Flipflops.org

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of though to the way costs for projects are estimated. It always seems a very hit and miss affair. One designer I used to work with used to work out the costs as accurately as he could and then double whatever number he came up with - this worked as well as anything - and fairly accurately reflected the time / cost of what he was doing.

I think a lot of the problem is to do with the way projects scale - a £10,000 project is not necessarily 10 x more complex than a £1000 project, but more importantly it is far easier to scope a static webpage with 10 pages and a contact form than website where the client guidance goes something along the lines of we want it to be a bit like Facebook {edit as applicable} but aimed at Pig Farmers {edit as applicable}.

The trouble with building complex applications is that it is often hard (if not impossible) to anticipate problems until you come across them. I suppose this has a lot to do with the rise Agile Development - using it as a way of getting away from specifications that often rapidly loose any relationship to the project they define.

Development is really an evolutionary affair and clients will change their minds in response to what they see - but God is (as they say) in the details - and it is often genuinely not possible to know how a project will go once it starts to take shape. Good project management I suppose the art of reconciling these evolutionary forces with budgets, clients and what is actually possible.

Right now in my current job I don’t really have any say in how projects are costed - and they are costed as well as anywhere else I have ever worked - which is to say as accurately as possible - but of course I have to work with budgets and liaise with clients over all the technical nitty-gritty - so I have lots of time to observe.

My current theory goes something along these lines (BTW all figures are just made up)

c = minimum cost
t = cost per database table
i = number of database tables

total cost = c + (t x i)

BUT this isn’t right yet there a number of additional factors that I am trying to work into the equation so far I have:

p = Client Knowledge - an overly knowledgeable client cause as much trouble as an IT somebody who is IT illiterate - ideally we need somebody who understands what you tell and has ideas of their own but can also understand advice.

z = a factor to fine tune t x i

For Example: if i = 10 then the total cost might work out as 1 x (t x i) but if i = 60 then total cost = 0.7 x (t x i)

I wonder what ever happened to my old graphics calculator…

To be continued…

Recently my friend and ex colleague Hannah Storie pointed me towards a wonderful piece of online art called ‘We Feel Fine’ http://www.wefeelfine.org. We feel fine is a work of art both on the level of… well art and looks to be a beautiful demonstration of the programmer’s art. As an artist and as a programmer I feel many things… Jealous (but in a positive way), inspired, touched… it makes me feel lighter of spirit.

To tell the truth I had almost given up on the idea that (great) art could happen on the medium of the computer screen. I’ve tried - the results have been so so… and i can’t really think of anything much I’ve seen that works…

There is a great deal of beauty on the internet… films, photographs, design, typography but this isn’t art. The power of art is that it transcends, but there is no route to it because it is about errors and leaps of faith and the spaces between things (both physical and notional). I used to love the work of Jared Tarbell at www.levitated.net (actually I still do) but it always felt trapped by the screen and seems infinitely better now it has escaped into art galleries (I haven’t seen any pieces in the flesh but would love to)…

Anyway back to ‘We Feel Fine’… they describe waht they do far more elegantly than I could…

Mission

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Go and see it today - now.

I saw two videos today both of them were disturbing in thier own ways the similarity - electricity.

The first one shows a guy with the worlds fastest electric drag bike - crashing it.

The second clip shows a student getting zapped with a tazer gun at a rally for US presidential candidate John Kerry.

I’ve recently handed in my notice, and am leaving COSMIC. As is the way of these things though, everything has got quite interesting all of a sudden.

For instance, there has been quite a lot of interest in the car share booking system that I wrote for www.moorcar.co.uk - it is a curious situation to be in. In terms of intellectual property everything I developed at COSMIC has to stay at COSMIC, clearly this is both good and bad.

Bad in that everything I have written over the past two and a half years is not mine and as it stands I have some nice solutions in place now, solutions which I know inside out and can drop into place.

Good in that these times of transition give one time to learn new things and a brief breathing space to develop new things. I’ve been taking this time to put together a new toolbox of code and to throw myself into object orientated PHP.

I’m also taking the time to get really up to speed with CakePHP, I’m putting together a skeleton with everything you need at the beginning of a web project, security, pagination, pages, uploads etc.

All in all the bad shrivels into insignificance, writing code is process of learning day by day, of course it doesn’t matter that I can’t use that code. When I it need I can just write again, better, have learned from experience.

The really interesting thing is that COSMIC are considering making Rocket, the CMS framework I developed into an open source project. This is intriguing - but also a bit scary. I am proud of it, it is fast, stable and flexible, it contains some elegant solutions. However it also contains rubbish, dead ends and blind alleys where the development was going in one direction and then it changed, unresolved philosophical issues… if the project was made open source it is a bit like one of those dreams where people imagine themselves walking down the road naked (I have never had one of these dreams) - people get to see everything. To be fair I think it would need a bit of work before it was suitable or made sense in wider context. On the other hand I would be able to legitimately use all that code. It also has a very cool logo, designed by my friend Hannah Storie.