Mary Rose Cook

The Waterfall method of developing software guarantees a result: a digital version of the requirements specification. Agile methods of developing software provide a service: software development.

Agile is replacing Waterfall. This means that software development is going from being fixed price to rate-based¹. With Waterfall, the developer would write the specification and then quote an estimate. With agile, the developer still writes a rough specification, but the features in it are not guaranteed to appear in the final product.

Instead, the developer says, “Let’s build this software together, and it will cost you $x per day.” It’s kind of like a cab ride: you tell the cabbie your destination, but you can settle up and get out at any time.

Which party, developer or client, is favoured financially by each of these methods? That depends on how good the developer is at estimating how long a piece of work will take. If they are great, Waterfall is better because they can sign a contract up front and get a guaranteed amount of money. If they are less than great, agile is better because they can’t dig themselves into a horrible underestimation hole.

Unfortunately, all developers suck at estimating work. To accurately estimate, you need to think through every problem you’ll encounter. To find every problem, you have to go through the work in detail. To go through the work in detail, you need to do the work. Some help is afforded by previous experience, but software development is rife with novel, tricky little problems.

So, financially speaking, Waterfall is bad for developers, and agile is better.

¹ Agile changes software development from manufacturing (secondary) to a service (tertiary). It was never quaternary, and it is also, finally, a developed country industry.

I am sad to see the little lady leave. However, $43 a month for hosting is quite a lot, so she has to go. The code is open source and on GitHub.

1. Open Preferences.
2. Click the All radio button in the bottom left.
3. Open the Video sub-menu on the left hand side.
4. Open the Output Modules sub-menu of the Video menu.
5. Click on MacOSX.
6. Untick the Back Screens In Fullscreen checkbox.
7. Click the Save button on the bottom right.

On Friday night, I programmed and came up with Switch off the light before you leave and my Mum watched the period drama, The Forsyte Saga, on ITV Watch Again. The Forsytes would suffer horrendous misfortune and dish out utter nastiness, but, then, every fifteen minutes, they would forget their troubles, go to a raucous disco and a man would shout at them about how they should be drinking Bacardi.

The first thing I remember is:

Someone said, “How do you feel?” I said, “Terrific”.

However, that happened after I had been in intensive care for several days. The story starts a few days before.

At 7pm on 12th May 2009, I was walking along Tooley Street near London Bridge. I had just left work and was on my way to meet Andie at Bar Wotever. I fell and hit my head. A crowd of passers-by gathered. One of them put me in the recovery position and one of them called an ambulance. PC Lee and PC Harmsworth passed by on their motorcycles, saw the crowd and went over. They examined me and found that my heart wasn’t beating. One of them did CPR until the ambulance arrived.

The paramedics took over the CPR. They gave me two shocks from the defibrillator and managed to restart my heart. They took me to the Accident and Emergency department at St Thomas’s Hospital. I was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. I was heavily sedated and a machine was breathing for me. My Mum and Dad and my older sister, Jess, arrived in the late evening.

To reduce the chance of brain damage, the doctors used a cooled saline drip and ice blankets to keep my body very cold for the first twenty-four hours. After a couple of days, a doctor decided it was time for me to breathe on my own. The sedatives were stopped and, as I came awake, my air tube was removed from my throat and I breathed.

My Dad says he asked me whether I could hear him and I nodded a tiny “Yes”.

I was in intensive care for a week and then I was transferred to Beckett, one of the cardiac wards. I remember little of the first week there. I talked to my friend, Nick, on the phone one day and he referred to something we’d spoken about the day before and I said I didn’t recall the fact that we’d talked. One night, I awoke in the midst of a dream where I was attached by wires to Jeremy from Peep Show. I found a nurse adjusting the leads of my heart monitor and I said, “No, don’t touch those! You’ll kill Jeremy.” The lovely ward sister, John, came and took me through an excruciatingly embarrassing compos mentis test (“What is your name?” “Where are you?” “What day is it?”)

After a week on the ward, I was basically back to normal. Unfortunately, the doctors couldn’t work out what had caused my cardiac arrest. The original plan had been to install a defibrillator in my chest. This would detect dangerous heart rhythms and revert them back to good old sinus with an electric shock directly into my heart. However, somehow the doctors’ aspirations became much greater and things turned into a sort of Sherlock Holmes mystery.

After a CT scan (3D organ imaging with X-Rays), several angiograms (wire with camera on the end fed into the leg and up into the heart), several MRI scans (3D organ imaging with magnetic resonance), several echocardiograms and a lot of blood tests, the following was discovered:

Part of the lateral ventricular wall of my heart is dead.

The circumflex artery that runs down the middle of my heart was coming from the wrong place. In most people, it comes from the aorta - the main artery into the heart - and delivers lovely oxygenated blood. In one in forty-thousand people, it comes from the pulmonary artery and delivers lame deoxygenated blood.

My aorta was bulging dangerously.

The doctors worked up some theories.

Most of the people with the misplaced artery die as infants because the part of the heart supplied by the circumflex doesn’t get enough oxygen. My body compensated by growing little vessels to deliver oxygenated blood from another heart artery to the under-oxygenated area. However, as I walked down Tooley Street, the already poor oxygen supply to the lateral ventricular wall of my heart became very bad. The tissue there died from lack of oxygen. My heart went into ventricular fibrillation and then stopped.

When I was one year old, my aorta was too narrow. A surgeon slit it open and installed some synthetic material in the slit to widen it. Now, aged twenty-eight, the stitches in the synthetic material were coming loose. If left to its own devices, my aorta would rupture and it would be curtains.

