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the long way home

It's 10:15pm here in Reykjavik, and it's still light out. I'm taking the long way home from Karlsruhe, Germany, and it is just beautiful here. Clear, crisp, sunny, and a starkly beautiful landscape. Just what my soul needed after the past few weeks/months of intense work (my day job on Workplace Designer has also been pretty hectic!).

There will be more to say about the Domino Designer in Eclipse project, but Chris has done a great job http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/InsideLotus?entry=dnug_domino_designer_7_plus filling in some details! We'll keep you posted, and be asking for feedback as we progress.

I did the Golden Circle tour today - walked between the American and Eurasian continental plates, saw the Gullfoss waterfall and the Geysir and Strokkur geysers (though only Strokkur was feeling like spouting), lots of geothermal energy, volcanos and craters, a glacier, and even a bit of snow fell. A magical day!

It will be good to go back home tomorrow, though. Have to wonder why the kids were cleaning the house....

my working heart's desire

Ever since I moved to Workplace Designer from Domino Designer a little over two years ago, I've had a dream.... I had unfinished business in Domino Designer - there were things I wanted to do that could not easily be done within the existing code base in the amount of time allocated to a release. Specifically, to improve the script editing experience within Domino Designer.

Seeing what the Eclipse editors could do for the same experience in Workplace Designer out of the gate, it was clear to me what needed doing. I've been championing a cause inside IBM for a while, gaining support for it, and yesterday, I was thrilled to show a prototype of Domino Designer embedded in Eclipse.

The prototype was fun to build, and my team pitched in to help with some last minute requests - and if I read the audience response correctly, this truly is the right thing to do. It's the beginning of the road, but I am so happy that we are doing the right thing for our Domino developers.

Michaelangelos or Monkeys

I worked at Wang for 13 years, from boom through bust. Quarter after quarter of 34% growth felt like it would go on forever, but of course it didn't. Wang was good to and for me - I morphed from technical writer to engineer, fresh out of school student with no idea what a job was to a valued employee. But living through the fall was sad. I left of my own accord in 1992, just months before the bankruptcy.

As Wang was thrashing, they signed up hook, line, and sinker for the "Quality Leadership Process" program (QLP). Every employee in the company had to take an initial short introductory course, and were supposed to follow up with a multi-month course that took something like 20% of your time for that period. Employees in the intensive course were supposed to complete some sort of project that would make a positive impact on the bottom line.... One of the more famous ones was putting up signs encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the elevator if they were only going up one or two floors in the Tower...

I escaped the long course with a well timed maternity leave, and deciding to leave the company before I could get snared into such a time sink. I often wondered what would have happened had I taken the course and suggested that one of the better ways of making a positive impact on the company would be to stop wasting employees' time in that program....

So one of my scars from Wang is that I shiver at the word "process."

I understand that it must be hard to manage engineers - but I struggle with applying process to art. If there are too many rules, the creative process gets thwarted. The key is to give engineers enough creative freedom in a problem to enjoy solving it, without so much freedom that there is chaos in a project. And that's a tough balance to find. Programs like QLP have a formulaic approach to how to do software/business. But when things get formulaic, they lose their art.

I'm told that when Dave Cutler interviewed people at DEC long ago, one of his trademark interview questions was whether software was a science or art. Had I ever interviewed with him, I would have said quite firmly that software was art.

Out of the mouths....

Mom, why don't you just work at work? Isn't home for home stuff? I got that from my son this afternoon.

I remember asking Dr. Stanton - my p-chem (physical chemistry) professor - how I would know when I was working hard enough in a conversation where he was lamenting my tendency to do just enough work to get an A in the course, but no more. He said you were working hard enough if you found yourself thinking about work when you were doing other things. He didn't explain it any more thoroughly than that, but over time I learned he was right, and realized that was a reasonably elegant and perceptive answer. And over time, I also realized that he probably realized before I did that I was not meant to go on in Chemistry, regardless of being able to do well at it.

But when I'm deep into code, there's a background process in my brain working regardless of where I am and what I am (ostensibly) doing. Having found a subject I care deeply about, I can now understand what he was trying to say. And maybe tincture of time has brought me a limited amount of wisdom, too.

So now I need to ask him the next question - how do you stop your brain from working when it is already working hard enough?

Laptops. Chains or wings? Or as Dr. Dolan in one of my favorite courses in college (History and Structure of the English Language) would say - not either/or, but both/and.

