

I wish we had had more milestones and stuck to them. The last couple of months were hellish with literally 14-16 hour days, 7 days a week. With my commute, there were many days that I arrived home, got into bed, woke up, and rolled back onto the bus to start it all over again. Despite reading about "hard-core" entrepreneurs who have this as a "lifestyle", I would not recommend it for a successful software engineering team.

We hit our earliest milestones and even had an early version about four months before launch. But the two milestones between that prototype and launch both slipped and no one stepped in to repair the schedule. So the rest of the team (including Ben and me, plus another six software engineers) had to take up the slack at the last minute. Missing these milestones should have told us something about the remainder of the schedule. Frankly, I think we were lucky to launch when we did (good job team!).

Low Communication Overhead = Success

We were lucky to have a small team. For the back-end it was basically just Ben and me. And we do all of the data management and most of the processing in the back-end. So it was easy for Ben and me to stay in sync. Add to that the fact that we work well together and we were able to achieve in a small team, what normally requires a much larger team.

While I've worked in much larger organizations, I've never had the leadership role in those organizations that I do now. So I can't say how much of this advice applies to larger organizations. I guess my feeling is the same that many people have: keep related logic together in small teams, have clear interfaces to other units. This worked well when we integrated with our middle-ware and front-end.

KISS

Anna Patterson describes a simple roadmap for building search engine technology. I'm not saying we followed this plan, but I can say that our (I hope successful) plan is equally simple. Identify the work you need to do. Come up with reasonable solutions. Plan and implement them. Don't get bogged down in hype or fancy technology.

There's certainly more to success than these points. These are just what come to mind when I think about the success of this project. In any case, good luck on your own projects!

What's a little impending doom among friends?

As you hopefully know, CERN's Large Hadron Collider—one of the most elaborate physics experiments ever built—is finally finished and was first turned on several weeks ago. Leaving aside the fact that it broke down a few days later (!), I've been truly surprised by how many people are worried that it's going to create some sort of time-space anomaly that could destroy the world. The subject came up recently over lunch and (to my surprise) the majority of my PFM sisters were freaked out about our planet's impending Swiss-wrought doom.

And they're clearly not the only ones, since the BBC broadcast an interview the day before the collider was turned on in which they asked a scientist about the possibility of black holes being created during the experiments. His response was to laugh knowingly and say not to worry; even if the experiments do create (tiny) black holes, "there's no chance of them devouring the world. Ha, ha, ha!"

I couldn't find the exact interview, but here's a very similar one. Unfortunately it doesn't quite recreate the awkwardness of that scientist's particular response. I think the definition of 'egghead' somehow fundamentally involves the idea of believing so deeply in science that you'll laugh at another person's fear of death as if they were confusing a Stephen King novel for reality. "Black holes? Ha! Next thing I know, you'll be worried about langoliers!"