A friend sent me a link to an interesting review that I was writing a long response to but thought I’d turn it into a blog post instead. The review is fantastically written by Zadie Smith but there’s a few glaring holes in it that frustrated this post into existence.

Smith, like many mainstream journalists and writers, seems to fundamentally understand what makes people like us excited about programming. I’ll respond to some choice quotes from the review.

No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible?

If such a pleasure exists? Really? She mentions in the review she talked to a “software expert” but she must have avoided this topic of discussion. The pleasure in coding combines creativity (like creating art, no-one will ever write a program the same way as you), building to try to simplify the lives of others and mathematical problem solving. I think the film communicates this fairly well but it’s one of these things that’s pretty much impossible to hide the elements of programming that immediately turn some people off it. Some people find the idea that I sit at my computer typing for most of the day fundamentally boring and there’s not much you can do to argue against this viewpoint other than display the great things that can result from it.

E Pluribus Unum—that’s the point. Here’s my guess: he wants to be like everybody else. He wants to be liked.

It’s a shame that for anyone who is or was ever considered “nerdy” that we fall victim to such poor pop psychology. Just because we weren’t all deemed “cool” in high school doesn’t mean our entire careers are driven by this reductionist need to over-compensate for what others thing we missed out on. Zuckerberg I’d imagine, like most software engineers wants to build something that everyone will think “how did I manage before this came along” and, even if they don’t know he made it, he’ll know that he’s simplified the lives of a lot of people. This is why we do it and this is why we love it.

The fact that Zuckerberg open-sourced his earlier applications (not just gave it away for not monetary value, her review misses this) shows this; he values the pleasure of people using his tool over the monetary return that he could have instead. This also points to why Facebook didn’t take the many chances to sell out to large companies earlier in its existence.

I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself.

The type of web (and person) she mentions already existed and still exists: you can use private email, private Facebook messages, protected Twitter accounts and use other services that guarantee privacy, even relying on end-to-end encryption so only the sender and receiver can see any content. Arguably, this was the first web, the one many of us were using 10 or 15 years ago. The problem is that she fails to see the flip side of her argument: what about those of us who are very public people, how could we share things with the world without relying on a gatekeeper or third-party before the internet and, arguably, before Web 2.0′s concepts became mainstream?

This is why she’s writing her review in the New York Review and not by monetizing a personal blog. She seems to believe in the gatekeeper, the Web 1.0 (or Person 1.0 from her article) and the tight separation of career and personal life, of the private persona that lives their life and the public persona that does their work (or perhaps I’m the one who is spouting pop psychology now).

As said, this was a brilliantly written review even although I disagree with many of the arguments in it. The Social Network (and indeed Facebook itself) is a great advertisement for the beauty and power of software: that someone can produce something that will change the world from their university dorm room with scarce resources, no corporate sponsors, some programming experience and a lot of hard work. It’s the antithesis of programs like X Factor and other reality TV that spouts the lie to society that success comes from being lucky enough to be picked by a corporation and that fame itself is the thing worth striving for.

Start showing films like The Social Network in schools. Get high school kids writing software rather than the letters in Word. Teach them how to write Facebook and mobile applications, programs that they and their friends will use outside of school. Let us, as software engineers, rekindle the passion that got us into this field in the first place and let’s see a return to late-night coding binges and building useful stuff for fun. Let’s see the youth of tomorrow look at our field and think “wow, that’s cool, I want to do that too”.

Our wedding was absolutely amazing! It was a lovely and meaningful church service followed by a party with all of our best friends and family. We have so many people to thank for making it such a lovely day, far too many to name here. If you’re planning a wedding, I recommend Gareth Saunders (who married us) Teannaich (our ceilidh band) and Benjamin Arthur (who took our photographs). (which came out amazingly and you can see here: ). I can’t recommend Benjamin highly enough; if you’re looking for a wedding photographer, hire him! You can see the photographs from our wedding and some of his other work at his Picasa Web Albums page.

The more astute among you may have noticed that this site has changed from mikearthur.co.uk to mikemcquaid.com. This is due to my getting married in May and taking my wife’s surname.

I came up with the idea of changing due to a bunch of reasons that included my recent feminist awakenings causing my displeasure at the history of women taking their husband’s names and family who would keep on the Arthur name.

Interestingly, the process for a husband taking his wife’s name isn’t all that different; I simply needed to pay a small sum and provide documentation to the UK Deed Poll Service who then provided me with paperwork to sign and get countersigned. Legally, I can call myself whatever I like at any time and that is my name but this Deed Poll is required to provide some sort of formal documentation where the bride would normally provide a Marriage Certificate with her new name signed on it.

