Our Technical--and not so Technical--Reading List

This week we thought we would stray a little outside of the technical world and respond to one of the questions we are often asked. Actually it is more often phrased as a statement than purely as a question "You guys must read an incredible amount of stuff to keep up with all the new things in the IBM i world." This is often followed by "How do you decide what to read?" or "Do you ever read anything except technical stuff?"

Let's start with the technical stuff. We follow some dozen or more online forums ranging from Midrange.com to Code400 to those on SystemiNetwork. We also subscribe to more than 40 technical newsletters covering topic areas from Web design to mobile apps to general IBM i and (not surprisingly) programming in RPG, PHP, etc. Do we read all of these completely? No; there aren't that many hours in the day. We find that skimming the content often reveals trends that we should dig into more deeply.

Of course there are a few writers that we consider "must reads." Scott Klement is the first person to come to mind, followed by Aaron Bartell  and for PHP-oriented topics, Alan Seiden and Mike Pavlak. Trevor Perry is always worth reading; even if we don't always agree with him we have to admire his passion!

We have, of course, large heaps of technical books around the place--more recently the PHP, Web and mobile-related heaps have been growing. Actually since we buy more and more books in e-reader format these days the physical heaps aren't growing as much as they used to, thank goodness. Many of the recent additions to the library come from the folks at Sitepoint. In particular we've added "JQUERY: Novice to Ninja" and "Build Mobile Websites and Apps ..." both of which are excellent introductions to the topics and well priced, as are most of Sitepoint's offerings.

Do we ever read anything non-technical? Sure. In a blog post a few years ago, we talked about our fascination with "Predictably Irrational" and "Freakonomics." Susan has actually re-read "Predictably Irrational" since then and enjoyed it as much as the first time. She has also been enjoying some books by Malcolm Gladwell: "The Tipping Point" and "Outliers" and she has "What the Dog Saw" and "Blink" waiting in her "to be read soon" stack. We also want to re-read our friend Bob Tipton's great book "Jump!: Get Unstuck" before we see him at the upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit, where he'll be our keynote speaker. He might quiz us on the content!

What about reading purely for fun? Absolutely. We recently discovered Kathy Reichs and are thoroughly enjoying her books. We didn't know it when we started reading her, but her main character, Temperance Brennan, is also the main character in the TV series "Bones". But if you don't like "Bones" don't let it put you off trying the books; they are really quite different. "Bones" has just been TV-ized. We have also enjoyed most of the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child, which we began reading at the suggestion of friend and colleague Paul Tuohy.

Jon is a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and even persuaded Susan to read "Nation" which she enjoyed even though she's not into the fantasy genre. This is interestingly one of Pratchett's young reader series, which may say something about our maturity level. If you haven't read it give it a try. It will challenge the way you view religion and society as well as being a darned good read. Jon was glad he didn't realize it was for young people or he might have missed it!

Jon has just finished reading "Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories," which is a collection of the stories Randy tells on his weekly radio show. If you are a music lover this is a "must listen." Until recently you had to listen to the live stream or on satellite radio in the U.S., but past shows are now available on CBC's website. Next on his reading list is "Outwitting Squirrels" by Bill Adler Jr. ,which from a brief glance is hilarious--and hopefully helpful!

So what else should we be reading? Any and all suggestions welcome.

Educating ... Jon (Among Others)

Educating ... Jon (among others)

This week we want to cover two topics related to education. The first relates to education in the formal sense, the second to that gained in the school of hard-knocks.

Back in our Oct. 25 blog post ("IT Must Be Magic") we continued a discussion on the shortage of young people entering the IT field. Those of you interested in the topic should check out part of an InfoWorld article titled, "11 programming trends to watch." The whole article is well worth reading, but the section headed "Programming trend No. 8: Traditional education fades from relevance" really grabbed our attention. Until we read this we had thought that hijacking talented high schoolers en route to university was something that only happened in the sporting world. Apparently not. It seems that some high-tech firms are actively pursuing the same approach. Interesting.

The article also references a Fast Company piece titled, "Silicon Valley's New Hiring Strategy." Has this approach been triggered by the shortage of IT grads or has experience simply shown that a degree in IT doesn't really prove that you can program in today's fast moving world?

This weekend Jon was doing some work with embedded SQL and had an "interesting" time debugging problems with one particular program. It hasn't done anything to improve his love/hate relationship with SQL, but he can explain why himself:

Susan has always been our in-house SQL person, but I've been doing more and more of it lately, particularly in PHP. I've also been using more and more of it in my RPG code. I want to like SQL--I really do. I have long been convinced that it's the right way to go--not for everything, but certainly for set retrieval and processing. I still have a gag reflex when faced by some of its more arcane syntax, but I am fighting that. Then just when SQL was starting to win me over ...

