Amalgamation OOOO

by zenquaker

Okay, yeah, I haven’t posted in days. There’s a couple of reasons for that.

The first reason for me not posting is that my sister came to town with her son. That was Saturday. I went downtown to meet them at the train station, and we spent the day at the National Air and Space Museum (where they had a cool exhibit on the Wright Brothers and a depressing one about World War I with some annoying bits about the Red Baron). The next day we had brunch with my mother, and went to the National Zoo (where I discovered the triceratops that I used to play on in front of the Natural History Museum). The next day we went to the Natural History Museum (where we saw a cool exhibit on the rescue of the Chilean miners last year). We rounded it out yesterday with a visit to the American History Museum (with a cool-but-not-as-cool-as-it-could-have-been exhibit on the flag that inspired the Star Spangled Banner, and a depressing lack of Kermit). It was nice to see my sister and nephew, but it kept me busy all day long.

There was a great bit on one of the signs in the Wright Brothers exhibit: “The Wright brother’s systematic flight-testing program was critical to their success. Their method of evaluating data gathered by testing an aircraft in flight, then refining the design based on those results, remains an essential tool in aerospace research and development.” That, combined with some conversations with my much more experienced programmer sister led me to the conclusion I had been avoiding for some time. Namely that agile development is like everything else in programming: it’s a tool. You use it when it’s the right tool, and you don’t use it when it’s the wrong tool. The same goes for object oriented vs. functional programming, high level vs. low level languages, web applications vs. dedicated applications, and whatever else you can think of. I think a lot of the wrong tools were chosen for the Sharp Floor program, but that’s a crumbled cookie.

Now, you might have noticed that my sister came into town Saturday, but I haven’t posted since Thursday. I could claim that I was getting ready for them to come, except I, um, accidental vacuumed some rope last weekend and had nothing left to do except wait for the vacuum to get repaired. What I did Friday was just take the night off and not do anything. It was wonderful. It was so amazingly wonderful that it was an obvious sign that I am pushing myself too hard. And I’m not even getting everything done that I want to. Now, everything I’m doing I want to work on. But working on that stuff is supposed to make my life better, not stress me out. So I re-prioritized everything, re-figured my schedule, and slotted everything back into my schedule.

This blog dropped to the bottom of my priority list and only got an hour a week. I have more time under the new schedule, and will use that time for whatever seems appropriate, so I may post more than once a week. But don’t count on it.

Thanks to all of you who have followed this blog while I was putting significant effort into it. If you want to move on, I understand. If you want to stick around, I’ll see you this weekend.