• Humility
• Love of Learning
• Detail-orientedness
• Adaptability
• Passion

The post examines each of these in depth and, as I said, is an excellent analysis. Most interesting to me is the first, humility. Ben starts:

“Humility is first because it implies all the other attributes, or at least enables them.”

Though Ben states he believes all five attributes can be learned, I am not sure I agree when it comes to humility. My early professional experience taught me that after basic technical competence, humility is the single most important attribute a developer can possess. Humility enables best practices like unit testing and refactoring. Humility allows collaboration. In my opinion, humility is a requirement for the long term success of a team.

In 10+ years, I’ve worked with some massive egos and some incredibly intelligent, talented people. Rarely would I use both descriptions for the same person.

Working with a programmer who is sure they are an expert in every topic makes for long days. They generally believe that every line of code flowing from their gifted fingers to the keyboard is bug-free and perfect. Their designs are the work of genius only they possess. Testing is unnecessary against such perfection. Code that does not work must be someone else’s issue. While this description may sound like a caricature, I’ve been there. More than once.

In my first programming job, I worked with that guy – the Expert. This was 1997 and the company was just figuring out how it might hop on the Internet bandwagon. We were building an e-commerce site with Java servlets and JSP (version 0.92, if I remember) — technology choices our Expert made because, well, he was an Expert. While the rest of the team was learning on the job, he churned out library after library. While the team got up to speed and built some momentum, our Expert wore out his welcome with management (long after he’d alienated most of the team) and was reassigned to a  “special” project.

As our first big release approached, we uncovered some glaring performance issues in his database connection pooling library (I believe this was early enough that we were using a Type 1 JDBC-ODBC bridge with no built in pooling). Clearly annoyed, he said he’d have a look and dismissed me. A couple of days later I inquired again. He could reproduce the problem, but was sure that it was not his code. His conclusion was that the JDBC-ODBC bridge was to blame and suggested that we switch to the pure Java driver, which I believe was not yet at 1.0.

Not long after this, our Expert left the company, having further worn out his welcome and failing to get his “special” project off the ground. In the meantime, a couple of us unravelled his connection pooling and fixed the threading issue that caused the problem.

I have other, similar stories – some from long ago, some from not so long ago. In all of them a lack of humility leads to pain. Again, I’m not sure this trait can be learned. I do know that when I think about joining a team, this is always one of the variables I carefully consider.

Spent some time yesterday in the cemetery. While facty was off looking for stuff, I took some photos.

This is the headstone of George Johnstone Stoney, best known for inventing the term “electron” in 1894. According to Wikipedia, he was the first to estimate the number of molecules in a cubic millimeter of gas. He has craters on the moon and Mars named for him (as well as a street near the cemetery, Stoney Road) and was a distant relative of Alan Turing.

Nerdtastic.

It seems that lots of folks are using flickr to upload pics from the recent WPBT excursion. Most (all?) of those photos appear to be tagged with ‘wpbt’. This is nice because onyone can go to flickr and search on this tag to see all the photos. Whats nicer for the rss-friendly is that you can turn a search into an rss feed. For instance, this url will give you all the photos with the wpbt tag. pop that in bloglines or your RSS 2.0 reader of choice and bingo, you can keep track of all the drunk and tilting pics people took of you.

Remember that this only works if photos are tagged, so if you are posting pics, tag ‘em.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled trip reports…

If I had a nickel for every time blogger ate someone’s post, I’d be able to move up in limits. Sheesh.

Now, I’m no expert in blogger’s software (I’d venture to guess that I’m the sole poker blogger using the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor, and I won’t even get into the virtues of using a tool so powerful), but it seems like an easy thing to write one’s post in a tool that will allow one to save said post to one’s hard drive occasionally. Then, when ready to publish, a quick copy and paste should do the trick.

Notepad, anyone?

I’ve carried a digital camera around with me almost everywhere I’ve gone for the better part of 5 years. First it was a bulky Olympus that I received as a gift from Facty while we lived in the bay area. I loved that camera and I loved having that camera in a city like San Francisco. All the photos on this site from before 2002 were taken with that camera. It was a tank of a camera, which was perfect. For part of our stay up there, my daily commute was from Marin County over the Golden Gate Bridge and to the South of Market area in the city. I’d leave very early to beat traffic and I found myself varying my route (sometimes widely) to see and photograph more and more of the city. Of course, I never stopped to take pictures. I simply stuck my hand out of the window of the car and took the pic. What? Dangerous?

The only scary moment I had occurred when I once stuck my hand out, over and across the the car to take a shot of something on the passenger side. Being San Francisco, it was a very narrow street and I noticed a bus coming in the opposite direction. In my haste to pull my arm back into the car, I banged my hand on the roof of the car and the camera came loose. It hit the street and bounced into the path of the oncoming bus. I slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car and held up my hands to the bus to stop. The driver saw the whole thing and stopped with plenty of room to spare (neither of us was traveling very fast). I grabbed the camera and hopped back in the car. The door to the memory card was busted and the battery door had opened, allowing a couple of batteries to escape, but once I got to work and replaced them, the camera still worked!

Sometime in 2002, I upgraded to the smaller, better Canon Powershot S110. Pocket sized, 2.1 megapixels. It even takes little 30 second video clips. It has been and continues to be a great little camera that does everything I need except one thing…

I’m not a big phone guy. I am even less of a cell phone guy. But, the one thing that cell phones come with these days is cameras. Not great ones, not even good ones, but still, cameras. And email. And the ability to take a picture and then email it somewhere.

Wouldn’t it be cool if one could take a picture, email it somewhere, and have it appear on one’s website automatically? It turns out that the fine folks at flickr provide just such a service. but wait, there’s more. If one’s website is built on one of the many fine blogging platforms (blogger, typepad, mt, etc.) that are available, the service is provided with barely any effort. Now how much would you pay?

So last week it was time to head over to the local cell phone haus to upgrade our phones. For a reasonable price and a fresh 2 year commitment, we walked out with matching Sony Ericsson z500a phones. Not the top of the line, but camera and email…

Now, this site doesn’t run on one of the supported blogging platforms. So, as I tend to do, I went digging into the flickr api. With the pear::flickr_api library and a little additional php, I hacked together my own little moblog. its over there, in the right column. I’m still tightening up the code, and flickr seems to not respond occasionally, but pretty cool so far. I suspect it could become popular come WPBT Vegas time…

In the titlebar of each entry is a number in parenthesis (probably 0). This is the number of existing comments and also a link to the popup window where you can view and add to them.