Measuring Developer Productivity and the Clock of the Long Now

Last time we spoke, you called yourself a senior quality engineer.

Señor. Señor quality engineer.

Is it Spain?

Mister quality engineer.

Yes. But still quality engineer seems to be the common theme in this job title. And I I just said, oh, I'm just senior, and and I forgot to to go back with with hilarity to your new job title

Alright. Okay.

Which you philosophically disagree with.

Somewhat. Yes.

You didn't manage to negotiate them away from calling it that?

Well, I would have had to get

the come there if you change the job title to tester.

If you change, like, your entire function Yes. To to my my point of view, I figured that would be supremely arrogant, basically.

And? And? Yeah. What's your point? Why didn't you? I have 17 points. Yeah. Yeah. Number 1.

You know, if we're gonna get into it. Right?

Well, I think we will. I think we will. But let's let's not until we get to it.

Well, you you are you

I know.

I'm I've

I've pranked the bear. Yeah.

Now I know. Exactly. But now I feel compelled to explain.

Yes. But I won't. Don't worry. You'll be able to feel that feeling very easily again. Okay. I don't think I Are

you gonna do quality engineering as your next thing?

No. Alright. Alright. We ready?

Yes. Ready. I think we're warmed up now, aren't we? We've, almost got to quality engineering.

But but we've we pulled back from the

brief. Yeah. Exactly. You know, because maybe monologue.

Maybe it'll come up later. Just maybe. Just maybe. Just maybe. So I wanted to start off by saying thank you to Mary. Thanks, Mary. Mary is a listener. She's listened to this podcast, I believe, since very early on in it.

The beginning.

And she sent me a text message to indicate that she has read the show notes.

Because that's the only thing that matters. Thank you. Thank you. So did so, basically, in the in the message, she says she's read the show notes. She knows I got a new job and then really likes the new look of the podcast, but doesn't actually say that she's listened to it.

It would be hard to she could have got out from the show notes, except that nobody would have read the show notes until they listened to us haranguing them about it.

Well, yeah. That's true.

So I'm morally certain that Mary has listened to our episode.

So in Mary's is it I read the show notes or I read the show notes?

I don't know.

See, this is why I'm a quality engineer.

It is. Yes. Or not. Yes. That's that's that's very true.

I see the what is it? The The ambiguity. The ambiguity of

that. Word. Yep. I'm gonna say, on reflection, what Mary said was, I read the show notes, exclamation mark, and that exclamation mark is, is more sensible for I read the show notes. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm gonna thank you again, Mary.

Thank you again. Yeah. Thanks, Mary. Thanks for listening.

Yes. Thanks for listening. No. No. No. I I'm certain of the listening.

Yeah. We must mention the new look as well.

There is a new look. You already have seen it.

So there's less aardvark.

Clang. Not an aardvark. It's perfectly clearly a a clanger wearing a sort of clanger garment. A clanger garment.

But it has 2 humans as in Oz on the front.

And to avoid confusion, it actually has our names with this larynx pointing

to Well, we figured it's probably you know, so I think that's a useful useful pointer.

Basically, neither of us really wants to be mistaken for the other.

No. No. And the reason why I'm holding my eyelids open is on the picture, not right now, is because

I was looking carefully at you, looking, your hands know any of your eyelids.

Well, I am you you're you're always holding them open, aren't you? Unless you're asleep. But on the picture

Not blinking like Yeah. Sorry. It's

alright. Yeah. On the picture, I'm holding my eyes open because I whenever someone takes a picture of me, my eyes generally tend to be closed or or look as if they're closed.

And interestingly, of all the pictures we took, by far the best one was the one where you were holding your eyelids open.

Yep. Yep. So it makes sense when you know the the backstory.

We did take some suspicious pictures on that occasion.

Yes. But

there there was one. I'm just gonna have to lead leave the reader to imagine what it might have been. I don't know the icon can say that. I think I'm affecting our reputation negatively. So, yes, there is a new look, and it's taken quite a while for us to do it in response to our big review by the lovely Mark Steadman. But, yes, we've made it. We've got a new look Yeah. And more subtly, a new title. Oh, yes. What's the title of this podcast, Ash?

It's what a lot of things? Tech talk from a human perspective. It is. The the

the colon is not.

You seem so shocked. You didn't pronounce the colon. Alright. Okay.

It was implied, in your tone. Yeah. There is a colon in it as well. I would have said, what are things? Colon.

Do you always announce the colon?

I sometimes. Sometimes. It's just people searching for it. You know? Maybe they maybe we'll never be able to be found by searching for what a lot of things Because of the colon. We'll have to search for what a lot of things colon now. Yeah. Actually, that's

the first step.

We're gonna have to try that.

We're almost nearly right, aren't we? But we generally are doing extra something.

Clock for a right twice

a day. Well, yeah. Exactly.

Oh my goodness.

So shall we deploy the furnace algorithm in?

I I think we shall. Although since I edited the last episode about 10 minutes ago in my subjective time, I can safely say we started with notebook LM. Yep. So that means we are going to do whatever your thing is first, and I'm just keeping the tension going until the very last second. So, Ash, what what is your thing?

So my thing is, is a statement.

Well, like a list of transactions?

No. Like a statement by a by a person or an entity. An entity. Entity. No. Consulting entity. It's the statement is, yes, you can measure software developer productivity. Oh. Because in general

Fight me.

Yeah. In general, we in software say, oh, well, you know, measuring individual productivity or software developer productivity is you can't do that. Don't work like that. We're we're creative.

Well, I think the thing is that what you can't do is measure it in the ways that people who don't understand it immediately come up with, like lines of code. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Number of bugs found.

Your job is to write code. So, obviously, the more the better.

Yeah. So the article was by McKinsey, a highly enlightened consultancy.

I'm looking at your face to try and judge the level of sarcasm, but I was not detecting any sarcasm, which I I feel is

So it's fine for like

meter is faulty. I'm just gonna tap the dial.