Eternal vigilance

I've been cancer free for a little over 11 years now. I had a rare cancer - Merkel Cell Carcinoma (http://www.merkelcell.org/) and they initially told me I had a 50-50 chance of surviving a year. With further testing, I was staged at either IB or II (they were never 100% sure if it had reached my lymph nodes). I had Mohs surgery to excise the tumor (on my left temple), and followed it up with two different kinds of radiation therapy. My last dose of radiation was on St. Patrick's Day, 1995.

At first, I had monthly checkups with my dermatologist, then every other month, then every 3 months, then every 6 months, then yearly. It took a long time, but I finally began to feel safe again. One year, when the anniversary of my surgery passed and I didn't even notice, I realized that mental freedom was part of the cure - the increase in the number of years survived was no longer a significant event. My life was moving past the trauma of diagnosis and treatment.

But I just experienced a new release. One of the benefits of having a rare cancer is that the most prestigious doctors are *interested* in your case. While my dermatologist only sees current surgical patients, he has continued to monitor me - until this year. This year, I was told I could just see one of his associates. To me, that is the final return to "normal." It's as if the final rope tying me to cancer has been thrown off. I still have to watch and monitor, but my case is no longer interesting. And boring is good where health is concerned!

But I won't forget to wear sunscreen.

I forgot

that I am tall. I know that sounds odd, and it struck me that way when I realized that I was realizing that fact anew.

I'm just under 5'7. Above average height for a girl. When I was in my all girls' high school, I was taller than about 90% of the class.

But then I went to a recently coed college, where there were 10 times as many men as women, and I work in a predominantly male field. So I became accustomed to being shorter than most of the people I know. To add insult to injury, my youngest son finally passed me in height last fall.

But yesterday, I had to drop a note off at the high school, and I happened to be walking in the building at the same time as a flock of high school girls getting off a bus. I was confused to realize that I was taller than almost all of them. And then I remembered - nothing has changed but my perspective. I think I'm distressed that environment can change my perception so much!

Planning is for wimps

Today I participated in an internal career event where I served on a panel explaining how I got to "where I am." I was somewhat stunned to even be asked to be on such a panel. I can't say I have a career plan, and I certainly have not taken anywhere near the standard path to architect. My style is certainly winging it - maybe they wanted to show that there are many paths for many different people.... Chemistry major -> Chemistry grad school -> tech writer -> software engineer -> software architect.

I learned relatively early on that I have to follow my heart. If I don't care passionately about what I am doing, I don't invest the energy to do my best work. That may make me a spoiled brat, but it's how my mind works and I just have learned to stop trying to second guess my instincts...

I don't feel the need to climb the ladder per se, what I really want is to get better and better at engineering, and to learn more and more. And I like to have a say in the product that I am building :-) Whatever falls out from that is fine with me. The point for me is to stay happy, to always grow and learn, and to build something I really care about. That is all I need.

So my career decisions have been primarily focused on what I found interesting. My definition of my career success is that I have managed to work on many projects that I really believe in and care deeply about. ViP, Domino Designer, Workplace Designer... I still like what I'm doing now, so I'm not even thinking about "next." The experts may say I should be thinking five years down the line, but I like surprises. Maybe I will be on Workplace Designer v17 by then, maybe there will be something new. But I will make all the career decisions from now til then with my heart.

Blueberry will ride again!

She's fixable, no frame damage. Expensive enough to be painful, but still less than you can get a replacement used Camry wagon for (they stopped making them in 96, and their resale reflects their rarity). Not that Blueberry could ever be replaced.

So we said go to the body shop.

She will be an island car when she's done. Driving maybe 5K miles a year, she should last a good long time. Though my son has already been trying to stake his claim. I will probably have to find the heart to let him drive Blueberry again, but it's going to be really difficult.

But I will be the first to drive her again!

balance

As my working life progresses, I'm finding an increasing tension between architecting and coding. My problem is that I love both. My managers would be perfectly happy if I spent my entire day architecting. But I would be miserable without that real connection to code.

Code grounds me and connects me to the project in a way that architecting does not. And I tend to do my best architecting *while* I'm coding. Coding puts me in an almost meditative state of mind where I can do my best work. I think this breaks traditional rules of design first, code second, but coding puts me in the moment and lets me see the issues all in context.

And I love the creative control of architecture. I moved to coding from technical writing partially because I wanted to have a say in *what* got built before it was too late. I want to figure out what features belong, what features fit, how we can best solve customer needs, etc. I want to design. I don't want to code someone else's design, I want to code my own!