Today I received my new passport, pretty much the last piece of identification I’ve had to get changed. Every service I use now recognises me as Mike McQuaid, both online and offline. It is interesting how easy it was to do most of this. Most people assured me it would be much harder as a man but it’s all been very straightforward. My only remaining grumbles are online services that don’t allow you to change your username such as Steam and Last.fm where my username remains “mikearthur”, although my profile name is updated.

Outside of work my fiancee and I have been planning our wedding and bought a house for us to live in when we get married. It was worryingly easy to do the whole thing, it required minimal paperwork. It’s in Broughty Ferry (on the outskirts of Dundee) and the sea is 100m away and visible from my new study. It’s all very exciting and I’m counting down the days until we get married and I move in.

At work, I’ve been involved in some more fun Qt consultancy stuff. It’s all been enjoyable and varied, something that really suits my childlike attention-span. I work from home so I’ve been flying to various places (Germany, Sweden, Denmark so far and Iceland next week) in the course of my work. I like seeing new places but am a rubbish tourist so it’s been nice to be able to expand my horizons without much personal effort.

One of the nice things about working with Qt and other open-source projects is that I can get to contribute to them at work when a customer needs a feature/bugfix. One of my projects has involved a lot of QtScript and I used QtScriptGenerator for the bindings (wanted to try SMOKE but I couldn’t find enough of a solid internet presence to trust it fully yet). I’ve made a few fixes to support code written in C++ rather than Qt (handle exceptions better, do some automatic C++ standard library type conversion, support C-style single “void” parameter and bugfixing). This stuff is all merged upstream and part of QtScriptGenerator.

I can’t wait till KDE and more open-source projects move to Git (and Gitorious/GitHub). It’s so amazingly simple to get patches merged and retain your attribution and handle local work branches while tracking upstream, with merging normally being handled near-automagically. This requires so much time to do in Subversion that it really pains me to have to use it now.

Another interesting project I’ve been working on recently is Homebrew, a package manager for OSX that seeks to use system libraries, be fast and make contribution incredibly easy (things that MacPorts and Fink seem to fail at). It uses Git as the repository backing store so you just fork from mxcl’s repository, use “brew create $URL” to create a template package from the URL and archive name, modify it until it works and make a pull request on GitHub. mxcl then looks over your contribution and merges it if it looks good. So far I’ve tweaked Qt and started adding the necessary dependencies to get KDE in there too.

I really like this model. I trust mxcl as a benign dictator, he is a good guy and makes sensible decisions (such as buying me beer), and I feel this method of contribution really opens the project up to many more people than it would otherwise. It also has the Steve Jobs/Linus Torvalds-type figure that I think is essential for any piece of software to have a clear set of goals and maintain a certain quality level.

It’s been nice for me working mostly on my Macbook now. Everything just works that I need to and I can still run pretty much every open-source application I used on Linux. It’s nice to see the vibrant OSS ecosystem on OSX and the attention to detail in applications such as Adium, particularly in having an attractive and easily usable interface. Hopefully I’ll be able to apply this level of polish to some of the KDEPIM apps in the next while too, currently they work great but look a bit nasty on OSX.

Too much writing, back to the code!

In the this time I have:

• Left my job at Mendeley working on a cool piece of research software. It was time to move on to other things and there are no hard feelings on either side, hopefully my work on there will continue to be well received and more Linux people (although Windows/Mac are also supported) will check out the cool Qt/C++ reference manager.
• Moved back from London to Edinburgh. I’d been away in Ipswich and London since leaving university and the call of Caledonia became too strong to resist!
• I proposed on the top of Cairngorm to my beautiful best friend and girlfriend. It was here that we’d had our first long chat while walking down seven years ago this summer. She said yes so we’re now planning the wedidng for 2010 and are both very excited!

Here’s a picture of us a few minutes after getting engaged (more and bigger photos to follow on my Flickr):

All this stuff has got me thinking more about the future so I’m trying to do the following:

• Plan my wedding and try to find a marital home for my fiancee and I. Also, buy a very cute puppy for us to have.
• Nail the currently freelancing I’m currently doing for my secret dream employer so that it will become a permanent position.
• Not install Linux on my new Macbook as it’s not fully working yet and I want to try and avoid wasting time fiddling and force myself to help the KDE Mac project.
• Stop wasting time messing unnecessarily with my computers when they work fine. Stop reading blogs that aren’t incredibly interesting. Stop following people on Twitter that aren’t incredibly interesting. Possibly stop using Twitter altogether for this reason

Generally I just want to try and start to make the most of my life a bit more, focusing on the things in life that matter (my faith, my fiancee and meeting actual goals with KDE/bass-guitar-playing rather than messing about).

It’s a bit of a random time for resolutions but hopefully this is a time when I can turn over a new leaf and start being a bit more useful again. If I’ve not achieved anything public in music or software in a few months then I want someone to slap me!

