Entries from February 2008 ↓

Irvine Welsh’s If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work includes four short stories and one novella. The short stories cover more conventional American turf than do many of his past works, with a couple of stories set in the American Southwest, and one in suburban Chicago (and a final one across the shore set in Costa Brava), yet still capture a deeper exploration of some of the classic horror stories, urban legends and reversals of urban legends that you might find in the work of Chuck Palahniuk. Welsh is the kind of guy you could imagine bringing the Ryan’s Steakhouse Story to life in cringing, vivid Technicolor. One has to only remember the “Worst Toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting to see how short of stretch that actually is.

But the crown jewel of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is the concluding novella set in Cowdenbeath, Scotland, “The Kingdom of Fife”, which interleaves the stories of the unemployed four-foot seven ex-jockey and competitive table football (i.e., Subbuteo) player Jason King and the depressed horse jumper Jenni Cahill. In alternating chapters, we get pulled into the visceral, utterly unpretentious and earthy world of Jason, who lives with his father (a dispossessed middle-age white man in Scotland who listens to 50 Cent and finds kinship with the plight of the African-American) and between nights of drinking the “black gold” (pints of Guinness) at the local bar called the Goth, stalks Jenni and schemes how to make some money. Jason narrates in the first person, in a kind of phonetic Scottish dialect that at first can be hard to parse but after a few chapter flows and resonates in the ear. (Sample translations: Ehs == He’s, goat == got, yin == one, tae == to, doon == down.)

For her part, Jenni is the lesser light to her more outwardly beautiful and more talented friend who also jumps showhorses (with more success–Jenni’s horse is a lame burden upon her family.) Jenni is of a higher class–her narration is more straightforward linguistically and captures the angst of a miserable emo listening to Marilyn Manson alone in her room, plotting her escape from Cowdenbeath.

Welsh’s novella covers a wide emotional range in just a couple of hundred pages, and despite the trials, slights, deaths and travails that befall Jason and Jenni, conveys to the reader Jason’s relentlessly realistic and optimistic outlook. Jason’s foibles are readily admitted and owned shamelessly, making him someone you can root for, warts and all.

It’s hard not to see this novella—which carries echoes of Trainspotting, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Ulysses, and a kind of bizarro-world The Graduate— not being optioned for a screenplay. Like the wee Jason, it may end up being a wee movie, but a wee one that I would pay to see.

If you’re patient enough to work through the dialect, If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is without a doubt one of the most gritty (not quite filthy) and heartwarming stories you’ll read this year.

More links:

• If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work
• Irvine Welsh’s website

Giles Bowkett on surviving in an irrational environment, aka “dodging corporate monkeys”.

Why is it so much in the world of technology comes down to the fundamental dynamics of an 80s movie? What can we do about it?

The simple, teenage answer is that if you create a successful technology project, the Biffs and the Chips will have to get out of your way.

I’m surprised that this rant hasn’t gained more traction, as it has all the hallmarks of a classic: it speaks truth and reaches its conclusion through a winding, multi-disciplinary chain of connections. Bowkett’s blog is required reading.

The last week or so I’ve been playing with rspec, a Behavior-Driven Development framework useful for capturing user stories from which code is derived. BDD seeks to improve upon test-driven development by moving up a level, representing actual user requirements as the starting point for development, rather than starting with a specific implicit design in mind.

For my own amusement, I turned the tips for writing in the Valleywag style into an rspec plain text story:

Story: author writes a Valleywag story
  As an author
  I want to write a story
  So that it meets the Gawker criteria

  Scenario: writer expresses the rage of the creative underclass
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then reader should feel the expressed rage of the creative underclass

  Scenario: writer mixes a plus and a minus
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post include a plus
    And post should include a minus

  Scenario: writer slams people not companies or products
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post should slam people
    And post should not slam companies
    And post should not slam products

  Scenario: writer insults but is surprising
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post should insult
    And reader should be surprised

  Scenario: writer doesn't let his anger get to him
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post shouldn't reflect writer's anger

  Scenario: writer avoids beat-downs
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post should not contain a beat-down

  Scenario: writer doesn't fisk
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post should not fisk

  Scenario: writer says only things writer would say in conversation
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post says only things that writer would say in conversation

  Scenario: writer avoids journalist math and uses specifics
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post uses good math
    And post uses specifics

  Scenario: writer writes only one joke per post
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post contains one and only one joke

  Scenario: writer bails early
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post is not overly long

  Scenario: writer uses satire and parody to illustrate subject's foibles
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post contains satire illustrating subject's foibles
    And post contains parody illustrating subject's foibles

  Scenario: writer never uses the word douchebag
    Given a Valleywag writer
    When writer writes a post
    Then post does not contain word douchebag

I submitted a story to slashdot the other night linking to Leonard Richardson’s Programmers at Work post. The submission languished in the firehose queue for a day, got up-modded by the user community, and then this afternoon was posted to the front page of slashdot.

Tonight I spent a little time watching the progression of a story around the net.

The coolest thing about the story for me came from seeing how a small minority of the slashdot crowd initially mocked the simplicity of Richardson’s site, but then rallied to defend it based on his longevity as a blogger and economy of style.

Slashdot was my second choice: the mindless link propagation that is reddit apparently didn’t want the link, although it’s now made it to the 10th position after someone submitted it a couple of hours after the slashdot story appeared. Bad karma, I guess.

On the heels of my recent posts related to great programmers of the 70s and 80s, Leonard Richardson comes out this week with an excellent “Where are they now?” follow-up that tracks down the current disposition of each of the programmers profiled in Susan Lammers’ 1986 book Programmers at Work, another influential text I read in my formative years as a developer.

Lammers’ book profiled what might now be called the original rockstar programmers: guys like Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, and Jonathan Sacks.

What’s striking is that unlike the rockstar entrepreneurs of today (on display in PaW’s equally zoological companion book from the 21st century, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days), the programmers interviewed back in the mid-80s are humble, curious and focused on the code, perhaps even surprised that anyone would care to interview them about their work. In Founders, you can’t open a random page without encountering yet another insufferable ego (with the exception of a few notable interviews with del.icio.us founder Joshua Schacter and recently minted millionaire HOTorNOT founder James Hong); yet in Programmers at Work, the wonder shines through. There aren’t any Zed Shaws lurking in those pages.

Much of Programmers at Work holds up well even after 22 years. By today’s standards, a few of Lammers’ questions seem rather quaint (”Do you write a lot of comments in your programs?”), but then you’ll run into something interesting, like Simonyi taking a potshot at the “cult of simplicity” and how in the long run of computer science and other symbolic sciences, he believes that embracing complexity over simplicity will be what leads to the biggest breakthroughs. Leave it to the space-traveling creator of Hungarian notation to comment on that. At least Lammers didn’t ask Simonyi about his commenting style.

While The Soul Of A New Machine showed a deep slice of real coders and engineers at work and inspired almost through tacit observation, Programmers at Work captured the breadth of the development opportunities available, in the programmers’ own words, and by showing their own work products in a much more explicit and expository form.

More PaW stuff here:

• Salon’s coverage of the reunion.
• Susan Lammers’ Amazon review of Founders at Work

I’ve managed to pull into the lead in the family contest, being down only 5.42% on the year. Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD) is pulling me through.

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	0.70%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-19.66%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-8.18%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	10.90%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-9.66%
Central European Distribution Corp	-5.42%