I would posit that you really can't architect without also coding. If I had only been an architect on Workplace Designer rather than coder and architect, I would not have had the skills to know what could be done - I needed to retrain in Eclipse and Java, to get that connection to what's real.

So I am going to have to be a rebel and be a coding architect.

long may she run

Blueberry, as she is affectionately known, is my 1994 Camry wagon. I am unreasonably attached to her. Last summer, our son was in an accident that smashed in her hood and broke the radiator, the grill, and the left quarterpanel is pushed backwards. Major damage, except that he hit something tall, so it is all damage high enough to be away from frame stuff (we believe).

The debate has raged all fall and winter about whether or not to repair a car with 173000 miles on it. Today, her winter of waiting is over - she was towed to a body shop. Stasis has ended. I hope they tell us tomorrow that the cost to repair her is within reason. Though reason may not be the right word in this case.

Early this week the decision will be made. I am certainly leaning towards repairing her. But if nothing else, motion feels good. Wondering back and forth is tiring - spring is in the air, and it's time for life to begin again.

Still standing

The last month has been intense, to say the least. My mom has been sick, Lotusphere, the arrival of a new puppy and the hopefully temporary arrival of my mother's dog, lots of code to design and write....

One at a time....

Lotusphere. It was an amazing experience, as always. I was heartbroken that the OGS demo didn't go as I practiced it. Had there been anything I could have reasonably done from the stage to fix it, I would have. The machine I was working on needed to have its client drive mapped, and that would have just been ugly to do on stage and would have taken the time I needed to demo the next release (the general session was packed full of demos, and there was no time to borrow!). I tried to fall back to the previous deployment, but a demo reset after the last practice had been done incorrectly, and that path failed, too. Fortunately the demo of the next release went well.

Though it was painful to not have Workplace Designer 2.6 not be able to shine as it should, the experience did show me the kindness in our customers. Throughout the week, I was stopped in the hall and told very kind things about how I handled it, how they knew it really worked, etc. Feeling the support of this community really helped me recover from the disappointment!

And as always, I return from Lotusphere both exhausted and recharged. There are so many things to do - and I always want to do them all immediately. But focus helps, so I'll tackle 'em one at a time.

The new puppy, Batman, (my sons named him...) is now 11 weeks old and arrived a week ago. He's very cute, and I love the way he takes on life with gusto. He is beginning to sleep through the night, but we're still going through almost a roll of paper towels a day. My mom's dog is spoiled rotten; I can't wait for her to get strong enough to bring Abby back to her....

Need to get back to my code now :-)

less than a week....

Lotusphere consumes January every year (not to mention bits of December!) Preparing talks, demos, making sure the code is ready, hectic days, so not much blogging of late. All this preparation is both stressful and envigorating.

But I'm excited. It may sound corny, but connecting with customers is what gets me through the rest of the year. To find out how we may have helped, what we need to do better, what's really important, and what can wait a bit. Worth every bit of the stress of preparation, Lotusphere centers me.

I used to be very nervous about presenting, and to some extent, I still am. But then I read an amazing little book by Livingston Taylor called Stage Performance http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671039717/103-0699144-3112631?v=glance&n=283155. Now I'm an engineer, not a stage performer, but what that book drove into my head was that any stage fright was about *me* and that my main concern as a speaker was my audience. So now when I feel that fear, I can pretty quickly control it with putting things in perspective. And get back to getting that demo in shape :-)

Why don't I care?

I've written code in Java, C++, C, PL/1, Pascal, Wang VS Assembler (clone of IBM 360/370 assembler), Fortran, and Basic. And I'm sure I'll learn new languages soon, because, like many others, I'm sensing that Java's reign is waning.

I'm obviously not a compiler engineer, because when I look back at the code I've written, I don't really focus on what language it was written in, but what the program did, and how it made people's lives better in some small way. I can't really say I prefer any of the above languages, except maybe they're all faster than Assembler, as that could get tedious (though the tedium was sometimes rewarded by being able to do something with particular Yankee efficiency).

I get frustrated when reviewing resumes with people who say that the candidate "must have" Java. I'd far prefer a C programmer who writes clear and beautiful code than someone who knows Java maybe a bit too well and is focused on playing silly language tricks that obfuscate the code. Just as in human languages, it doesn't matter what language is being used to express the thought, it's the thought that matters. And in engineering, clear and simple thought yields (in my opinion) the best code.

