MileStone for my project

Nice. Today, finally got the system works together. After around 1 year, soon I got more first product :)

Designing Reusable Classes

Ralph E. Johnson & Brian Foote

Software reuse does not happen by accident, even with object-oriented programming languages. System designers must plan to reuse old components and must look for new reusable components.

Evolutionary lifecycles are the rule rather than the exception. Software maintenance can be categorized as corrective, adaptive, and perfective

Classes usually start out being application dependent. It is always worthwhile to examine a nearly-complete project to see if new abstract classes and frameworks can be discovered. They can probably be reused in later projects, and their presence in the current project will make later enhancements much easier. Thus, creating abstract classes and frameworks is both a way of scavenging components for later reuse and a way of cleaning up a design. The final class hierarchy is a description of how the system ought to have been designed, though it may bear little relation to the original design.

One sign that a good abstraction has been found is that code size decreases, indicating that code is being reused. Many Smalltalk projects have periods in which the size of the code increases at a steady rate, followed by periods in which little change occurs to the code, followed by a sharp decrease in the size of the code. Code size increases as the programmers add new classes and new methods to old classes. Eventually the programmers realize that they need to rearrange the class hierarchy. They spend a bit of time in debate and experimentation and then make the necessary changes, usually creating a new abstract class or two. Since Smalltalk programs tend to be compact, it is feasible to rewrite a system many times during its development. The result is much easier to understand and maintain than typical nonobject-oriented systems.

Finding new abstractions is difficult. In general, it seems that an abstraction is usually discovered by generalizing from a number of concrete examples. 

Rules for Finding Standard Protocols

Rule 1: Recursion introduction

Rule 2: Eliminate case analysis

Rule 3: Reduce the number of arguments

Rule 4: Reduce the size of methods

Rules for Finding Abstract Classes

Rule 5: Class hierarchies should be deep and narrow

Rule 6: The top of the class hierarchy should be abstract

Rule 7: Minimize accesses to variables

Rule 8: Subclasses should be specializations

Rules for Finding Frameworks

Rule 9: Split large classes

Rule 10: Factor implementation differences into subcomponents

Rule 11: Separate methods that do not communicate

Rule 12: Send messages to components instead of to self

Rule 13: Reduce implicit parameter passing

追梦战士，赞！！！

这两天一直在追《中国好歌曲》。哇！！！藏龙卧虎！！！ 我只看到，听到雷雷战鼓，冲天的坚韧！赞。

这么多梦想的追寻者，和他们的坎坷，艰辛和付出比起来，我真的是太，太，太他妈的幸运了！！！

哥听的不是歌，听的是寂寞

致同在路中的追梦人，你懂的。。。

梦的堡垒
http://v.qq.com/cover/b/bhcskrkfmfydat2/n00133d1tad.html

氢气球，飞上天，
以为不朽。
我的双脚，
抵不在，路的引诱。
从今天起，
不再做货架的罐头。
从今天起，
再痛也要自己走。
放肆地被击碎，才发现我的梦，
躲在坚强坚强的堡垒！
疯狂地被击退，才发现我的梦，
躲在坚强坚强的堡垒！
有些伤口，莫名痛，
变成理由。
现实这借口，说太久，
变成理由。
从今天起，
做独自奔跑的犀牛。
从今天起，
再痛也要自己走。
创伤地被击碎，才发现我的梦，
躲在坚强坚强的堡垒！
疯狂地被击退，才发现我的梦，
住在坚强坚强的堡垒！
疯狂地被击退，才发现我的梦，
住在坚强坚强的堡垒！
疯狂地被击退，才发现我的梦，
住在坚强坚强的堡垒！

伤
http://v.qq.com/cover/b/bhcskrkfmfydat2/r0013pghbyy.html
我需要一个理由，安抚破碎的信念，脱下沉重的躯壳。
想隐藏一个谎言，掩饰着卑微的脆弱，不能再回到从前。
当所有的人失去，原本该有的冲动，怎么改变。
伤！！！
在背后，
抽刺着我，不保留。
重拾所有的伤痛，
想要撑着，我不会痛，
伤！！！
在胸口，
拉扯着我，不保留。
冲破所有的嘲弄，挣脱枷锁。
就让热血痛快汹涌。
我需要一个理由，安抚破碎的信念，脱下沉重的躯壳。
伤！！！
在背后，
撕裂着我，燃烧我，
想像磨灭的曲折。
怎么继续，我不会痛。
伤！！！
在胸口，
拉扯着我，沸腾我。
冲破所有嘲弄。

