Inductive Bias

When talking to fellow developers or meeting with students it happens from time to time that I get the question of why on earth I spent my freetime working on an open source project? Why do I spend weekends at developers' conferences like FOSDEM? Why do spent afternoons organising meetups? Why is it that I am reviewing and writing code after work for free?

Usually I point people to a post by Shalin explaining some of his reasons to contribute to open source. The post quite nicely summarises most reasons that match well with why I contribute back.

On the Apache Community mailing list Grant Ingersoll asked the question about whether devs who work on or use open source are happier in their employment.

In his response Mike posted a link to a video on what motivates people that adds another piece of information to the question of why work on open source software can be perceived as very rewarding though no money is involved: With people doing cognitively challenging tasks, motivation via payment can get you only so far. There are other motivational factors that might play an equal if not larger role in getting people to perform well on their day-to-day work:

• Autonomy: If people are supposed to be engaged with their project they need time and freedom to chose how to solve their tasks. Many large engineering driven companies like Google or Atlassian have gone even further by introducing the concept of giving people a day a week to work on what they want how they want provided they share their results. These so-called 20% projects have shown to have high potential of turning into new, creative project ideas but also even into bugs or problems getting fixed.
  
• Mastery: Great developers strive to get better at what they do - simply because realizing that you actually learn something and get better at what you do can be very satisfying. One way of achieving that goal is to work together with peers on common projects. The larger the pool of peers to draw from, the higher the probability of you finding mentors to help you out and to point out mistakes you make.
  
  There is one more factor why working on open source increases your coding level that should not be underestimated. Grant Ingersoll nicely described it in the thread mentioned above: "I was just talking with a friend yesterday, and fellow committer, who said he is a much better programmer since contributing. Of course, it makes sense. If your underwear is on display for all to see, you sure better make sure it is clean!"
  
• Purpose: People like to work on projects for a purpose. Be it to make all information accessible to the world or to turn earth into a better place by making cheap calls available to everyone. As a counter example deploying some software only for the purpose of selling a license and not make life of your client better by recommending the best solution to help solve his problem may not be half as satisfying.
  

There is quite some documentation out there on what drives people who contribute to open source projects. The video shared by Mike nicely summarizes some of the motivations of people that are independent of open source work but are closely related to it.

A few days ago I finished reading the book "Apprenticeship Patterns" - Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman, by
Dave Hoover, Adewale Oshineye. The book is addressed to readers who have the goal of becoming great software devleopers.

One naive question one could ask is why there is a need for such a book at all? Students are trained in computer science at university, then enter some IT departement and simply learn from their peers. So how is software development any different than other professions? Turns out there are a few problems with that approach: At university students usually don't get the slightest idea of what professional software development looks like. After four years of study they still have a long way to go before writing great software. When entering your average IT shop these juniors usually are put on some sort of customer project with tight deadlines. However learning implies making mistakes, it implies having time to try different routes to find the best one. Lucky are those very few who join a team that has a way for integrating and training junior developers. Last but not least at least in Germany tech carrier paths are still rare: As soon as developers excel they are offered a promotion - which usually leads straight into management before they even had a chance to become masters in their profession.

So what can people do who love writing software and want to become masters in their profession? The book provides various patterns, grouped by task:

• Emptying the cup deals with setting up an attitude that enables learning: To be able to learn new skills the trainee first has to face his ignorance and realise that what he knows already is just a tiny little fraction of what differenciates the master from the junior.
  
• In the second chapter "Walking the long road" the book deals with the problem of deciding whether to stick with software development or to go into management. Both paths provide their own hurdles and rewards - in the end the developer himself has to decide which one to go. Deciding for a technical carrier however might involve identifying new kinds of rewards: Instead of being promoted to senior super duper manager, this may involve benefits like getting a 20% project, setting up a company internal user group, getting support for presenting ones projects at conferences. The chapter also deals with motivational side of software development: Let's face it, professional development usually is way different from what we'd do if we had unlimited time. It may involve deadlines that cannot be met, it may invovle customers that are hard to communicate with. One might even have to deal with unmovtivated colleagues who have lower quality standards and no intention to learn more than what is needed to accomplish the task at hand. So there is the problem of staying motivated even if times get rough. Getting in touch with other developers - external and internal - here can be a great help: Attending user groups (or organising one), being part of an open source project, meeting regularly with other developers in one's general geografical area all may help to remember the fun things about developing software.
  
• The third group of patterns has been put under the headline "Accurate self-assessment" - as people get better and better it get ever harder to remember that there are techniques out there one does not yet know. Being the best in a team means that there is not more room to learn in that environment. It's time to find another group to get in touch with others again: To be the worst in a team means there is a lot of room for learning, finding mentors helps with getting more information on which areas to explore next. Especially helpful is working on a common project with others - doing pair programming can help even with picking up just minor optimisations in their work environment.
  
