Good afternoon, the internet. I, Curtis Lassam, tireless champion of gentlemanly beverages, have just enjoyed a steaming mug of morning ambrosia.

Well, it was really more ‘afternoon ambrosia’. My morning was almost entirely consumed by meetings, as would be expected of a soulless corporate drone such as myself.

This tea was especially sweet, because yesterday, I failed at morning tea. I failed at all possible tea metrics. There was no recoverable deliciousness.

The morning was, of course, dominated by training meetings. We’re learning why Data Architecture exists, from a Dutch man who was programming in COBOL back before computers existed. I made my tea, and left it behind, distracted by more meetings.

So, that was an initial tea fail. Cold tea is no good. I thought, ‘hey, I’ll microwave this into palatability’, forgetting that my travel mug was forged out of what could only be described as a solid sheet of stainless steel. The explosion, and resulting stench of burning plastic, was noticeable throughout the entire department.

I tried making tea in the shattered wreckage of my old tea mug. It just tasted like metal and failure. I had to discard the whole sordid failure-pile that had once been my morning routine.

The whole compound fail that was my tea of yesterday, however, just made today’s tea all the more sweet. Well, that and the six or seven teaspoons full of sugar.

But today, I’m three for three. I started by putting a brine together. A half cup of salt, a full cup of brown sugar, mustard powder, and black pepper, in a bowl, and then hot apple cider vinegar poured over the thing. Mix it up, give it some time to dissolve. Throw in two racks of ice, and shake a bit to cool it all down. Bam, brine.

Then, I tossed some pork chops in the brine. Just let them sit there and soak up flavor and juiciness.

Later? I got hungry. Chicken broth with green onions, fresh ground ginger, garlic, soy sauce, and rice noodles. It needed meat, so I fetched one of the half-brined chops, sliced it into convenient little strips, fried it up, and tossed it in the soup. Verdict? Delicious.

Even later still? I fried up a full chop. Flavorful, juicy, and delicious.

And then? Popcorn in a pot. My last two attempts at popcorn used a stock pot and fairly low heat, and the popcorn ended up being not-quite-burned-but-definitely-pretty-overdone. This time, I used a much smaller pot at a much higher heat. The smaller pot, while offering a decreased popcorn payload, was easier to ’shake’ over the element… and the popcorn came out fluffy and perfect. Nice. Three for three, baby.

So, here’s mine.

As for “Advice for CS Students”, I polled Dan, Travis, and Dovic, and used their advice. The school did not appreciate Dovic’s advice.

The call has gone out once more, and so now I’m presenting my advice.

• Visit the IRC channel. (irc.freenode.net – #sfucsss) – it’s populated
  mostly by ex-CSSS who are industry professionals, and we know
  everything about everything.
• If a course says “Lecturer: Staff” or “Lecturer: TBA”, avoid it like
  you would avoid gonorrhea – unless you look forward to a whole
  semester of a clueless grad student reading PowerPoint slides off of
  an overhead projector.
• If a course says “Lecturer: Bart”, “Lecturer: Mori”, “Lecturer:
  Vaughan”, or “Lecturer: Baker”, take it. It doesn’t even matter what
  they’re teaching. Just take the course. I guarantee that it will be
  excellent.
• Occasionally crack open a textbook. Sometimes the concept that the
  lecturer has utterly failed to teach is in there, and explained in
  detail.
• Take notes in lecture and do the assignments, and nine times out of
  ten, your review-for-the-final will be a breeze. The tenth time out of
  ten, it’s because your professor dropped a big ol’ bridge-o-crazy on
  the class, and you’ll still do okay thanks to the magic of curved
  grading.
• All-nighters are a recipe for bad code.
• A lot of people come out of university with nothing to show for it on
  a resume except a hollow degree and a tiny amount of Java experience.
  This is bad. Do Co-ops, Project Courses, and Hard Courses. Do as many
  as you can. It’ll halve the time you spend in Junior Programming
  positions when you graduate.
• Try your very best not to do a co-op as a QA tester. The only
  experience that’ll give you is how to be a QA tester. It’s an unending
  loop of mediocre jobs.
• Bring a towel.
• Contribute to open-source projects.
• Have fun.
• You will never be surrounded by as many members of the opposite
  (/same) sex in your age, education, and interest group as you will
  over the next 4-8 years. As computing science students, this may
  occasionally mean that you need to branch out and try courses in
  Criminology, Journalism, or Biology. Join clubs. Meet people. You
  can hide in the protective shell of Computing Science culture for the
  entirety of your degree, and that’s just sad.
• Some students just come up to the mountain for classes, then go down
  immediately afterward. Soak up some SFU culture. Hang out somewhere.
• The student newspaper is terrible, until you consider that it’s
  written and edited almost entirely by amateur volunteers. They do an
  excellent job with limited experience and resources.