So the, like, the the highest level sarcasm possible

undetectable. Yeah. I think that's it. You've just you've blown the meter.

The reason why this this article of, yes, you can measure software developer productivity, the reason it intrigued me is because I thought it would be a good one to explore my dislike for deadlines, my disdain for estimates, and my general belief that many of the metrics created for software development are owed to the failure of people and product management, dreadful prioritization, and an unshakable belief in the principles of the industrial revolution.

And a fanatical dedication to the pope. Yeah.

So I'll give you the gist of the article, shall I? So, Buzz, would you like the gist?

Ash, please summarize the attached article.

Do you want it that in a podcast form? Or

I want you to delve deeply into the treasure trove that is this article.

Okay. So the article is a treasure trove of no. So the article basically says, all companies are now tech companies. Or have a tech aspect to them. Okay. And a lot of them have developers. So we should be better at measuring developer productivity because other people in other roles get their productivity measured all the time. So why are you so special? Well, not you, Ian, but,

you know I mean, yeah. But

Yeah. But I'm Ian Smith.

For the purposes of this, the there's just confine it to all developers. Yeah. Except me. Fair. I don't need my productivity to measure. Thank you very much. I'm special.

So loads of people in the industry say you can't measure developer productivity, and certainly not very well. But the boffins at McKinsey have come up with a way. I enjoy using the word boffins.

It is a a word with special resonances for the UK

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Audience.

Yeah. Definitely. So

Completely incorporates. We'll do it for you.

That's probably why I like it as well. So this includes measuring a system, team, and individual level.

Okay. Well, I'm not in innately hostile to any of that.

Okay.

I mean, it's interesting. I there was another report from McKinsey that probably wasn't the same one, but maybe it was. No. It wasn't called anything about developer productivity, but it said that the main unit of productivity is a team. Mhmm. So they were kind of saying team team productivity is more important

Yeah. I'm on board with that.

Individual performance. Mhmm. Anyway yeah. So they're saying that developer productivity or or other development productivity

Well, we see

development productivity.

That's the thing, isn't it?

System, meaning, generally, the system well, yeah, let's let's do terminology. What does system mean in that context?

So the system, I that actually means the the actual code that you're developing. So it talks about measuring that using, say, deployment frequency and uptime.

Oh, like, so Dora metrics Yeah. Applied to the system.

Yeah. So for the system that we use Dora metrics to to measure productivity. And then for the team and individual, they'll use space metrics. So The final frontier. The final frontier. So space means satisfaction and well-being, performance, activity, communication, and collaboration, and efficiency and flow. There's lots of ands in there. It seems like they might have tortured that into the acronym space.

You're not spared.

It's like fire.

But so sorry. I'm still a bit stuck on system Yeah. Even though we've clearly moved on to space. Space. But do dora metrics measure productivity?

Not necessarily. I don't think.

I mean, I think they measure I would describe it as effectiveness.

Yeah. Yeah. See, the I guess we're going, like, back up a level here as well, aren't we, about, like, what is this article actually trying to trying to say? They talk about, like, efficiency, and you talk about effectiveness. And I'm kind of with you. I'd rather be effective than efficient. I'd rather do the, you know, the most important work than do lots of work efficiently.

I've asked chat gpt Mhmm. In one word, what do Dora Metrics measure? And the answer comes by performance, full stop.

System performance or team performance?

I just allowed it one word. No.

So so, yeah, so it uses Dora and space metrics in order to to measure productivity, and then a few other things that, like, an individual level as well.

So I'm most interested in the individual ones. And the reason is that organizations do different things to, quotes, unquote, rectify problems at these different levels. Yeah. But that the individual level is where they feel they have the most punch.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

So so I'm quite interested in what the individual ones are.

So they do something called I think it was called contribution analysis, which sounds as terrifying as, you know, as you imagine that it is. So, basically, it looks at it says, look at your Jira or whatever your task management system is and see how long things have been in columns and who's completed the most tickets, those types of things. But they put it in, like, a soft language, if you know what I mean. So

I think they would have to because as soon as it's it's a race to do the most tickets Yeah. And how can we inflate the tickets perceived size and then do the most of them? Yeah. Well, I did 700 t shirt sizes of work Yeah. By rating everything I do is 5 t shirt. It's extra large Yeah. And then, doing it in half a day.

So contribution analysis, according to the article, it can help identify opportunities for individual upskilling or training and rethinking role distribution within a team. For instance, if a quality assurance tester has enough work to do, I was like,

well never happens. They're all just sitting around idly, aren't they?

Yeah. I was like, well, thank you for coming up with yet another framework, which punches downwards on the testers. You know what I mean? Like, you've done it again. Such a soft target. Oh. So, yeah, I was like, right. Okay. So I wonder why you picked out that particular

I wasn't hating you, Mackenzie, but now I am.

I can tell you that quality assurance testers I mean, that job title, that I mean, just the the fact that they use that as the title baffles me.

They should be saying quality engineers.

Quality manager. Well, at least that's more comprehensible than a quality assurance tester.

Yeah. That's that's true.

So, yeah, I was like, okay. Now you've got me on the, you've you've I'm bristling now. You're bristling. You immediately This

beard has gone to twice the normal size.

Like a badger. So immediately, you've talked about contribution analysis and gone straight to the tester. Yes. It's like absolutely get stuffed. So, McKinsey, I'm ready to go to battle with you.

I I think that what they meant by that was that if a software sorry. A quality assurance tester didn't have enough work to do, that they would be able to reskill them to be able to be a developer or something else.

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like that, doesn't it?

And and to make their life better.

You're saying that my life would be better if I was a developer?

I'm saying

People would be trying to measure my productivity. But I don't Yeah.

Yeah. I don't. McKinsey would would say that, you're being upskilled by giving you new skills Yeah. That mean that you can perform more roles inside the team.

That's not my skill set.

Not at all sarcastic.

Not at all. Alright. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Just tap the meter again. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's registering. Yes.

