2003/04/21

Chandler Release 0.1 is out. See what all the fuss is about, almost.

Larry Seltzer wants to throw out SMTP and start over. I have to support that. If the European Union can change the money that 300 million people use all on one day, we can change our email protocol. Let's find a protocol with decent authentication and with micropayments to make spam uneconomical, and let's set a deadline, maybe two years in the future, when SMTP will simply be turned off. Everybody will know it's coming, just like Y2K, and everybody will have to be ready.

A couple of new books worth checking out:

Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects. The latest book from the heroes of Peopleware, Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister. Makes a brave case that the person (or company, or team) who is responsible for risk management is the person who is going to pay the price when things go wrong. Waltzing With Bears kicks off with an excellent analysis of the famous "failure" of software engineering that delayed the opening of the new Denver airport, framing it as a failure of risk management. In fact when you look a bit more closely at the software project itself, it's pretty clear that the software team was expected to perform the impossible, and the project as a whole had no way to recover from a slip in a typically over-optimistic software schedule.

Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization by Andrew King. A well written and very thorough treatise on what you can do to reduce download times and speed up web sites. Yes, putting your whole HTML page on one line can really help.

No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, by Andrew Ross. A big disappointment. I think the original book was not exciting enough so the publisher tried to present it as a critique of informal, humane workplaces. The "hidden cost," they want us to believe, of pleasant, diverse workplaces seems to be that they shut down and you lose your job. I know, it doesn't make any sense. The author wanted to write a book about cool dotcoms, but they all imploded, and he was stuck trying to claim that they imploded because they tried to have a humane workplace, without really believing it himself, so it comes out a big mess.

Most of the book, though, is an interesting look inside two of the Aeron-infested workplaces of the fin-de-siècle, presenting a picture of young and diverse liberal arts majors jammed in a big room together playing loud music and patting themselves on the back for having such cool unjobs. Rather than focusing on the business stories behind Razorfish and 360hiphop.com, which we've presumably heard, this book tries to look at the work environment itself. Unfortunately it's written in a current-events American Studies tone rather than as an ethnography, which is too bad, because some anthropological skills would have made this a million times more interesting (and useful, to those of us that are trying to create humane workspaces while creating successful businesses).

My new book is here! Apress has just published a new collection of 36 essays from Joel on Software, aptly named More Joel on Software. Get yours today! Available from Amazon.com or wherever fine cheese is sold.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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