Global Nerdy

Here’s something I found amusing and entertaining: an explanation of the ins, outs and benefits of old-school letterpress typography, done in a 1950’s black-and-white newsreel/documentary style: Typography School. The video features David Dabner, who teaches letterpress typography at the London College of Printing and thinks that computer-based typography has made students lazy and sloppy.

[Found via Transbuddha, who found it via Fresh Signals]

The Small Insights

First, I was reminded that you never know what’s going to connect with people. I wasn’t expecting this article to gain any more attention than the usual number of pageviews and maybe a comment or two. After all, most of the laws, rules and axioms in the list have been around for a while and chances are (especially if your line of work is programming, engineering or tech) that you’ve seen at least a few of them on a web page, poster, t-shirt or mug.

Second: Sometimes all you need is a single link from a site with high readership. This is hardly a revelation; if you’ve read The Tipping Point or books of that ilk or heard the saying that goes “It isn’t what you know, it’s whom you know,” you’ve already internalized this fact. But it’s always good to have an example that you can point to. My thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for linking to the article and saying such nice things about this site on BoingBoing.

The Not-As-Small Insight

Years ago, I read Paul Fussell’s book BAD or, The Dumbing of America, a critique of that the American tendency to glorify the cheap, schlocky and superficially good and ignore genuinely good things.

One passage that stands out for me is in the chapter about the outright BADness of modern American poetry. At the end, he encouraged people that rather than writing more bad poetry, they should compile tables of easily-observable data, such as the weather every day over several years; that information would certainly be of more use to more people than painful poesy.

I’m going to ignore the cultural snobbery in Fussell’s statement and focus on the idea of compiling easily-observable data into tables because I think there’s a gem in that thought: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.

As with the second insight, as a reader of this blog (I’m assuming most readers either work in tech or follow tech news) chances are that you already knew this, deep down. But it’s such a simple and basic idea that sometimes, like the air we breathe or the high-speed connections that we didn’t have even a mere 10 years ago, we forget about it.

Consider the Laws of Software Development article. I cribbed most of the laws from Phil Haack’s article, 19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development. My additions were:

• Displaying the laws in tabular format rather than like an article
• Adding a few laws by Googling for the ones that weren’t in Phil’s list that I remembered
• Arranging the laws by name in alphabetical order
• Linking the name of each law to a page containing its description (or failing that, the most relevant page I could find)
• Naming the person who gave us the law or the person after whom the law was named and linking to the most relevant page for the person

The article merely had readily-available information, compiled into an easy-to-read format, with convenient links to additional information. And despite not being rocket science, it got a lot of eyeballs and the most comments of any article ever posted here on Global Nerdy.

Allow me to repeat the insight: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.

I’m repeating it at least partially for myself, because it’s a lesson I keep forgetting, even though I keep seeing examples all the frickin’ time:

• My friend Albert Lai, who was a high school intern at my first job, made a small fortune selling a site he helped build, MyDesktop.com to Internet.com. The site was simply a collection of tips for Windows users.
• Sites like BoingBoing and MetaFilter, and more recently del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit: they provide one-stop shopping for interesting links.
• The more successful social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook give people their social contacts and ways to interact with them in a single, convenient place
• It needn’t be limited to information, but tangible things as well. Think of Ebay and Craigslist. Home Depot. Wal-Mart. Target. Costco. Linens ‘N’ Things / Bed Bath and Beyond.
• I Can Has Cheezburger? took all those LOLcats out on the ‘net and put them in a single place. Also note that I Can Has Cheezburger? also follows an insight I had that I posted earlier: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

If you’re trying to come up with a useful and possibly profitable application — hey, I am — and you’re banging your head screaming: “I can’t come up with a new technology!”, remember the insight: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.

I know I will.

If you know of a law of computers, programming or technology that didn’t make it into yesterday’s table of laws, please let me know in the comments. I’m going to take those laws, add them to the table and post it on a permanent page in this blog.

[This was also cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog]

Inspired by Phil Haack’s article 19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development, I decided to collect laws, axioms and rules pertaining to mainstream software development and put them in a nice, easy-to-read table.

This is by no means a complete list of laws; I’ve purposely stuck to the ones that apply to everyday software development and steered clear of the more theoretical ones. Maybe I’ll compile a more complete list someday.

