sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Fox's laws of software development
date: 27 October 2021
preamble: A not entirely serious treatise on the immutable fundamental laws of software development activities

Fox's laws of software development

A not entirely serious treatise

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: The Chi problem
date: 09-Oct-2025

The Chi problem

Much has been said about the word sometimes written as 'Chi' in English (pronounced the same as in the English word 'cheese'), corresponding to the Chinese character 氣. This character, pronounced 'chi' in Chinese, 'ki' in Japanese, 'khi' in Vietnamese, 'gi' in the Philippines etc and corresponding closely with the Indian word 'prana' is variously translated as 'energy' in the sense of vital life-force, or 'élan vitale' from the French.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Alexandrian Architecture
date: 09-Jan-2023

Alexandrian Architecture

My New Year's resolution: I am not going to talk about Micro-services.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: On Shu-Ha-Ri
date: 25-Oct-2024

On Shu-Ha-Ri

So, fairly regularly something turns up in my inbox relating to Shu-Ha-Ri (守破離) often quoted as a Japanese model of skills acquisition. These articles, blogs etc. are all problematic in some way or other, and inevitably as both an Aikido instructor and a career IT professional with deep experience of Software Development Methodologies, I will get asked what I think. Hmmm...

So, let's start with the Wikipedia article:

sleepyfox

'Users hate change'

This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly:

1. Humans naturally resist change
2. Your change is for the better
3. Customers should just get used to it and stop complaining

There's slightly more to it than that, he caveats his argument with requiring you to have of course followed their best practices on product design, and allows for a period of customers being able to elect to continue to use the old site, although he says this is obviously only a temporary solution as you don't want to support both.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Yang vs. Yang
date: 30-Sep-2025

Yang vs. Yang

I was recently asked why I practice violent, aggressive Tai Chi!

sleepyfox

Value, Productivity and Metrics

author: @sleepyfox
title: Value, Productivity and Metrics
date: 24-Jun-2011

This is a response that I made on the Software Engineering Productivity forum of LinkedIn, on the topic "How do you measure (software) engineering productivity?"

The question was defined:

sleepyfox

The Code of Cthulhu

I did not invent this, I have extensively searched for the original article but failed to find it, so I'll do my best to reproduce it here.

Imagine a large Enterprise software development company. A bright young programmer joins this company, and in their first few weeks sets about the non-trivial task of understanding the gigantic bloated code base for the company's flagship product.

Finally, the young programmer ascends the dizzy spire of the company's office building and storms into the CTO's gloomy office with a stack of fanfold computer printout, pausing as they become aware of the music playing: a cacophany of crazed flutes and pan-pipes emerging from an audiophile system with a turntable that looks like a medieval orrery and a speaker that bears more than a passing resemblance to the monstrous shell of some long-extinct cephalopod. The music stops, the silence replacing it redolent of some awful finality.

Still full of righteous indignation the programmer angrily declares:

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: ObFOSScation
date: 15-Oct-2024

ObFOSScation - why FOSS means more than you think it does

The problem with #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is that everybody thinks they know what it means. I once spent a couple of years working on and off with Ross Gardler, a VP of the Apache Software Foundation and Manager of OSS-Watch in Oxford.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Expertise and interviews
date: 23-Apr-2023

Expertise and interviews

In 2001 Paul Graham, founder of Startup Incubator Y Combinator wrote a blog post about LISP called 'Beating the averages'. I don't want to talk about LISP, or startups, not today anyway.