I didn't always feel this way. Is it cynicism? I don't think so, but maybe. I used to worry that I'd be out of date, unmarketable if I didn't make the jump from PL/1 to C, and the other language transitions after that.

Or maybe it's just evidence of the subspecialties in software engineering. Some English majors specialize in linguistics; others in literature. I'm glad the linguists are out there, because someone needs to make sure these languages parse and make sense. If I have to learn a new language soon, ok, bring it on. But until then, I prefer the literature :-)

next year....

I will not wait until two days before Christmas to start shopping for Christmas. I will not wait for two days before Christmas to go out and get a tree.

I will try to balance things better between project deadlines and caring for my family. I will *enjoy* the holiday rather than approach it as a vast to-do list.

Amazingly, even with such a late start, we were in the end ready for Christmas. But I feel like I missed it for all the rush.

When I was a teenager, my mother and I would go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and I had a shearling muff that I would wear only that night - I suppose much of this is yearning for days of less responsibility, but I missed looking at the clear Christmas Eve sky with my hands warm in my muff. I missed the quiet and stillness of those nights.

The stillness is still there - I know it. I need to be still within, and that is so hard to do with all the commotion of a family and a career. I used to love Christmas Eve. I used to know how to relax and enjoy. This coming year, I will remember. I am going to find another muff. And this moment, I am going to close my laptop and bake Christmas cookies for my kids.

The world ain't slowing down....

The Google thing has bothered me for a while - one company having so much data - what we think (blogs), what we're looking for (search), our mail (gmail), where we're going (maps), etc. At first people thought I was crazy, after all their motto is don't be evil... But driving to Maryland, I was listening to NPR, and heard an interview with one of the authors of this amazing short video:

http://www.idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

This is different from my worries in many ways. But you have to ask, what is the future we're asking for? We should be careful, because we may get it....

Puppies!!

My field spaniel Georgia had her first litter yesterday morning - 2 boys and 1 girl. The two boys are black, the girl is liver and tan. I was going to try really hard not to keep one, but I think I'm going to keep one of the boys (and Georgia's co-owner and breeder will be keeping the other two).

This picture was taken when they were about 12 hours old. I haven't seen them in person yet - if Georgia sees me, she may think her work is done and it's time to go home, and she does still need to take care of them for a little bit longer!

It was a worry this week, wondering if everything would go ok, but everything went well and Georgia was a champ! Which of course she is: http://www.westminsterkennelclub.org/2005/results/breed/fieldspa.html

two and a walnut

A week later, Raz is still huddled in the corner of the cage, now sitting on two eggs and a walnut. The walnut is right in there with the eggs. They are very close in size, and she must have just decided it was an egg, too....

I am getting worried - when is this going to stop?

On another front, (real) puppies are imminent. Our field spaniel, Georgia, who went to Westminster last February is due to deliver any time this week. I am trying very hard NOT to want to keep one - we have five dogs, that's really more than enough. I just know that I am going to melt when I see them....

Trying to be strong...

The W word

So I don't like wizards. Those who work with me know this well. It's one of those things I feel deeply about.... One of my hot buttons.

Wizards have become fairly ubiquitous - to the point where sometimes you have to take a stand to *not* do a wizard. Especially when dealing with Eclipse UIs, where wizards rule the day.

But to me, a visual development tool is, well, visual. Wizards are a fill in the blank experience, not visual at all. They just don't fit - it's a bad feeling to have a wizard mixed in with drag and drop stuff - oil and water, a sense of not belonging. There is definitely a *feel* to a program, a piece of software. In a fluid drag and drop experience, a wizard (to me, anway) is jarring.

When you are filling out a wizard, the program is telling you what to do, taking you down a prescribed path. The wizard is in charge, not the user. The point of course is to make the process easier - but I think the first question to ask is what is wrong with the design in the first place that the user can't navigate it him/herself? And once the user is finished, the user has to deal with what has been created, presumably then in a dynamic way, as relaunching the wizard wouldn't feel as natural on an existing object. So the dynamic editing experience also needs to be built, and it needs to be excellent - and a good measure of how excellent it is is often if the artifact could be easily built from scratch using it.

I guess I just don't like programs telling me what to do...

ok, it's gone too far now

I just got an email from my son - autogenerated from his birthday wishlist from amazon.

With such salient phrases as "as kids"(as in when we were...) and signed "best wishes"....

So he's made an automated gift registry for his birthday and emailed it to me (from his gmail account, of course).

I think I want to unplug all the devices and go live off the land....