Rules: Once you’ve been “tagged”, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be “tagged” (on Facebook). You have to “tag” the person who “tagged” you. If I “tagged” you, it’s because I want to know more about you. (I’ve only “tagged” people on Facebook).

1. I’ve been seeing my girlfriend (Lindsay) since we were both at school. She is amazing and I’m a very, very lucky man.
2. I treat life like a software problem. I’m convinced there must be some algorithm for “solving” all the world’s problems.
3. I became a Christian at 17 but wasn’t raised going to church.
4. I love dogs and hate cats. I want to train all the world’s dogs to eat the world’s cats.
5. I exfoliate and moisturise. I am/will be mocked for this but don’t care because my skin is awesome.
6. If I ever couldn’t be a software engineer any more I’d become a full-time bass player.
7. I have my nipple pierced, resulting in the nickname “Nipples” at school. Most people called me that rather than my name, including a fair few of the teachers.
8. Cycling has been my main method of transport for about 10 years so I have an strong dislike of bus drivers and people who beep their horn.
9. Deus Ex is my favourite computer game. It is incredible and and you should play it even if you don’t play games. It is a work of art.
10. I hate tea and coffee.
11. I think of myself as Scottish before British.
12. I constantly wish I had enough time to try and help everyone through all their problems.
13. I look forward to being married but fear becoming a parent too young.
14. Sometimes when I meet random people on nights out I like to convince them I have a really bizarre job. Last time was a paramedic for domestic pets.
15. I was one interview away from joining the British Army’s Infantry.
16. I have landed a plane. (In real life, not just in a computer game.)
17. I think Babylon 5 is possibly the best piece of TV or film ever made and if you disagree then you are wrong.
18. I can’t cry and haven’t done so for over three years. This slightly worries me.
19. I care very little what random new people think of me unless I’m in a situation like an interview or my good impression means a lot to my coworker/friend/girlfriend/family member.
20. I’ve known I was going to work with computers since primary school.
21. I think if you are not Scottish you shouldn’t be allowed to wear a kilt (possibly by law).
22. My music collection contains almost no female artists, probably because most of it is progressive rock.
23. One of the most endearing things someone can do to me is take the piss out of me.
24. I relish all criticism as one of my goals in life is to improve myself as much as possible in every area.
25. I generally hate romantic comedies unless they have John Cusack in them and then I irrationally love them.

As a result of this I’ve taken to sporadically reading relationship-help books and books about the differences between men and women psychologically. The most recent of these was recommended to me by a good female friend; the classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

The book basically uses the model of two species from different planets interactions to represent the stereotyped (the author admits this) but often valid problems in the interactions between men and women, focusing this book on those in romantic relationships.

I think a lot of the points that John Gray makes are fairly apt, about how men and women respond to their negative emotions (men tend to want to be by themselves, women tend to want a sympathetic ear but not to get solutions to their problems). We didn’t find this particularly revelatory; after a relationship as long as ours you tend to work these things out for yourself.

What I found interesting was that instead of challenging the fact that neither of these slightly extreme reactions should actually be challenged and improved upon (encouraging men to become more open and women to be more pragmatic when upset) John Gray instead seems to imply that you should just learn to accept that a few days a month (his rough estimate) your partner will act irrationally and selfishly and you just need to let them do that to get it out of their system.

I’m pretty glad I didn’t read this at the beginning of our relationship or I think my girlfriend and I would have developed some fairly destructive attitudes towards dealing with our differences. I think understanding these are a key element in improving a damaged relationship or knowing how to better communicate with your partner but I think blind adherence to John Gray’s advice could actually be fairly damaging for a relationship that doesn’t already have problems.

I’d probably recommend reading this book if you are having problems communicating with your partner but if you are happy and both of you are sharing your feelings and honestly and openly dealing with issues in your relationship I’d say it’s perhaps one to miss. Regardless of your camp I’d personally recommend from following his advice to the letter and perhaps strive for a great relationship all the time and moving beyond your biological impulses to try and become a better partner.

Apparently I’m a member of Generation Y as I was born in 1984. As I’ve been working in the last few years, especially in my time at BT, I’ve found myself having a very different attitude to my older coworkers. I’ve sometimes felt that maybe I’m just a “rebel” and need to learn to conform, but reading this blog has been a bit of a wake-up call in helping me to realise why I do some of the things I do and how I can be better motivated.

I’d say it’s a must-read if you are either in Generation Y yourself, or you are a manager who has staff from Generation Y working for you and want to understand how to keep them well motivated.

If you want to find out even more about this stuff, the company behind the blog Naked Generations does consultancy and have worked with some pretty big names already including the British government.

Check it out!