The Mythical Man-Month : 3 – The Surgical Team

The Problem

• Teams, of course, should not be more than about 10 people.
• Certain employees are much better at producing code than others.
• How do we maintain the conceptual integrity of a single, well-architectured system if there are 10 people building it?

The Surgical Team

Instead of divvying tasks up equally amongst all team members, Brooks suggests a ’surgical team’ – with the bulk of the coding responsibility on one man, and the support tasks divvied out amongst the team members.

• The Surgeon: Designs the software, writes the software, writes the tests, and writes the documentation. He is a very busy man.
• The Co-Pilot: The pair-programming partner to The Surgeon, the Co-Pilot understands all of the code, and has more time to discuss it with the rest of the team.
• The Administrator: Handles money, people, space, and machines – everything non-technical. Can serve multiple teams.
• The Editor: The documentation produced by the surgeon is likely to be a bit technical, unclear, and ‘engineery’. The editor takes that documentation and polishes it like nobody’s business.
• The Secretary: For filing and typing and answering phones. This book was written in 1975, remember. Replace this today with The Bitch, a young and semi-useless fellow (co-op) used to fetch coffee, make appointments, fill out Sprint charts, test, fix minor bugs, and dance for the entertainment of others.
• The Program Clerk: The guy who runs batches. 1975. In the case of 2010, replace The Program Clerk with The Build Engineer – the guy who manages source control, constant-integration build/compile/test chains, and what-have-you. Can also serve multiple teams.
• The Toolsmith: When The Surgeon says “I need a library that does X” or “I need a tool that does X”, the toolsmith finds or builds it.
• The Tester: Writes tests. Executes tests. Manual tests. The tester wants to break the system.
• The Language Lawyer: One guy who knows the language/library/toolkit really, really well, for consultation & code review. Can serve multiple teams.

The Benefits

• The Surgeon is the single point of contact for any work on the code, making inter-team collaboration easier.
• If The Surgeon gets hit by a bus, The Co-Pilot can step in right away.

Saying “No”

Here

Reasons to Say No:

• Kill a bad idea.
• Keep a project on time/budget

Ways to Say No:

• Cite Best Practices: Educate your customers. If everybody else is doing it, it’s probably for a reason.
• Use Data: Gather data. Authoritative-sounding numbers are convincing.
• Use Price: Quote a price for the bad feature. A high price.
• Who’s Using It? Usability testing from ‘potential customers’ is a good way to squelch bad ideas, as stakeholders visibly see the customers struggling to understand the features.

Cushioning the Blow:

• Yes-No-Yes: “Yes! It’s a good idea to try to blah!” – “No, that’s probably not a very good way to do it.” – “Yes! Let’s try to think of better ways to do that!”
• Wait: Think carefully before you ‘no’.
• Plan B: What if they don’t accept your ‘no’? What then?
• Same Data, Same Conclusion: Instead of saying no, give stakeholders the same data that you used to come to the ‘no’, and let them come to your decision.
• Less is More: A short, well-expressed reason why something is a bad idea handily beats a multi-page treatise.

Good afternoon, the internet. I, Curtis Lassam, tireless champion of waking up, have just gone through my morning routine for the 8,942nd consecutive time.