You’ll notice that some of the laws come from the world of biology — they also appear in some lists of software laws, and I think they still apply.

The Law	Who Said It	What it Says
Amdahl’s Law	Gene Amdahl	The speedup gained from running a program on a parallel computer is greatly limited by the fraction of that program that can’t be parallelized.
Augustine’s Second Law of Socioscience	Norman Augustine	For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.
Brooks’ Law	Fred Brooks	Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Clarke’s First Law	Arthur C. Clarke	When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clarke’s Second Law	Arthur C. Clarke	The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Clarke’s Third Law	Arthur C. Clarke	Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Conway’s Law	Melvin Conway	Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
Cope’s Rule	Edward Drinker Cope	There is a general tendency toward size increase in evolution.
Dilbert Principle	Scott Adams	The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
Ellison’s Law of Cryptography and Usability	Carl Ellison	The userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work.
Ellison’s Law of Data	Larry Ellison	Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts.
The Law of False Alerts	George Spafford	As the rate of erroneous alerts increases, operator reliance, or belief, in subsequent warnings decreases.
Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem	R. A. Fisher	The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.
Fitts’ Law	Paul Fitts	The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.
Flon’s Axiom	Lawrence Flon	There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs.
Gilder’s Law	George Gilder	Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.
Godwin’s Law	Mike Godwin	As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Grosch’s Law	Herb Grosch	The cost of computing systems increases as the square root of the computational power of the systems.
Hartree’s Law	Douglas Hartree	Whatever the state of a project, the time a project-leader will estimate for completion is constant.
Heisenbug Uncertainty Principle	Jim Gray	Most production software bugs are soft: they go away when you look at them.
Hick’s Law	William Edmund Hick	The time to make a decision is a function of the possible choices he or she has.
Hoare’s Law of Large Programs	C. A. R. Hoare	Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.
Hofstadter’s Law	Douglas Hofstadter	A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience	Jakob Nielsen	Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Joy’s Law	Bill Joy	smart(employees) = log(employees), or “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
Kerckhoffs’ Principle	Auguste Kerckhoffs	In cryptography, a system should be secure even if everything about the system, except for a small piece of information — the key — is public knowledge.
Linus’ Law	Eric S. Raymond, who named it after Linus Torvalds	Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Lister’s Law	Timothy Lister	People under time pressure don’t think faster.
Metcalfe’s Law	Robert Metcalfe	In network theory, the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
Moore’s Law	Gordon Moore	The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double in about 18 months.
Murphy’s Law	Captain Edward A. Murphy	If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.
Nathan’s First Law	Nathan Myhrvold	Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.
Ninety-ninety Law	Tom Cargill	The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
Occam’s Razor	William of Occam	The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.
Osborn’s Law	Don Osborn	Variables won’t; constants aren’t.
Postel’s Law (the second clause of the Robustness Principle)	Jon Postel	Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.
Pareto Principle (a.k.a. “The 80-20 Rule”)	Suggested by Joseph Juran, named after Vilifredo Pareto	For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
Parkinson’s Law	C. Northcote Parkinson	Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Pesticide Paradox	Bruce Beizer	Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffectual.
The Peter Principle	Laurence J. Peter	In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Reed’s Law	David P. Reed	The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, scales exponentially with the size of the network.
Rock’s Law	Arthur Rock	The cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.
Sixty-sixty Rule	Robert Glass	Sixty percent of software’s dollar is spent on maintenance, and sixty percent of that maintenance is enhancement.
Spector’s Law	Lincoln Spector	The time it takes your favorite application to complete a given task doubles with each new revision.
Spafford’s Adoption Rule	George Spafford	For just about any technology, be it an operating system, application or network, when a sufficient level of adoption is reached, that technology then becomes a threat vector.
Sturgeon’s Revelation	Theodore Sturgeon	Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Tesler’s Law of Conservation as Complexity	Larry Tesler	You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you’ve reached that point, you can only shift the burden around.
Weibull’s Power Law	Waloddi Weibull	The logarithm of failure rates increases linearly with the logarithm of age.
Wirth’s Law	Niklaus Wirth	Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
Zawinski’s Law	Jamie Zawinski	Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.