《我雖死去》， 新年新期盼，GCD早日倒台！

终于明白了那句话，孩子，不是老人变坏，而是坏人变老了！

什么玩意！文革这个疤不能揭呀，简直就是人间地狱。。。

GCD是人类文明的奇葩，原始社会在现代文明的延续。。。

Development Process Types, and what is the open source?

http://zguide.zeromq.org/page%3aall#Licensing-and-Ownership

Trash-Oriented Design

The most popular design process in large businesses seems to be Trash-Oriented Design, or TOD. TOD feeds off the belief that all we need to make money are great ideas. It's tenacious nonsense, but a powerful crutch for people who lack imagination. The theory goes that ideas are rare, so the trick is to capture them. It's like non-musicians being awed by a guitar player, not realizing that great talent is so cheap it literally plays on the streets for coins.

The main output of TODs is expensive "ideation": concepts, design documents, and products that go straight into the trash can. It works as follows:

• The Creative People come up with long lists of "we could do X and Y". I've seen endlessly detailed lists of everything amazing a product could do. We've all been guilty of this. Once the creative work of idea generation has happened, it's just a matter of execution, of course.
• So the managers and their consultants pass their brilliant ideas to designers who create acres of preciously refined design documents. The designers take the tens of ideas the managers came up with, and turn them into hundreds of world-changing designs.
• These designs get given to engineers who scratch their heads and wonder who the heck came up with such nonsense. They start to argue back, but the designs come from up high, and really, it's not up to engineers to argue with creative people and expensive consultants.
• So the engineers creep back to their cubicles, humiliated and threatened into building the gigantic but oh-so-elegant junk heap. It is bone-breaking work because the designs take no account of practical costs. Minor whims might take weeks of work to build. As the project gets delayed, the managers bully the engineers into giving up their evenings and weekends.
• Eventually, something resembling a working product makes it out of the door. It's creaky and fragile, complex and ugly. The designers curse the engineers for their incompetence and pay more consultants to put lipstick onto the pig, and slowly the product starts to look a little nicer.
• By this time, the managers have started to try to sell the product and they find, shockingly, that no one wants it. Undaunted, they courageously build million-dollar web sites and ad campaigns to explain to the public why they absolutely need this product. They do deals with other businesses to force the product on the lazy, stupid, and ungrateful market.
• After twelve months of intense marketing, the product still isn't making profits. Worse, it suffers dramatic failures and gets branded in the press as a disaster. The company quietly shelves it, fires the consultants, buys a competing product from a small startup and rebrands that as its own Version 2. Hundreds of millions of dollars end up in the trash.
• Meanwhile, another visionary manager somewhere in the organization drinks a little too much tequila with some marketing people and has a Brilliant Idea.

Trash-Oriented Design would be a caricature if it wasn't so common. Something like 19 out of 20 market-ready products built by large firms are failures (yes, 87% of statistics are made up on the spot). The remaining 1 in 20 probably only succeeds because the competitors are so bad and the marketing is so aggressive.

The main lessons of TOD are quite straightforward but hard to swallow. They are:

• Ideas are cheap. No exceptions. There are no brilliant ideas. Anyone who tries to start a discussion with "oooh, we can do this too!" should be beaten down with all the passion one reserves for traveling evangelists. It is like sitting in a cafe at the foot of a mountain, drinking a hot chocolate and telling others, "Hey, I have a great idea, we can climb that mountain! And build a chalet on top! With two saunas! And a garden! Hey, and we can make it solar powered! Dude, that's awesome! What color should we paint it? Green! No, blue! OK, go and make it, I'll stay here and make spreadsheets and graphics!"
• The starting point for a good design process is to collect real problems that confront real people. The second step is to evaluate these problems with the basic question, "How much is it worth to solve this problem?" Having done that, we can collect that set of problems that are worth solving.
• Good solutions to real problems will succeed as products. Their success will depend on how good and cheap the solution is, and how important the problem is (and sadly, how big the marketing budgets are). But their success will also depend on how much they demand in effort to use—in other words, how simple they are.

Now, after slaying the dragon of utter irrelevance, we attack the demon of complexity.