The embedded SQL query I was building was a simple one. Just a straight SELECT with a simple WHERE clause. In the past I've often done such trivial retrievals with a SELECT * into a DS defined by referencing the external file definition. But while I was building this particular one I found myself hearing the voice of IBM's Mike Cain telling me not to waste time retrieving data I didn't need. OK, I thought, I'll be a good boy and SELECT just the columns I need and specify them in the DS--how hard can it be?

Problem was I didn't get the DS right. I was tired and simply reversed a couple of fields. As a result the values I was seeing made no sense. Now I could swear that when I've done something foolish like that in the past the SQL pre-compiler berated me and told me that the structure was not usable. Not this time. Not a word--even though one of the fields was alpha and the other numeric. It seems to me that changes made in SQL in general, and the pre-compiler in particular, in recent years have allowed it to do a lot of implicit casting between different data types. I can only conclude that in that light IBM has relaxed the validation rules. Either that or my brain has gone completely to mush and I am mismembering the "olden days."

I was clearly having a bad day as I also accidentaly discovered that the pre-compiler doesn't issue an error if you specify a column name in a SELECT clause that doesn't even exist in the table in question. The result is an SQL 42703 error at runtime. At least the error message was explicit about the cause of the problem. Maybe I've never made that mistake before, but it really surprised me that the pre-compiler didn't catch it, particularly since earlier it had failed a compile because the table in question was not found in the library list.

What's the point of all this? Other than to demonstrate my own apparent incompetence? Basically I want to warn others not to make too many assumptions about what potential problems the pre-compiler will or will not diagnose. Sometimes our dear old RPG compiler spoils us and lulls us into a false sense of security!

More on eReaders and Belgium

First, thanks to all those who commented on last week's blog. It's nice to know we're not the only ones who think using the language properly is important!

Second, an update on our July 19 post. As we said there, after contemplating and comparing various eReaders for more than six months, we finally bought a Kobo. As Ken predicted in his comment, we soon discovered that having one eReader wasn't enough. So we're now officially a two-Kobo family.

We did consider going with a Sony for the second one. We even put some PDFs on a memory card and took it into the Sony store with us to see if it handled PDFs significantly better that the Kobo. The results were decidedly mixed. One PDF document actually caused the Sony to reboot itself and it never opened it. Maybe it had something against RPG in V7.1? Another smaller PDF did open and was better than on Kobo, but still far from ideal. When we tried just a regular ePub-format book on the Sony, the book-load and page-turning performance seemed quite slower than we experienced with our Kobo. Then there was the fact we couldn't bring ourselves to pay about 35-percent more for the Sony in Canada than it would have cost to wait until our next trip to the U.S. to buy it there. Plus the Kobo was on sale last weekend and even without the sale it's less than the Sony, even in the U.S. We also felt happy to support  a local Toronto-based company. So, our second Kobo is a very welcome addition to our home.

Our last topic this week is also one we've blogged about before. We have many fond memories of great times working at ITSO forums at the former IBM education facility in the village of La Hulpe, just outside Brussels.  We're so fond of the place that, a few years ago, when we took Jon's mother and aunt for a visit to Brussels we spent nearly a day wandering around the village of La Hulpe and the grounds of the Chateau next to the old IBM facility. The former education facility seemed not to be in use at all when we were there, which we thought was such a waste of a beautiful location, surrounded as it is by the Belgian National Forest.

We recently reconnected, courtesy of FaceBook, with a friend who worked at La Hulpe back in the days when ITSO forums were there. She just told us that La Hulpe has been re-opened as a boutique hotel and conference facility called Dolce La Hulpe Brussels. We're very excited that on our next trip to Brussels, we may have a chance to stay in our old stomping grounds at La Hulpe. For those of our readers who stayed there years ago, you'll probably wonder, as we did, how they ever turned those tiny utilitarian rooms into what you see in the photos on the website; although their smallest rooms are fewer than 100 square feet, still far from spacious. Even so, clearly at least two of the old rooms with the minuscule twin bed, desk and space for nothing else must have been combined to make for these more comfortable surroundings. However, it looks as if La Cave (the bar) and the restaurant are similar to what we remember. 

Of course, it won't be quite the same as gathering in La Cave with 15 -20 others, half of whom had been awake for the last 24 to 48 hours trying to get their workshop labs running!