Well, it's interesting that if you're drinking McKinsey Kool Aid here, you're measuring system performance using Dora metrics, which if you start doing that, will tend to lead to better processes. And Yeah. Because otherwise, it's very hard to do very well Yeah. With very poor Dora metrics Yeah. Says the very large amount of research that went into them.

Yeah. So doing that, maybe looking at the Dora metrics and then looking at the space metrics before you start looking at individual contributions Yeah. Because your individual contributions will be constrained by the quality of the other metrics.

And in fact, that might be the order of repair. Yeah. So if there's a problem, you start by fixing the system, then you move on to the team and the processes, and then only then do you start trying to fix individuals.

Yeah. I hope so.

Every organisation who adopts this, who read this article and think, yes, we should do that. Mhmm. That's what they're all thinking.

So this has apparently worked at 20 companies, which I assume are McKinsey's clients, you would imagine. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, I guess,

Maybe they just read the DevOps handbook and counted the companies in it.

Gave everybody a copy of the Phoenix project. And

I'd say you can do a lot worse than that.

Yeah. Well, yeah, that's true, actually. Yeah. That's very true. So one of the other things that I enjoyed in there was there was a kind of another dig at remote working as well in terms of because people work remotely, therefore, you need to measure them more. And I was like, oh, thank you very much. I'll knock that off the bingo card.

Control your own. Pretty much. I've always wanted to say that. You've always been the one that said that, but I wanted to say that.

Oh, I'm glad you got it in.

I I am too. Yeah.

But I think mostly, like, overall, this thing that I read because it does remind me of being measured as a as a tester with bugs, test cases, number of developers that I've upset.

See, they don't measure number of developers you've upset, but they should.

I do. I'm all over that.

So when they're telling you off for not enough bugs, you can just come back to them with, oh, yes, but I upset 200 developers.

It must have been a good bug.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That one bug.

So question for you, Ian. Do you think development productivity can be measured in a decent way? Forgetting this this framework because, you know, we could pick holes in this all day, can't we?

Yeah. But I actually don't think it's too awful. I mean, you're getting into a very I mean, there's Goodhart's law, isn't there? Yeah. Which is that, basically, any measure that turns into a oh.

Look it up.

I'll have to look it up. So Goodhart's law, you deserve an explanation, so please don't skip this one minute read. It's Wednesday, 27th November, and our fundraiser will soon be over. Please reflect on how often you visited Wikipedia this year, and if you'll give £75 to the Wikimedia Foundation. Sorry. I don't think that was it, but I was trying to look up.

But that's what you got.

That's it. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It's how people articulate that. Yep. So that's a pitfall, probably. Is that mentioned in the article?

No. It's just that this is we've used this on 20 clients, and everything's going great. But, yeah, I would expect that from a consultancy's article.

Effectively, that's a pitfall that companies trying to do these probably quite good measurement Yeah. Ideas. Oh, yeah. I mean, developer productivity I think my whole thought on this revolves around Goodhart's law. I think that if you approach it with, we want to make everything better

Mhmm.

What can we learn from the Dora metrics, the space metrics, and individual contribution metrics Yeah. To to make things better, then I feel like, yeah, you can. I I think that would tend to make things better. Yeah. But if it was right, we've measured your space, and, you're too claustrophobic, so you're fired. Or if you don't increase your space over the course of this year, then you'll be fired next year. Yeah. Like Shaun the Sheep, isn't it?

Shaun the Sheep. Yeah.

Thanks. It was Larry the lamb when I was a kid Yeah. That taught like that. Anyway, let's let's not go down that that terrible, terrible

Yeah.

Rabbit hole. Yeah. But, yeah, I I feel like as soon as you're using it to beat people up, then it it all falls to bits. But I do think it's helpful to measure stuff Mhmm. Around development because without measuring it, you know, you it's hard to make it better.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of, like, similar, but I think the the unit of delivery is the team. So you measure the team's metric. Yeah. And you'd leave the individuals alone because what you wanna know is is the team delivering the value that you wanted to do. But I realise that there's, like there are organisations. They still want to know what individuals are up to, don't they?

Well, they need to know who to lay off at the end of the year.

Yeah. They need to know the bottom 10% who need to go, don't they? So

Which is you know, it sucks.

Yeah. Yeah.

I suppose.

So do you think, like, software developers in general in the that we resist the notion unnecessarily in your experience?

Well, I would sympathize with an instinctive resistance to the notion Yeah. Yeah. Because of the ways the way these things fall foul of Goodhart's law. And so I can see why it would be quite reasonable for people to develop an instinctive resistance to it. Yeah. Because the next thing you know, it's, oh, you've only done this many lines of code. Yeah. Somebody else

has done it.

But I do think that measuring things helps give you the information you need to to improve things. I mean, I think, for example, a lot of developers, while resisting being measured, would approve of Dora metrics. Yeah. But they invented them. Yeah. Yeah. You know To try

and take the focus off individuals. Yeah.

Probably. Yeah. And for those reasons, those are a powerful driver to make things better. I think if you found that for developers and used it with a pure heart

Yeah.

Then, yes, I think it would be great. But as soon as you introduce, particularly in large corporations where they've got spreadsheets of people and they sort them to do things, They need numbers to populate the Yeah. Columns of their spreadsheet.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, that's the temptation for them.

Yeah. One other thing that I found quite interesting in the article itself, they talked about is they called it work done in the inner loop and work done in the outer loop. So the inner loop is coding Right. And testing, and the outer loop is deployments. So outer loop is deployment security and compliance, integration with other systems and meetings.

So it's DevOps?

Well, they talk about so, basically, they say you need to be spending more time in on the inner loop.

Well, that's

sort of mine

Yeah. That's when you produce.

