In a book called Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood. I came across some intriguing research about rigid thinking. The research entailed asking three groups of kids – four-year-olds, six-year-olds, and eight-year-olds -- to balance rods of different lengths on a pencil.

Continuous Integration build tools are great: they help us ensure our product works after every commit, keep historical data and metrics, build our product for all target environments, and do many more useful things.  But there’s one key aspect that often gets overlooked:

They’re fun.

There’s an excellent article in today’s New York Times (5/21/09) by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” a book I recommend and  frequently quote in my own writings. The article is called “What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous” and the gist of it is

Personally, I thought a self-titled tutorial sounded a bit arrogant, but Lee Copeland talked me into it, and it seems to have attracted attention anyway. According to the hosts, it was the most attended session at something just above 50 people. Go figure. Lee was right, and I was wrong.

I just opened a letter from CapitalOne with a very unexpected message. The letter says "You've earned a bonus of $2,500!", saying it's their thanks to me on my credit card anniversary, and suggesting that I use it for a night on the town.

I read it again after I picked up my jaw from the floor...

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One of the practices recommended by Extreme Programming (XP) is to keep a ten-minute build.  Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres write in Extreme Programming Explained: “Automatically build the whole system and run all of the tests in ten minutes.  A build that takes longer than ten minutes will be used much less often, missing the opportunity for feedback.”

So what do you do when your build takes longer than ten minutes? 

Am I the only one who gets bugged about the misuse – and misunderstanding – of the term “average”? One recent instance, for example, is the much-touted statistic regarding flu outbreaks -- that every year, an average of 36,000 people die from the flu.

False!

TODO comments are a useful tool for short-term reminders, but are somtimes used as an excuse to write bad code.

You probably know the phrase: A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It was used to test typewriters, because it has all the letters of the alphabet.

I recently read a strikingly clever book based on that sentence that I think will appeal to many of my software buddies: Ella Minnow Pea (i.e., LMNOP) by Mark Dunn.