Some of the special summer room rates are fairly good (by European standards, at least) and the surroundings are truly gorgeous. If you decide to try it out on a trip to Europe, let us know and we'll happily send you our own personal tourist guide to Brussels and give you pointers on some great restaurants in the La Hulpe area.

Adapting for the Future

We just returned from speaking at the Ocean User Group's annual conference and were delighted to see an increase in the level of attendance. We suspect that in part this was due to the remarkably low price level that the group was able to achieve. And just how did they manage to do that in these days of ever-increasing prices? Well, like the Toronto User Group (TUG) we covered in May of this year, they switched from hosting the event at a hotel to using the facilities at a school, as did the MITEC group we mentioned in June. This seems to be a good trend.

In Ocean's case the school in question was a campus of National University. Because the majority of their classes are held in the evenings and on weekends, the Ocean folks were able to rent the facilities during the day at a very competitive rate. As an added bonus, they weren't tied to paying inflated hotel prices for meals and refreshments and were free to arrange their own catering. This resulted in better quality food at a lower cost. A win-win situation. Those of you who've never tried to organize an event at a hotel may wonder just how much of a difference something like this can make. Just to give you some indication--it isn't uncommon for a hotel to charge $50 or more plus an 18- to 20-percent service charge, for a gallon of coffee. That's close to double the cost of buying from Starbucks or other quality coffee establishments. Use similar figures for meals and snacks and you'll quickly see why it makes such a huge difference.

The Ocean team is a great crowd and continue to work hard to make the group both meaningful and affordable for their members, as indeed do all of the local User Groups we've had the pleasure of working with lately.

And the future is ...

We finally gave in. Well, kind of. Remember back in December of 2009 we mentioned an eBook reader was on our shopping list and we were waiting to see what happened to pricing. Well, the price point has finally dropped to a level where we felt we really should take the plunge. Of course, the number of devices in the market has increased significantly since we last looked, so we had to start the shopping all over again. In the end, although the price of the Sony reader we mentioned previously as our leading candidate has fallen by close to 50 percent, that was not our final choice. We went for the Kobo and so far are very happy with our choice. It interfaces with both Jon's Mac and Susan's Windows PC, and can handle PDFs as well as the major ebook formats. In Canada it's sold through the Chapters book-store chain and Walmart, and in the U.S. by Barnes and Noble, which is where we bought ours as they're running a $20 bonus promotion right now and were also offering five free eBooks. The eBooks work really well and PDFs are more challenging to use, but since most times we have our laptops with us that's a minor requirement. Jon has now read the whole of a Lee Child novel, a substantial portion of two Sitepoint technical books and various other bits and pieces and most of this on the unit's first battery charge.

It's not an iPad, but we long ago decided to wait until at least version two before we launched into buying one of those, so for now the Kobo will fit the bill. In fact, we may end up with two of them since Jon is showing no sign of wanting to "play nice and share."

Make Yourself Happier--Give

Everyone feels down from time to time. In the current economic climate, it seems people have more reasons than ever to be depressed. Nearly everyone reading this post undoubtedly knows someone personally who has lost a job within the last year. We've seen comments in our blog from some of those people. Even if you haven't lost your job, you may well be worried about that possibility. If you're self-employed, as we are, chances are you've seen a downturn in your income in recent months. Most of us have been personally impacted by the shrinking value of our retirement nest eggs. We've all heard the jokes like "my 401K just turned into a 201K."  All of the bad news and anxiety is enough to depress anyone. Is there anything we can do to pull ourselves out of this blue funk?

As anxious or depressed as you may feel about your own situation, there's always someone in the world--a lot of them--who are far worse off than you. That fact alone probably does little, if anything, to make you feel better about your own lot in life. But you may be surprised at how much doing something to help those less fortunate than yourself could do to help you feel better about your lot in life.

For example, some of you may have noticed the PS on one of Aaron Bartell's recent comments on this blog: "I am shaving hair on my body. Find out why at http://firstgiving.com/aaronbartell." Aaron is running in a half marathon to raise money via sponsorships to feed starving children through World Vision. Leave it to Aaron to come up with a twist on the normal "sponsor me for charity" pledge. He has agreed to publicly (via YouTube) shave various parts of his body when the value of his sponsorships reaches various levels. As of this writing, he's more than half way to the first level when we all get to see him shave his legs. If he makes it to his goal of $10,000 in sponsorships, his 4-year-old son will get a chance to shave Aaron's head into any style he wants. We're pulling for Aaron to make that level just to see what Ethan comes up with! 