I can’t say I’m surprised but I am pretty disappointed. When it first emerged on The Register that Phorm had been monitoring the internet communications of BT customers I was a BT employee. When it came out that BT outright lied on to those tech-savvy customers who raised the issue my opinions of my employer had sadly dropped to an all-time low.

I’m not someone who believes in publicly criticising the company I am currently working for (partly because the company I work for currently is awesome) and didn’t want to straight after I left at the risk of seeming bitter or unprofessional but I feel it needs to be publicly stated that I did not at any time agree with the actions that were being taken by my current employer and everything negative I found out second-hand and eventually was part of the reason I left.

I’m not sure what the management of BT that thought that Phorm was a good idea were up to at the time but I feel they may need a little reminding that massively alienating a huge portion of your technical user-base is probably not the best way to run an ISP, considering how much influence we have on our non-geeky friends’ technology choices.

As for their “anonymous” technology, if I’m “anonymous” enough for you to be able to track me across multiple IPs then I’m not “anonymous”!

Yesterday was pretty fun, saw a lot of great talks and met a lot of awesome people. My particular favourites were Celeste’s usability talk, Peter Siking’s printer dialog usability talk and the Plasma Frenzy (is it just me or does that sound like a scifi themed wrestling match?).

The talks were interesting and I was positive on almost everything that was said. The only thing that slightly twinged my pragmatism was the suggestion that GNOME and KDE collaborate more on underlying libraries. I suggested to the speaker that the reason we hack using GTK/Qt is because they are far, far less painful than writing straight C/C++ and that until KDE is willing to depend on glib or GNOME on Qt I doubt we are going to see a lot of the developers developing cross-DE solutions.

The social event in the evening was a good laugh. Held in a brewery, I managed to make the stupendous faux pas of asking for Stella when they have some stupid selection of local beers there. Whoops. I particularly enjoyed recanting with Riddell the complete list of everything awesome about Scotland and particularly didn’t enjoy being repeatedly whipped in the nipple by Adriaan’s jockey whip (why the hell he has that with him I’ll never know…).

Looking forward to the rest of today’s talks and starting the furious coding on Monday!

I’ve really enjoyed the process and been doing quite a lot of reading from wise people like Joel Spolsky on the type of things that you should and shouldn’t be asking in an interview.

Two of the most important things Joel emphasises are that it is essential to have an applicant writing code in the interview and that you are better to not hire a good software engineer than hire a bad one. Thankfully our judgement has seemed good on the latter as everyone working at Mendeley seem to be not only great people but all of our software engineers (including me!) are really passionate about writing software that is more than just “good enough“.

I’ve found Joel’s first point an interesting conundrum. How should you get people coding in an interview? Obviously I’m not going to detail our exact interviewing process on my blog but I personally believe that getting the applicant to write out a solution to a simple algorithmic problem on paper (while you watch them) is a great way of seeing how they approach a problem, how quickly their mind works and how careful they are with validating their requirements. It’s interesting the sheer variation in the above exercise from people with very similar academic backgrounds and length of experience, even when asked a very simple algorithmic problem.

It’s an interesting experience as an interviewer looking at personally appeals to me about a candidate. This is by no means an exhaustive list or even that all of these indicate a good software engineer but just my own thoughts:

• A very solid technical understanding is obviously crucial. On these lines, however, I think it is important to not oversell yourself. Nothing is worse than someone claiming to be an “expert” in a technology and they don’t have more than a basic understanding of it. If your understanding is basic and you’re being interviewed, that’s ok. Just sell your other attributes. If it was a requirement, you wouldn’t have got this far!
• If there’s one thing I think is the number one attribute in a software engineer it’s the drive to learn new technologies and techniques. If software is clearly more than just a job to you and you are reading software blogs, listening to software podcasts or contributing in OSS outside of work, chances are you are going to take more pride in your work than someone to writing software is just a 9-5.
• No matter how good someone is technically, if they aren’t going to fit in the team then they shouldn’t be hired. The last thing you want is a new member disrupting the social dynamic of a group of people that currently get along. I think everyone wants to work with people that they’d be happy to talk to outside of work so if you’re a likeable person than that reflect well on you.

Also, as an interviewee I’ll share some of what has annoyed me in interviews:

• If you don’t ask me any technical questions, you probably have some software engineers in your team that suck at programming. I don’t really want to work with people like that.
• Please don’t keep me waiting for weeks only to tell me I didn’t get the job based on something that I said in my original CV/cover letter I sent to you.
• If I don’t get a job I want constructive criticism so I can improve myself.

I try to keep the latter points in mind when interviewing people so as not to annoy others as I was annoyed.

I’d be grateful for anyone else’s input as either an interviewer or interviewee.
Let the argument commence!