• The fourth chapter "Perpetual learning" deals with finding opportunities to learn new technologies - either in a toy project that in contrast to professional work is allowed to break and can be used to try and test new techniques and learn new languages. Other sources for learning are the source code itself, tech publications on magazines, books (both new and classic), blogs and mailing lists. Reflecting on what you learned helps remember it later - on option to reflect may involve writing up little summaries of what you read and keeping them in a place where you can easily retrieve them (for me this blog has turned into such a resource - yeah, I guess writing this book summary is part of the exercise, even was a proposal in the book itself). Last but not least one of the best resources for reflection and continued learning is to share knowledge - though you may feel there are others out there way better then you are, you are the one who just went though all the initial loops that no master remembers anymore. You can explain concepts in easy to understand words. Sharing and teaching means quickly finding gaps in your own knowledge and fixing them as you go forward. Last but not least it is important to create feedback loops: It does not help to learn after three years of coding that what you did does not match a customers expectations. As an apprentice you need faster feedback: On a technical level this may involve automated tests, code analysis and continuous integration. On a personal level it involves finding people to review your code. It means discussing your ideas with peers.
  
• The last chapter on "Constructing your curriculum" finally dealt with the task of finding a way to remain up to date, e.g. by following re-known developers' blogs. But also studying the classic literature - there are various books in computer science and software development that have been written back in the 60s and 70s but are still highly relevant.
  

The book does not give you a recipe to turn from junior to master in the shortest possible time. However it successfully identifies situations many a software developer has encountered in his professional life that made him quesion his current path. It provides ideas on what to do to improve one's skills even if the current IT industry may not be best equipped with tools for training people.

My conclusion from the book was that most important is getting in touch with other developers, exchanging ideas and working on common projects. Open source get several mentions in the book, but also for me has turned out to be a great source for getting feedback, help and input from the best developers I've met so far.

In addition meeting people who are working on similar projects face-to-face provides a lot of important feedback as well as new ideas to try out. Talking with someone over a cup of coffee for two hours sometimes can be more productive than discussing for days over e-mail. Hacking on a common project, maybe even in the same location, usually is the most productive way not only to solve problems but also to pick up new skills.

Last week I attended a discussion meetup with Ken Schwaber in Berlin/ Kreuzberg. The event was scheduled pretty shortly - still quite a few developers and project managers from various companies in Berlin showed up.

Ken started with a brief summary of the history of Scrum: Before there was such a thing as an IT industry programming actually was a lot of fun. But somehow the creative job was turned into something people tend to suffer from pretty quickly as people tried to apply principles from manufacturing industries to software "production". Suddenly there was a distinction between testers, programmers, architects... People tried to plan ahead for months or even years noticing only very late in the process that the outcome was by no means what was needed when the product finally was ready.

In contrast to waterfall Scrum comes with very short feedback loops. It comes with developers working with very strong focus on one task at a time. Change is not hated but embraced and built into development.

Some features of Scrum that are often forgotten but never the less essential that were discussed that evening:

• Scrum is all about transparency - it's about telling your customers what is going on. It is about telling your customer honest estimations. It is about telling development to the best of your knowledge all that can makes up for a feature.
  
• Scrum is neither easy nor a solution in itself. It is simply a way of uncovering problems very quickly that are easier to hide in waterfall processes. You have one person who is an isle of knowledge in your company? At every sprint planning this problem will become obvious until you find a way to solve it.
  
• Scrum is about giving developers a box of time that is not to be interrupted. Developing software asks for a lot of concentration. Getting interrupted and resuming work on the task again is so expensive that there is close to nothing this can be justified with.
  
• A nice way of doing Scrum is to use Scrum for management and XP for development. Scrum does not provide any solutions on how to reach the goals set - it does not tell you exactly how to arrive at a stable release by the end of your sprint. It just sets the goal for you. On the other hand XP holds quite a few development best practices that can help achieve these goals.
  
• It needs time to change how customers and developers are working: Yearlong experience has trained them to think in certain ways. So at the beginning Scrum is all about teaching and training people. It takes time to learn a new way of getting things done.
  

There are ways to do fixed price contracts with Scrum. You just have a few more freedoms to offer to your customer:

• Tell your customer that your clients usually change their mind underway. Give them the freedom to change anything not yet implemented. An item can be exchanged with an item of equal cost for no increase in prize. An item can be exchanged with a cheaper item with a decrease of cost, it can be exchanged with a more expensive item for a rise in cost.
  
• Tell your customer that you already have pre-priorized items. The client is free to re-prioritize items as he wishes - as long as the item was not implemented already.
  
• Tell you customer that as you are implementing those items at first that have a high priority you may come to a point where those items not done are not important for release so he could eventually stop early and pay less.
  

In summary the evening was very interesting and insightful for me. It helps to talk about Scrum implementation problems. To learn which problems others have and how they attack these problems.