Code Mash Keynote #1: Venkat Subramanian

So far there's been several shuffling from the printed schedule, including the order of the keynote speakers.  So the morning keynote for day 1 of Code Mash is Venkat Subramanian with the topic "Pointy-Haired Bosses and Pragmatic Programmers: Facts and Fallacies of Everyday Software Development."

Here's some summary points from the keynote:

• The semicolon abuses the pinky.
• Often head fallacies as Best Practices.  Generally a good sign it should be questioned.
• Emotion, stress, bias, ignorance, impatience, past events, and intolerance all lead to fallacies about technology
• Asking the question "Why?" will help fix issues.  In general it helps to ask it about 5 times a day to really learn something.
• Fallacy: "More money & time will solve our problems".  Having clear goals for a project is the best way to get things done.
• Service Packs sound much better than Patches.  You don't have a "problem", you have a "challenge".  Technologies aren't "stupid", they're "interesting"
• The longer the project goes, the more prone it is for failure.  By 3 years it is almost certainly dead
• Big companies can afford to be stupid by spending and spending without shipping software.  Government is the only "company" that can afford that model
• "If your objective is to build what your customers wanted, you will fail.  You need to build what they still want"
• Fallacy: "It's got to be good because it's from this large vendor"
• "Using software because it's free is like getting into arranged marriage for the sake of money.  Where real love?"
• Molding-Colossus Problem: we complain that software is old so we ask vendors to fiddle with it.
• RDD - Resume Driven Design.  Using software because it will look better on your resume than what a project really needs
• Infatuation is fitting the technology to the problem
• Standardization before Innovation == BAD IDEA!
• Fallacy: "We're off-shoring because it will save us money."  The gap in cost is closing in on 1:1.  Companies figured out they're methods are already failing, so they figured they might as well fail-for-less
• Huge turnover in staff in India off-shore companies
• "Hire smart skilled developers who can learn fast".  "Small team of highly capable developers is better than large teams of below average developers".  Off-shoring isn't bad, just take advantage of great talent world-wide.
• Fallacy: "Dynamic Languages are not safe."
• C programmers are generally excited and say "I can't wait to get to work and see what this crap does today!"
• Java's 13 years old.  What do you expect of a 13 year old???? (in reference to having "2.0 - 1.1" result not be 0.9, but Groovy it works despite being on same JVM engine)
• Generics in Java is screwy because of the backwards compatibility.
• Royal Gorge Bridge is 1000ft above the Arkansas River.  It has a sign that says "No Fishing From Bridge"
• "Humans have a natural tendency to complicate and confuse".  Especially noticeable at Starbucks with coffee sizes.
• Developers are like prehistoric cave artists.  As soon as the creator walks away, any special meaning to the symbols lose all meaning.
• "My code is not testable" == "My code and design sucks!"
• Unit testing == exercising

Overall really good stuff, but his use of video, changing color schemes/fonts kind of hurt it.