Yeah. So productive people spend time on the inner loop, not the outer loop. The Thoughtworks blog that pointed me to this post basically said, so focusing on productivity in the way McKinsey suggests can cause us to mistakenly see coding as the real work of software engineering, overlooking things like architectural decisions, security analysis, and performance monitoring, for example. Because I think that's something that I hear quite a lot from from developers too. I think that's what oh, I only have 3 hours a day to do coding, whereas the rest of the time is meeting or, you know, discussing or, you know, whatever it is.

But is that what developers are complaining about? Are they complaining about status update meetings?

Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, developers

in estimates. Yeah.

Yeah. Thought we could get

a bit of sympathy for that one.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. No. We had a meeting about estimates today.

Was it about why why you weren't gonna do them?

Well, I don't say anything. I'm just like, if the team says it's gonna take this long. And the only reason I go to those sorts of meetings is if some because if someone says, well, that's how long coding will take, how long will testing take? The only reason I go is so I can correct that misconception and say, that's not what this is. We talk about the team's work in its entirety, not what the developers do and what the testers do.

And who says that that we can't automate? You could just send a little parrot to do that.

Yeah. No. Absolutely.

In fact, you just have a slightly more sophisticated version of Homer Simpson's nodding bird.

Yeah. We just need to detect that signal that someone's about to say something like that. How long will testing take?

Yes. And then blow up the nuclear power plant.

And then and then just launch into the monologue about why that's wrong. Yes. Yep. And that's it. So, so, yeah, I hear the the trope of code being the real work quite a lot, and I hear it from developers and from, like, non developers as well. So there was one more thing. We should stop being so patronizing to people who don't understand software development.

Oh, well, bless their little cock.

That's exactly what I thought. And I was like, no. You shouldn't think like that.

Well, I I do, in general, think that people should stop being patronising to other people. Yeah. And I guess I could extend that to programmers and civilians.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So it basically said it on, like, both both sides because you do get people who are not in software development saying, well, I don't understand that. Or that's nothing to do with me. I've heard lots of product people say that to me before. Well, that's the technical side. And I'm like, no. Both sides it's it's the side.

It's the project.

It's the project. There are no sides. You know? It's just like there's just like the the product and the implementation of it are the same thing.

I would used to be driven crazy by project managers I would talk to Yeah. Who would say, oh, I could manage anything. I I don't need to understand anything about the the technology. And you're like, well, how can you possibly make decisions to prioritize things Yeah. If you don't understand it, if you willfully don't understand it? Yeah. And by the way, your job is making prioritizing decisions about the project.

Yeah. Well, that's another thing, isn't it? Prioritisation. No one fancies that either.

So I've got a question for you.

Okay.

How are you gonna contextualise now your feelings about deadlines and estimates in the light of that discussion in the article?

Contextualize? Yeah.

I mean, how how can you place your feelings about those things in the context of the article and the things that we've just been talking about?

Well, I suppose in terms of I don't know. I don't know if I have a

good answer, to be honest. Parse pause error at like 1. Yeah. Yeah. Fatal error. Yeah. Segmentation violation, core dumped.

I suppose deadlines and estimates, are things that are used they're turned into metrics, I guess, sometimes.

Well, people immediately believe them and go off and make things depend on them.

Yeah. So if you then judge a team or an individual by those deadlines and estimates, then that's a bad use of metrics to measure developer productivity. And I just think that they're bad metrics.

Yeah. But I don't think they're metrics at all. I think what they are is people who are being forced to care about how much does things cost and how can I prioritize between these things without full information about how much they're gonna be and how much they're gonna interpose in the list of other things that I want Yeah? To do. And if they haven't got information about that, they can't do that. So that's why they ask for

Well, as long as they're using it in that in that spirit, but I suppose it's not always used in that spirit. Sometimes they are transposed into a, this is what's going to happen because that's what you said. So, you know, I think the the again, it's murky, isn't it?

Well but, you know, the consequence of people taking that information and using it to understand that is that they if it doesn't turn out that way, their song their sums have turned out to be wrong Yeah. And they they they get in trouble. So I kind of get it. I I sympathize with people who want estimates Yeah. And and, want things doing by deadlines. I sympathise with them. And almost always, you can find some external force that's forcing them to do that.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's always something else going on, isn't there?

But, yeah, it's very disturbing to see a long list of estimates added up Yeah. With no error bars. This could be anything from 12 seconds to 2 and a half years.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Exactly.

Time we've added all these up. Yeah. Right. We've rolled out it 12 seconds now.

So I guess, like, I put developer productivity and estimates and deadlines into, like, a similar class of into a similar category Mhmm. Of things that, when done, can be misused quite badly. So I suppose that's how I link link them together. Yeah. I just think that and when used when used wrongly and used to call the people into making commitments that they can't meet, then I think it's a bad it's a bad thing.

Unquestionably. Yeah.

Yeah. So rather than them being matrix themselves, yeah, I kind of that's fine. So

Oh, boy.

Yeah. So that was my thing. It was just how it was full of loads of stuff that when I read it, I kind of I got a bit riled, which is quite a nice I always think it's it's quite a nice one to talk about because, you know, you just immediately either agree, disagree. And find myself very riled when reading the article.

Well, what you need is, like, an AI that reads articles just before you get to them and then puts trigger warnings at the top of the trigger warning, estimates. Yeah.

I love estimates, but I just don't do them. Nah. I just I accept the team. I accept what the team say. It's just test estimates that I don't like, if we're gonna be specific about it, because it's because that's just nonsense, isn't it?

Well, I always love the quote from Douglas Adams. I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. Yeah.

I think that's the thing because usually they do whoosh, to be honest. Yes. And I'm just I enjoy aspirations, but when you're into the realms of hopes and dreams, then I think you're on shaky ground. I just prefer I just work on the work. When it comes to things like that, I'm sorry. Just start doing the work, and you find out.

Get going. He was just like, I'll come back to you in 2 days with an estimate. Yeah. The estimate is 2 days. Very well. Confidence level, 100%.

And you can you can put that in my, I'll put that in my personal development plan Yes. As a goal that's been met for the year.