Aaron is doing the sponsored run to raise money to feed hungry children, but we suspect he will find, if he hasn't already, that a surprisingly nice side benefit of doing this is a great positive feeling. First of all, to do something for someone else, you must first be aware that someone else has problems bigger than your own. That perspective alone helps make you feel better. In addition, doing something concrete to help someone in need tends to make you feel good.

Donating money is a great way to help those less fortunate. Performing some activity to help may be even better. Aaron is giving not only money but his time and substantial energy--not to mention his hair--to help those children. In return, we're sure he'll receive a great deal of satisfaction--much more than if he'd simply written a check to World Vision--because he's actively involved.

Those of you who are unemployed at the moment probably feel you can't spare any money right now, no matter how good the cause. But if you're in this position, one thing you may have is time and energy--maybe not enough energy to run a half marathon like Aaron. But if you look around, you'll find many organizations that can use your time. Some ideas?  Become actively involved in a leadership role in your local i user group. We don't know of any who aren't looking for more people to help out. No user group in your area? Why not create one? What a great way to build contacts with i shops nearby. As a side benefit, maybe you'll even find one that has an opening for you. How about teaching computer literacy classes for the elderly?

Of course, your volunteer work doesn't need to be related to your real work. This week, we spent our first day on a building site with Habitat for Humanity. The organization is building a house about a mile from ours. What a great day we had and, with the exception of more than a few aching muscles, we're feeling much better about life in general than we did before. We're looking forward to spending more days on the site in the next few weeks.

Susan recently read Bill Clinton's book, "Giving," in which he describes many innovative ways that different individuals and organizations are helping those who are less fortunate. Regardless of your political leanings, it's a great book if you're wondering what cause or organization to support with your time and money or if you just want a bit of inspiration. In the final chapter Clinton discusses why one should consider giving. There is, of course, much consideration of what a different place the world could be if more people donated more time and money to those less fortunate.

But the reason that struck us as perhaps the best is really a selfish one, because giving makes the giver happier. To quote the book: "Who's happier? The uniters or the dividers? The builders or the breakers? The givers or the takers? I think you know the answer. There's a whole world that needs you, down the street or across the ocean. Give."

Looking For Ways to Reduce Your Programmer's Productivity?

Surely nobody in their right mind wants to do that? You'd think that went without saying, and yet day after day all over North America (and to a lesser extent elsewhere) that is exactly the impact of many of today's conventional management practices.

This was a conclusion that we had reached many years ago as individuals, but it was affirmed by the research we did while preparing a management class for one of our larger customers. One of the books we studied was “Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

One of the truly affirming sections of the book concerns "Programming War Games" and the conclusions that they draw from the results. You'll have to read the book to get the complete picture, but in summary the games took place on an annual basis over a number of years. Teams of programmers were all given the same task to perform. The language that they used and the tools and techniques they employed were entirely at their discretion. At the end of the competition period, their work was reviewed for completeness, accuracy and maintainability among other factors. The results were repeatedly the same--factors such as programming language used, years of experience and salary had little or no impact on the results. The factors that did have a major impact were the organization (company) in which they worked and the workplace environment. 

So just how important was the workplace environment? Very. Examine the performance figures in Download idevelop_090908_table_1.doc and you'll get a good idea of just how important. Note that these numbers were derived from a questionnaire that the competitors completed before the competition began--in other words they were ranking their normal working environment.  It’s also worth noting that the meaning of subjective terms such as "acceptably" was left up to the individual respondents to determine. 

One thing that is not obvious from the table is that those programmers ranked in the top quartile were not just slightly more productive than those in the bottom quartile, they were orders of magnitude more productive!

So let's return to our original question and see just how these numbers can show us how to reduce programmer productivity:

Start by moving your programmers into smaller workspaces and, since it appears that noise levels and privacy have a significant bearing, make those new workspaces cubicles with really low dividing walls! Does the resulting working environment sound horribly familiar? It did to those working for our client. The environment in which they worked was so bad that when they were permitted to "decorate" their working environment for Halloween, all of the programming groups erected cardboard walls and made their cubes into jail cells, castles, forests, you name it--anything that increased their privacy. Interestingly the non-IT groups on the floor did not feel the need to build walls as part of their decorating strategy!

Given the above, it will come as no surprise to you that the majority of the most productive software companies in the world offer a high degree of privacy and self-determination in their programmer accommodations. Ever wonder why programmers at Microsoft get their own offices with walls and doors that shuts?