It starts with my CD-powered alarm clock, which has contained the same mix-CD since I bought it. In Grade 11. Why mess with a good thing? I can listen to the music playing and know exactly how long it’s been since the alarm has gone off, without having to open my eyes or think excessively hard — both tasks that can be troublesome in the morning.

By the time it gets to Daft Punk, I’m usually at least mostly awake and alert. In University, it usually made it all of the way to Tom Lehrer’s Element Song, which was just one of the many reasons that I was pretty consistently late for class. “These are the only ones of which the news has come to Haaaarvard… and there may be many others but they haven’t been discaaaaavered” became the morning death knell for any pretense of arriving in class on time.

After I get out of bed, it’s time for the shower (optional), and shave (optional), at which point I am usually quite late. There’s time to briefly stare, wistfully, at the Cheerios that sit on top of the refrigerator. They’re mocking me. “You never have time to eat us. Maybe if you give up hygiene. You, too, can taste of the morning oaty goodness.” I hate those smug Cheerios. They think they’re so much better than me.

At this point, I usually do 1000 pushups, take a 30 kilometer ride on my bicycle, and then drive to work, practicing my over-the-top lies in the car along the way.

Since I’ve started work, I’ve started loading leftovers into these tiny, modular lunch-sized containerbowls. Two or three containerbowls makes a pretty good — and pretty varied — lunch. The only trouble is that I’m not sure if I want to be the sort of dude who has his fridge filled with hundreds of nigh-identical meal-units. At that point, it might be time to just give up and buy a pocket protector and some enormous plastic glasses.

This morning, I took cream and sugar to work with me. It felt strange, walking through the park to work, holding a carton of cream. “What are you doing?”, I imagined the park patrons saying.

“I’m walking my cream.”

Good afternoon, the internet. I, Curtis Lassam, tireless champion of having cool air blasted up my shorts, am wishing that I had an air conditioner in my house.

According to this thermometer that I’ve been keeping in a pot of boiling water, it’s at least 100 degrees Celsius in here. That is way too hot. I am sweating like Dolph Lundgren in a sauna filled with packing foam. This poor leather couch, it never had a chance.

Admittedly, I’m forced to consider the air conditioner because some of my previous schemes to cool the apartment down have failed. Let’s look at some of them.

Plan A: Bag full of ice.

When the frostbite heals, I might be able to use my toes again.

Plan B: Frantic arm-waving

This plan was actually successful, but I got tired after 9 or 10 hours and couldn’t keep going. I was getting strange looks from the other people on the Skytrain, anyways.

Plan C: Create an Enormous Rocket and Use it to Shoot the Earth Exactly 1 Foot Away From the Sun

Unfortunately, logistical difficulties in this plan created some problems – some couplings melted, I ran out of money, and my engineering lead sued me for having a hostile workplace environment.

Plan D: The Dutch Twist

I had to promise the police that I wouldn’t discuss the details of the Dutch Twist. Let’s just say that those preschoolers will never be the same again.

Plan E: Hat-Fan

Fun but ineffective, as I have exhausted the world’s entire supply of AA batteries.

Good afternoon, the internet. I, Curtis Lassam, tireless champion of automation and scheduling, have pre-scheduled each “On the Topic of” post this week.

“Why?”, you might ask, perhaps followed by “why should we care?”. Maybe even “who are you, and why are you in my house, standing over me while I sleep, breathing deeply and clutching a vegetable peeler to your chest.” Yes, I get that last one a lot.

It’s simple, various readers. Because I can try to keep a more reasonable schedule, writing whenever the mood strikes me and then pushing my various insane thoughts into the queue. That even gives me more time to adapt, alter, adjust, poke, prod, pontificate, edit, elucidate, and … um… egg. Additional editing shouldn’t really clear up my lunatic writing style, though, so it’s not really a win for anybody.

The most major benefit, however, is clear. Any time I schedule anything on a computer, it feels like I am commanding a tiny army of unreliable robot servants — something that most of my friends should know is a pretty heady feeling. Someday, if I keep this going, I might not be the only one standing over people while they sleep, breathing deeply and clutching a vegetable peeler. There might be tiny, unreliable robot servants, too. I’d imagine they would be holding a tarp.