For the year?

Yep. Wake me up next year for a new one.

Yes. Yes. Oh, joy.

So that was my thing.

Well, Ash, that thing was a monument to

my thing. Monumental. A mental monument to things.

I reckon if you went to Monument Valley There it would be. You'd find that thing right there.

Filled the valley.

Yes. And, yeah, not just one monument.

Can we seamlessly transition to an interlude where I drink some water?

We can. Although, I think you're misusing the word seamless there.

Can we transition to an interlude?

Yes. Yes. We can. It's just, the tech industry and the people working it love the word seamless.

Yes. I saw a presentation today with with at least 4 uses of the word seamless, which to describe systems that we hadn't integrated with yet. So it's like, well Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not.

Maybe I can have this as a thing sometimes. Seamlessness. Yeah. Because seamless means you can't tell where one Yeah. Finishes and the other one begins, which is a cyber security which is a security nightmare. Yeah. Because without boundaries, we are nothing. Yeah. People just say seamless. What they mean is, you know, gigantic Grand Canyon like seams are permitted in this context. It's just the most misused word in

the text industry. Depends on the seam, doesn't it, on who sees the seam? If to to a customer

fallen down it and the lie is broken at the bottom. Yeah.

To a development team who's trying to integrate with other things, then the seams are gonna be quite immense, generally. But to a to a customer, maybe transitioning between one system and another.

I think the the bleached bones of customers may be found at the bottom of many technology seams.

Well, I'll still call it seamless.

Well, yeah. Of course. So will I.

Yeah. In my presentations, I'll call it seamless.

In your presentations, it'll be seamless.

Absolutely. This is the the world that

I want it to be,

not as it is.

Yes. Yes.

So seamlessly, transitioning to interlude. Seamfully. Seamfully. So can I talk about interlude things after I've had another little drink?

You can talk about interlude things before or after you've had another little drink out of your coral monzo bottle Indeed. With a squeaky lid.

With a squeaky.

Okay then. So have you got any Interlude things. Announcements? I don't know why I'm calling it. I just think announcements is a very silly word for what we do in the interludes, but, you know

I think I prefer Interlude things. Interlude. Oh, no. It's we got them. We're doomed, aren't we?

We will now commence with interlude thing number 1.

Like a like

a Interlude thing number 1, would you please come to the microphone?

So I have, an achievement for my for my interlude thing number 1.

Or announcement?

Announcement. No. An achievement. Excuse me, it's an achievement, I think.

It is an achievement.

So I ran a 100 kilometres at an event called the backyard ultra. So what happens is every on the hour every hour, you set off on a loop, which is 4.16 miles, 6.7 kilometres. And then you have an hour to complete that loop. And then as long as you return within the hour, you then maybe go to the toilet, have something to eat, and then on the hour, you go out again. And you keep doing that until you can't run anymore.

So for me, I think this whole having time to go to the loo and do anything in between is just Yeah. Fictional. I feel I will be stumbling over the line at the second then having to start again.

Yeah. That's when it gets real sad because you you when when you get really tired, you then start to come in, like, much closer to the the hour mark.

Yeah.

And then you have to go straight back out again. And by the time you hit that slope

It multiplies.

Yeah. Then then you're done. So I managed 16 laps, basically, which was 12 hours of running time because I would generally finish after about 45 minutes of the hour. Oh, right. And then have 15 minutes to refresh oneself for the

next lap. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that is really an achievement. Congratulations.

No. Thank you. Yeah. I managed to completely wreck my ankle as well, so I haven't run since. But, you know, if you're gonna do these strange crazy things, then you should probably expect side effects.

So where where did you go to do this?

So this was at Bramley Falls Park in Leeds.

Oh, okay. Not far away?

No. So just near the Kirkstall Falls train station.

Oh, very nice. Yeah. No. That is insane. Yeah. But Yeah. Really an achievement. Yeah.

So I'm in I'm in recovery.

I've got an Apple Watch Ultra, and I've never done anything like that.

This is the new joke, isn't it? You did this one last time.

I did. Yes.

Yeah. I know. You get you get stuck on them.

I I like a good repeating joke. I'm not sure this is it, though. It's a bit too self deprecating.

And then the following day, we got a new cat. Well, so she's called Bauhaus.

That was gonna be my first question.

Yeah. Which means building house.

Not named after the band then No. From the eighties?

No. Named after the the movement started by Walter Gropius. So she's 8 years old. She's rescued from Halifax, RSPCA, and she's settling in nicely. Oh, lovely.

Quite happy to to live in your house then.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And it's, cat luxuries.

Yeah. Well, it is kind of yeah. Almost entirely cat friendly.

Yes. Yeah. Human friendly.

Human friend adult human friendly, cat friendly, small humans, not so much. No. No. So they are my, I'm not gonna say announcements. They're my interlude

Things.

Interlude things.

Oh, dear.

So, Ian, do you have any interlude things?

I do. I did a talk. Hey. See, I realized I haven't done a talk since before the pandemic.

Oh, that is a long time.

And I just thought it seemed like a good idea to sort of get back on the horse if you like. Yeah. And Squadify, who I work for, I'm their CTO, asked me to to do this talk in London as an AI meetup. So I I did go and and I did this talk, and, it was called enhancing team effectiveness with AI, a squadify case study.

So is that did AI write that title, The last one

No. It it didn't. It didn't. It's basically a talk about how the work I'd done with Squadify to bring AI into their platform. Right. And without going off on a some kind of weird selling spree, I believe in Spotify. I've seen a lot of teams that really needed help. Mhmm. And Spotify can be that help. And I think it so I, yeah, I did a talk, and there's a video of it.

Yeah. Having a particularly high self esteem moment.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Exactly. But it turns out that, other people listening to it find the content at least moderately interesting. So people came and talked to me after it, so I felt very good about it. And it's been has been a long, long time.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not the pre pandemic, I did loads and loads of talks pretty much every month, but since the pandemic, a lot, lot less. I've done a few this year, and it's been nice to to use the skills again a little bit. Yeah. So so, no, that's good. I'm glad for you.

Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad. The other thing that was interesting about it was it was the first presentation I've done using IA Presenter. Have I ever talked to you about this?

IA? Presenter. None. IA presenter. Alright. Okay.

Yes. I think he saw the look on my phone. He decided not to go there. Wise move. Wise move. So IA is a company called Information Architects. That's what it stands for. And for many years now, they've had an app in the Apple ecosystem across across the Apple ecosystem called IA writer, and what that is is a distraction free writing tool. But, IA Presenter is a, presentation software that uses markdown. So you write your presentation as a markdown document.

So you spend less time tinkering probably, so you just don't accept it, like, as it

is. Well, ideally, that is what happens.

Well, I would expect, obviously, you to to begin to tinker with it.

If you really start having very strong feelings about how you want something there exactly, You just can't. It doesn't work like that. You have to just say, well, I do want a picture on this page. And you can say, do you want it to cover the background? Do you want it to be contained in its space, or do you want it to cover the space but extend beyond the edges of it?

Yeah. You can sort of immediately create another piece of content out of it. Yeah.

Cool. So, anyway, I wasn't gonna go on about that, but, actually, I think it's pretty cool. Yeah. The other thing that they they've got in that, which is really cool, I've not seen anywhere else, is over the course, you can make your slide backgrounds follow a gradient. So you can start off blue, and it slowly goes to orange as you go through the so it's like morning to evening as you go through the slides.

So I

thought that's a lovely idea that I've never seen that anywhere

else. Yeah. Yeah. It's good signposting as well, isn't it?

It's nice. Yeah. It is. So that was more than I thought I would say about that. But, yes, first talk went well. Video, that I find mortifying. And I do want to say one other thing because I've been watching a TV show, a new TV show.

Okay.

And it's kind of stressful.

In a good way? Yeah. Well Or in a terrifying way?

Recommended to me, but it's stressful in a stressful way. Yeah. So it's people shouting at each other and losing their tempers and but somehow working together in a team to deliver these amazing things. It's the bear, it's called, and it's about a restaurant. And, this guy who's a Michelin chef comes back to inherit a restaurant from his brother.

that

did with a lot of unison. But what what you what they show is how a kitchen works, how it works, and that's what's so compelling about it. And the the the way that a high performing, you know, high standards kitchen Yeah. How they maintain a level of perfection, and the way that they communicate amongst themselves. So one of the the chefs is sort of acting as a caller and saying, right.

Yeah. There's Kinda see it coming as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like the thing about the acknowledgment. So I've I've heard, because that that's one of the things that in a lot of teams, you don't get. Yeah. Yeah. I I'd look back on, like, all the work that I've done, and it's like, do people really it's it's rare that you get acknowledging that someone has actually heard what you're

what you're

saying, or you acknowledge what someone else has said. Yeah. Yeah. It's more broadcast than, like

Listening.

Listening. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the the other thing they do because they're all crowded in this quite small space of the kitchen. They're quite verbal about walking around even. So they say corner, and they go around the corner Yeah. And they say behind when they walk behind someone just so that everyone can always maintain an awareness Yeah. Of what's going on around them without ever taking their focus away from this very demanding task of making this dish 6 times for for 2 different tables

Yeah. Yeah.

And making sure that everybody gets what they've ordered and that it's done in the way they want it because it's a nice Yeah. Experience that's what we

give like a timely fashion.

And it's perfect. And they their obsession with the perfection, and there's you see them with tweezers putting tiny bits of herbs on top of Yeah. Things and putting sauce onto things in a very kind of exact way, and then something smudges it, and then they're like, right. Start again. Yeah. Incredible. Mhmm. It's worth putting up with the stressfulness to to watch it. Okay. It's on Disney plus. But Okay.

Yeah. I have heard of it, but never never watched it.

No. You should give it a try. Watch the bear. It's very, very, very good.

K.

So Thing 2.

Thing 2. Should we move on to the thing proposed by Ian Smith?

Yes. Unfortunately, because I fixed the database, I'm only allowed one perspective

One perspective. On it.

So we're down to 1 each perspective.

Yeah. Oh, well.

My thing is the clock.

I'm glad that you very specifically said it right.

How could I have said it, Josh? I don't understand the joke here.

There is no joke.

There is no joke. Now that's a running that can run.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Actually, yeah. Yeah. That's true. Actually, last time, we've both done it now. So it's a it's a genuine long running joke, not just Ian, repetitive joke.

Well, I accept either.

They they are very closely related to the fact.

Yes. I always like those eighties sitcoms with the same joke every every week. I just Yeah. I just love that.

But it's just that's part of the device, isn't it? You know, it just

The pinnacle of that was Aloha Aloha

The the

is a

The policeman.

A comedy about, the French resistance in World War 2. And every episode, the policeman, who's an English spy in France, would come in and and say good morning, and the French resistance leader would arrive and say, listen very carefully. I would say this only words. And every episode, all the same things would happen. I'm a life like a drone.

Yeah. Every single episode was pretty much the same, wasn't it?

I don't know. There were some highlights.

Okay.

But I'm going to avoid that rabbit hole because I've only managed to say the first two words of the name of my thing.

Maybe we can have a lower lower than interlude next time.

I think maybe we could. Yes. I don't think we should tell people we're gonna do that because they'll just unsubscribe.

Well, we should also think, yes, we could, but should we?

Always a good question. Yep. Just because you can do something. So my thing is the clock of the long now. What this is is it's a project of the long now foundation, which was started in in the nineties, and it was started by a chap called Danny Hillis.

Hillis.

Because Ash attempted to disrupt my memory of this by saying it was Bruce Willis, but it's not Bruce Willis. It's a chap called Danny Hillis Yep. Who was kind of obsessed with this idea that people thought the future was the year 2000. And in the nineties, you know, we all thought, oh, well, the year 2000, that's a big deal. But he started this foundation because he wanted to think about time in a different scale.