After about five weeks in hospital, the doctors cooked up a solution to these problems.

To get a good oxygen supply to the lateral ventricular wall of my heart, they would perform a bypass to move the circumflex artery so it was fed by the aorta. To prevent my aorta rupturing, they would chop out the bulging section and replace it with a synthetic tube. This would be done in one mammoth operation.

I found some of the details distressing. I would be on a heart and lung machine for most of the operation. Because the main vocal cord is wrapped around the aorta, it might be severed, thus destroying my voice. Because they would be operating near the arteries that supply the spine, it was possible they might sever one and paralyse me. There was a 10% chance that I would die on the table.

On the morning of the operation, my Mum and Dad and my brother, Matt, hung out with me at my bed. We laughed a lot. Matt told me he loved me for the first time. I was given two Temazepam and went off to theatre waving a jaunty goodbye.

The operation took ten hours. Afterwards, I spent twenty-four hours unconscious in intensive care.

I woke up in the High Dependency Unit. I could move my legs. I could speak. I was drugged up to the eyeballs on morphine. I ate four yoghurts and talked to my Mum.

The next day, the nurses removed the tubes that were draining blood from my chest. The day after that, I was moved to Doulton, another cardiac ward. The day after that, the nurses removed the dressings that covered the main incision in my chest and I had my first post-operative shaky-kneed shower.

When they were developing the original Macintosh, the Apple engineers referred not to a deadline for the project, but instead to a constant time to completion. In other words, the end was always in sight, but never got any nearer. I felt the same way about being in hospital. However, two weeks after the operation, eight weeks after I’d been admitted, I was discharged.

Two weeks after that, I am sitting in bed at my Mum’s house and writing this. I have a new scar down the middle of my chest. I have been to a party and into town a few times and came back very tired. I sleep in the afternoon. I can’t run. Sneezing feels like my collar bone is going to split in two. Sometimes, I feel afraid when I go to sleep. I get out of breath when I speak.

Dying meant that I missed out on a bunch of life: The Acorn, Horse The Band and Jamie Stewart gigs, several parties, supper with my brother and sister, the Queer Insurrection gathering in Leeds, a screening of Objectified, the Radical Routes party and my sister’s birthday, and a beside-myself-with-excitement visit to my ungirlfriend in Bradford.

But, life is slowly coming back.

In short, fun fun fun fun.

We set up at The Guardian’s offices on Friday evening. I and a few other lucky organisers made a lot of Lego men:

We returned at 8 a.m. on Saturday. People registered and got their swag bags (customised t-shirt, Lego man with accessories, Sharpie).

For those that don’t know, one the best things about Barcamp is that anyone can put on a session. I went to a session about hacking the baking of bread:

Gui’s thesis (slides) is that one can try out recipes and then improve them through further experimentation. He said that because of the long periods that bread must be left alone, it is the perfect activity to interleave with hacking sessions. You mix flour and water, cover and leave it for two days. You will have a pit of bacteria. Add more flour and water, leave for another two days. Take a third of the result - leaven - add more flour and water, knead, leave to prove, knead, then bake. Use the rest of the leaven as your next starter batch. Share it with friends. Add other stuff.

I went to a talk on young people by a guy called Will. We talked mostly about the divide between younger and older people and about whether the two groups differ.

I did a session on the perceptron. I talked about how to make good music recommendations (slides, an out of date blog post). We had a really great discussion about how music recommendations should *really* be done.

Could you graph a person’s music taste against artist output over time? That way, you might see a person fall in love with and out of love with bands. You might see which parts of an artist’s canon the user preferred.

Should you recommend only albums, or even songs, rather than artists? It’s rare to like all of the recorded output of even a favourite band. Does the dissection of music into songs start to destroy the concept of the album?

We also talked about how to incorporate music discovery into everyday life. Are clubs and the radio really as good as it gets? Could occasional new songs be interspersed with a majority of songs a user already knows? Will mobile music catalogues and perennial access to large libraries make this easier?

As night fell, the games of Werewolf began.

I had never played before and fell instantly in love. Players sit in a circle. A few people are werewolves and the rest are villagers. Each group has to eradicate the other to win the game. Killings happen either in the night when the villagers are asleep and the werewolves silently agree upon someone to tear to shreds, or in the day when the villagers agree on someone to lynch.

I thought about why geeks choose to play a game defined by social interaction. Someone pointed out that we like systems and environments with strict rules. Thus, exploring social interaction - arguing, backing-up, lying, debating, confronting, sharing, joking - in a controlled environment is perfect.

Time wore on. The clocks went forward and it got to five in the morning and I went to bed. I say, “bed”, but what I mean is a chair. I pulled my coat around me and nodded off. I awoke two hours later.

We laid out breakfast and everyone munched away. The Sunday sessions began (sadly, I didn’t get to any of them). I had a wonderful talk with Amir on how hacking is one of the great arts, but lacks the surface charisma of music and painting and theatre and has a disappointing disconnect between the raw materials and the product.

On the bus back to Brixton, I thought about how events that last several days are popular amongst many different groups. Music festivals, camping trips, retreats, conferences, holidays, political protests. But I think the key element is not the extended time, but the overnights. There is something about that four-in-the-morning feeling that makes time feel special. You know you should be in bed like everyone else, but you aren’t - you are in another world. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being a kid run amok in the school after all the teachers have gone home.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand, Vanished from my hand, Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet, I have no one to meet And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship, My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip, My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels To be wanderin’. I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind, Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach, Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, Let me forget about today until tomorrow.