Want to know more? Then run--don't walk--to your local bookstore and find yourself a copy, read and digest. Make sure you get the second edition (1999) it has a number of updates and revisitations of topics covered in the first edition. The scary thing is how few things have changed in the intervening 12 years! A little depressing really.

If this is a topic that interests you, you might also enjoy reading Joel Spolsky's take on this topic--a piece also inspired in part by Peopleware.

For Something Completely Different: A Suggestion for Your Reading List

We've both recently read "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely and we already know we'll be re-reading it in the days to come. This is one of the most amusing, enlightening, interesting and educational books we've read in a long time--the only other one we can think of that made us think this hard is "Freakonomics." If you enjoyed that you'll love "Predictably. ..." Not only is it a good read, but it is all based on solid research and the conclusions drawn make sense--and not always the sense you'd like them to make!

As programmers, we like to think of ourselves as rational human beings who make decisions for logical reasons. And yet deep inside we know that isn't always the case. The book will help you understand the real forces at work in the decision-making processes, and with that understanding comes not only the power to make the "right" decisions, but to make sure that others make them to! Want to make sure that the boss chooses the right one of the options in front of him? Read this book and learn what you can do to ensure you get the decision you want. Trust us--relying on logic and reasoned argument won't cut it. You need to understand the irrational motivations in play.

Even though we were aware of what was being tested, we still found ourselves making irrational choices in the examples posed in the book--when we were honest enough to admit it that is! We suspect you will too.

Footnote from Jon. I really wish that I had read this book before the kids went through puberty. The "birds and the bees" talks would have had a very different slant! The section of the book that deals with the effect of "hormones" on the decision-making process is a real eye-opener and makes complete nonsense of much of the "conventional wisdom" that passes for sex education in most circles. Read it--it is very scary--but it makes sense.

Final note: "Freakonomics" is by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. If you haven't read it yet you should--particularly if you're planning on selling or buying a house in the near future. 

Why Writing a Book Isn't in Our Current Plans

When are you going to write a book on ... ? This is a question that we are asked at least once per conference and at least once per month by e-mail, so it seemed a reasonable topic for the blog entry this week. The simple answer is: We want to, we really do, but it is tough to find the time. A more complete answer is far more complicated, but hopefully some of you may find it enlightening. 

In fact, we already write quite a lot. At least it feels like a lot. We write this weekly blog, our monthly IBM Systems Magazine i5 EXTRA e-newsletter article (to subscribe, click here), ad-hoc columns for other publications and at least six major magazine articles a year, many in IBM Systems Magazine. All of that is in addition to the writing we do as we prepare the training materials that we develop as part of our "real" job. The writing itself, of course, doesn’t necessarily take an inordinate amount of time, but the research behind it and the preparation of sample programs, etc., can consume an incredible number of hours. Then there’s the time spent responding to questions from the editors and the occasional rewrites resulting from such questions.

In and of itself, spending this amount of time wouldn’t present a problem except for one teeny tiny detail. Money, or to be more precise, the lack of it. The simple fact is that, other than for folks such as J. K. Rowling and James Patterson, writing doesn't really pay. That may come as a surprise to those of you who groan every time you think of the high price of the System i text book that you had your eye on. But the fact is the author of that book will be lucky to see 18 percent of the price. And the percentage they receive is based on the actual price paid for the book, not on the cover price. Just to give you an idea as to what this can mean from the author's perspective: A good friend of ours published a book some years ago. While writing the book, he made the "mistake" of logging all of the hours that he spent on it. Once the book was published he waited for the money to roll in. And waited, and waited. To cut a long story short, we all went out for a drink when, some many months later, his calculations finally confirmed that he had reached the towering heights of  $1 per hour. It’s a little disheartening to think that you could have earned at least 5 times as much by taking a part-time job at the local McDonald's!

One of the lessons we learned from this was never to clock the hours we spend on a particular piece--and just to be content with the check when it arrived. But of course the result of all this is that writing is something one can really only afford to do when no paid work is occurring. This is even more true in the case of writing for IBM Redbooks publications. We’ve been trying to find time to work on a follow-up to the "best-selling" RPG Redbooks publication, "Who Knew You Could Do That With RPG IV." So far we’ve had little success. Why? Because unlike writing for book publishers or magazines, writing for IBM Redbooks publications doesn't just pay badly--it doesn't pay at all. Nothing, nada, rien!

So--why don't we write a book on. ... We will one day.  But you may have to wait for a while. ...