Yeah. So, like, how long have we been in the Yes. Anthropocene

era. But, you know

So it's, yeah, it's,

Human civilization started much less than 10000 years ago.

Exactly. Well, certainly as we perceive it today as well. Certainly.

Well, yes. Yeah. Yes. Relatively. So when you start looking at things on the scale of that amount of time, it changes a lot of the things we think about. We've both been involved in building systems, but we never think of anything like that time frame. No. We We're thinking about next year

Yeah. Yeah.

At the outside. Yeah.

Because there are some people in in technology saying, well, you need to think about, like, the the end of this system as well. Yes. You know? Think about it all the way from building its first iteration to when it's actually obsolete. But it's it's hard to get people to think like that even and and that might be 5 years or 10 years or whatever. So a drop in the in the ocean compared to what this project is.

Yeah. And if you think about even 1000 years, there's there's not a lot of things around No. That were made more than 1000 years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's only a very select set of monuments, isn't there?

I mean, Britain has existed. I mean, I think we measure from William the conqueror showing up in 1066. Yeah. And that's a bit under a 1000 years ago. Mhmm. Is it? Yes. It is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, thank goodness for that. My whole appreciation of history was just swaying Yeah. Dangerously. So, yeah, I thought this was very interesting. Of course, it's expensive, and so it's being funded by Jeff Bezos in a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos.

Do you think Jeff is gonna put his consciousness into this clock in some way so he can project himself forward in time?

I'm trying not to say the phrase giant clock.

So you mentioned, like, engineering challenges. Mhmm. So what sorts of things?

Well, materials, what can you make out of that won't wear out across 10000 years? What about maintenance? So if you can't guarantee that it'll be maintained

Yeah.

And if we're in a bronze age, regressive civilization

Back to the bronze age.

Could you make it out of stuff that they might be able to maintain it with?

Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting challenge, isn't it, as well?

And you sort of often hear about planned obsolescence. Mhmm. And this is kind of the exact opposite of that. Yeah. It's like planned durability. Yeah.

Because to be as reliable as it needs to be, I guess, like I say, it needs to be made of the right materials. It probably needs to be simple as it would not have tons and tons of moving parts in order to do its job, which is simple. It's hard to achieve as well, isn't it, while still also fulfilling the purpose. Yes. You can make simple things which are rubbish and don't do the thing that you want them to do.

Yeah. I mean, goodness knows.

Yeah. Alright. Okay. So it's like that was one of the challenges to overcome is to think of, like, a power system which could could run for that long.

It's powered, according to my quick Google there, by a combination of mechanical energy sources. So mechanical energy harvested from temperature differences between day and night, energy from human visitors who contribute through interaction, and solar energy

It's like an exercise bike.

A solar energy which captured through a window, allowing sunlight to heat a sealed air chamber. So it's all of those are really ingenious. I was just

Yeah.

While I was reading them out, just thinking that, except for the exercise bike.

That's how it is. I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna last for 10000 years if it needs humans on exercise bikes to run it.

So it's got chimes in it. Alright. And they've they've made it they've got enough different tones of these chimes that they can make over 33a half 1000000 combinations, which means that throughout the days of the 10000 years, it will never repeat itself.

Interesting. That's cool.

The other thing I learned was that there's a model of it in the science museum, which is maybe you want to go and see it. Mhmm. And if you you can go and see it in the mountain, but it's very remote. Right. So it's, you're not going there on the way to somewhere.

Yeah.

Wow. Anyway, the reason that I was drawn to it was the technical challenge of it, the difficulty of it, but also the perspective of it. The idea that we're gonna start this project, which will be finished when innumerable generations of humans Yeah. Have been and gone. I mean, there are multi generational sort of things now.

Yeah. Planet of the apes now worshiping the nuclear bomb. Something. Yeah.

It's interesting to me that Jeff Bezos funded this. Mhmm. But I kinda wonder, will these people in 2000 years' time have any idea about him or anything to do with anything? I mean, will they, you know, will they be? It's unimaginable. When you think how humanity has changed in the last 1000 years, the idea of 10000 years is just inconceivable. Yeah. And building for that

Yeah. Yeah. Because I I thought a part of me gets a bit loses hope when it comes to humanity and being having, like, multi generational responsibility, because sometimes I think we're not doing a very good job of that. No. So, you know, part of me is like, alright.

Yeah. It's like when the spike you know, in the moon landings and all that kind of stuff Yeah. It was humanity kind of I mean, there was a lot of politics surrounding it and beating the Russians and all that to it. But despite that, it was it was kind of what's next.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like there's, like, aspiration there to to to do things? I remember, when I read what was the book called? So, basically, I can't remember what the book was called, but the gist of it was is that it was we are now just, like, custodians of society as it is, and there's little aspiration left.

And we kind of dodged nuclear war so far. Yeah. But, you know, climate change, we're signally failing to dodge.

Yeah. So it's like I find hope when projects like this start, and, you know, people aspire to do something that's gonna reach beyond, like, their lifetime, like, way beyond their lifetime. So it may gives me a little bit of a boost to think that people are still aspiring to do something which is, like, goes beyond, you know, the normal and pushes society on a little bit more.

It makes me think of things like Stonehenge and the pyramids Yeah. Which were built for re I mean, Stonehenge, I don't think anyone really knows why it was built, where it clearly has some sort of, sort of ancient religious significance and to do with the cycles of the sun and

Yeah.

All the midsummer and all this kind of stuff. But those people building that could not have imagined us Yeah. Looking at it in 2024.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And that's, I think, the feeling that you get from this. It's, yeah, it's something that can outlast us.

Yeah. Yeah. To me as well, it was it's like a bit of an antidote to building something simple, long lasting, resilient, and reliable is like an antidote to my current sort of feelings of the, like, enshitification of the world.

Yes.

I saw that

Thanks, Jeff.

Yeah. Saw that the current doctor had had coined were entering the enshito scene.

Well, he's going to be coining that in various ways for for the rest of

Yeah. Yeah. So it's just and I find solace in, like, thing projects like this, trying to do something different. And then, also, like, when I think about, like, my own work as well, to do a good job and to leave things better than they were rather than my overriding feeling sometimes that humanity generally leaves things worse than they were in most things that we do.

I'm not

sure that's absolutely true, but it's just like, you know, in your lower moments, that's how you feel. You can

feel like that. I mean, the thing is there's plenty of stuff to back that up even though there are things to Yeah. To contradict it.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, I say it's too easy to be cynical about these things when there's a lot of, like, suffering in the world. But anything that exposes anything that shortism short termism often is the cause of suffering. Yeah. So anything that looks to looks to go beyond that, I'm all for it, and I'll just ignore that Jeff's involved.

One of their FAQs is given all of the world's pressing problems, why build a 10000 year clock? There's a great passage underneath which I've enjoyed which was, wasn't the clock supposed to have been built on a mountain top in Nevada? Originally, the idea was to build a practice clock in Texas which would serve as a prototype for a 10000 year clock in Nevada.

As As

we got into the project, we came to appreciate the complexities of underground construction in a remote mountain and understood the quality of materials that we needed to make even a practice clock. So in getting this prototype working as a long lasting clock, it became a real 10000 year clock. So, basically, it's a prototype that's gone into production.

Yeah. I like that. I like that. That's very, we can all identify with that as as people in software as well, can't we?

Yes. It's

like my proof of concept is now serving 5,000,000 yesterday. Yeah. It's like, alright. Okay. We've scaled it.

And, there's another FAQ which I find entertaining. When can people visit this clock? We have an understanding that the clock will have ways of being visited in the future. We do not have the details of how that will work yet.

See, that's the second like, Douglas Adams was invoked in my mind with that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

The clock is located in some of the roughest desert wilderness in North America, inhabited by rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Even the needle sharp plants are out to get you. I've seen weather shift from a baking heat to a dust storm to lightning to freezing sleet in a matter of hours. The clock is deep in underground in a mountain that's far from Rhodes, and it's a tough climb to reach it. So, basically, you have to really, really want to go and see it.

Which I quite do. Yeah. Even despite that description. Yeah. So Well,

probably, the description has helped, doesn't it?

No. Yeah. Yeah. That's true, actually. Yeah.

And if you were going there, you could legitimately get an Apple Watch Ultra 2. Anyway, that was my thing, which was more monumental than

That was well, it's literally Literally

a monument, isn't it?

Yeah. But it's not a game changer.

No. Why make it so hard to visit? I always wanted the clock to be far away in the middle of nowhere because remoteness makes it more likely to survive.

Well, yeah. So it's like the the seed vault, isn't it, in Svalbard? Yes. Like, if you put that in Central London, someone would probably break in.

Yeah. Yes.

It's like it's better if it is somewhere remote.

It is.

Yeah. So I I also understand that as well.

Yes. So

But that's a great thing. It fills me with a bit of hope, which is

It's a slightly optimistic thing, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

That if we're gonna make something that's last for 10000 years, that there's some point to that.

But we might have a go

the existence of humanity continuing. Yeah.

We might have a go at being around in 10000 years' time.

Yes. All the people, gathered around at the base of it to hear and chime the 10000th year.

Yeah. I think the other thing that's just popped into my head about it is the slowness that is not valued anymore. Mhmm. So I I I do things slowly, and I make no apology for it. So, like, the other day, I was testing a new service, and I wanted to learn about its dependency.

Yes.

And seen a few responses and said, well, yeah, it's okay.

Looks fine to me.

Yeah. Exactly. So I took the time. I always remember an old boss of mine, he told this story of when his dad his mum would ask his dad to paint, the lounge over. Mhmm. And he'd get out his 3 inch paintbrush and start painting the lounge. And he put test test match special and just exist with that task and just do it slowly. Mhmm. Then his wife would be like, why are you doing it so slowly? It's like and he'd be like, well, you asked me to do it.

Yeah. But for a long time. For a long time.

So, yeah, that was the other thing that appealed to me about about this thing. It made me think of quite a few things.

Excellent. So food for future episodes. Yeah. Scarily.

Absolutely. We could do a future episode about my existential dread of climate change.

Oh.

Let's not do that. Please don't do that. Let's just talk can we talk about instead?

Yeah. So I would like to say something like, so how can people email us, Ash? But then I lack confidence that your answer will be

I can be sensible about this. No. No. Just just just to prove you wrong.

Go on then.

I just can't do it. I can't I don't know if I could even say it normally anymore.

Remember it. He's trying to remember it, but it's just breaking up in the wrong places.

So you can email Ian and Ash You can. At whatalotofthings.com.

In fact, please do.

Or technology eos at whatalotofthings.com.

I'm gonna sample these, and I'm gonna put them on my little buttons over here.

And they are the most sensible email addresses that we have.

They're the only ones. I I sometimes I was thinking the other day that we should just do that thing where all emails get forwarded to us, whatever email address is used. And then then we can just make a new one up every week because we know they will all work. But, no, it's Ian and Ash at what a lot of things dot com or technology e yours at what a lot of things dot com. So, really, it's a matter of your own personal taste.

Yep. I'll just text us.

They can't text us.

But Mary says differently.

Mary can text me. Yeah. Yeah. True. Well

You there was a bit of touch of father's head in that well then.

Oh, dear.

Goodbye, Ian.

I feel a bit

I feel so that sounded a bit final, didn't it?

Yeah. It did. It was just like the next sound was the loud explosion. Goodbye, Ian. Oh, dear. Who shot first? That's what they'll be asking about us.

Who shot JR?

Yes.

No one. It was all a dream.

It was all a dream.

It was.

So thank you for listening to us, and good night. Good night. Right. I'm pressing the button.

Press the button.

Not that button.