Complexity-Oriented Design

Really good engineering teams and small firms can usually build decent products. But the vast majority of products still end up being too complex and less successful than they might be. This is because specialist teams, even the best, often stubbornly apply a process I call Complexity-Oriented Design, or COD, which works as follows:

• Management correctly identifies some interesting and difficult problem with economic value. In doing so, they already leapfrog over any TOD team.
• The team with enthusiasm starts to build prototypes and core layers. These work as designed and thus encouraged, the team go off into intense design and architecture discussions, coming up with elegant schemas that look beautiful and solid.
• Management comes back and challenges the team with yet more difficult problems. We tend to equate cost with value, so the harder and more expensive to solve, the more the solution should be worth, in their minds.
• The team, being engineers and thus loving to build stuff, build stuff. They build and build and build and end up with massive, perfectly-designed complexity.
• The products go to market, and the market scratches its head and asks, "Seriously, is this the best you can do?" People do use the products, especially if they aren't spending their own money in climbing the learning curve.
• Management gets positive feedback from its larger customers, who share the same idea that high cost (in training and use) means high value, and so continues to push the process.
• Meanwhile somewhere across the world, a small team is solving the same problem using a better process, and a year later smashes the market to little pieces.

COD is characterized by a team obsessively solving the wrong problems in a form of collective delusion. COD products tend to be large, ambitious, complex, and unpopular. Much open source software is the output of COD processes. It is insanely hard for engineers to stop extending a design to cover more potential problems. They argue, "What if someone wants to do X?" but never ask themselves, "What is the real value of solving X?"

A good example of COD in practice is Bluetooth, a complex, over-designed set of protocols that users hate. It continues to exist only because in a massively-patented industry there are no real alternatives. Bluetooth is perfectly secure, which is close to pointless for a proximity protocol. At the same time, it lacks a standard API for developers, meaning it's really costly to use Bluetooth in applications.

On the #zeromq IRC channel, Wintre once wrote of how enraged he was many years ago when he "found that XMMS 2 had a working plugin system, but could not actually play music."

COD is a form of large-scale "rabbit-holing", in which designers and engineers cannot distance themselves from the technical details of their work. They add more and more features, utterly misreading the economics of their work.

The main lessons of COD are also simple, but hard for experts to swallow. They are:

• Making stuff that you don't immediately have a need for is pointless. Doesn't matter how talented or brilliant you are, if you just sit down and make stuff people are not actually asking for, you are most likely wasting your time.
• Problems are not equal. Some are simple, and some are complex. Ironically, solving the simpler problems often has more value to more people than solving the really hard ones. So if you allow engineers to just work on random things, they'll mostly focus on the most interesting but least worthwhile things.
• Engineers and designers love to make stuff and decoration, and this inevitably leads to complexity. It is crucial to have a "stop mechanism", a way to set short, hard deadlines that force people to make smaller, simpler answers to just the most crucial problems.

Simplicity Oriented Design

Finally, we come to the rare but precious Simplicity Oriented Design, or SOD. This process starts with a realization: we do not know what we have to make until after we start making it. Coming up with ideas or large-scale designs isn't just wasteful, it's a direct hindrance to designing the truly accurate solutions. The really juicy problems are hidden like far valleys, and any activity except active scouting creates a fog that hides those distant valleys. You need to keep mobile, pack light, and move fast.

SOD works as follows:

• We collect a set of interesting problems (by looking at how people use technology or other products) and we line these up from simple to complex, looking for and identifying patterns of use.
• We take the simplest, most dramatic problem and we solve this with a minimal plausible solution, or "patch". Each patch solves exactly a genuine and agreed-upon problem in a brutally minimal fashion.
• We apply one measure of quality to patches, namely "Can this be done any simpler while still solving the stated problem?" We can measure complexity in terms of concepts and models that the user has to learn or guess in order to use the patch. The fewer, the better. A perfect patch solves a problem with zero learning required by the user.
• Our product development consists of a patch that solves the problem "we need a proof of concept" and then evolves in an unbroken line to a mature series of products, through hundreds or thousands of patches piled on top of each other.
• We do not do anything that is not a patch. We enforce this rule with formal processes that demand that every activity or task is tied to a genuine and agreed-upon problem, explicitly enunciated and documented.
• We build our projects into a supply chain where each project can provide problems to its "suppliers" and receive patches in return. The supply chain creates the "stop mechanism" because when people are impatiently waiting for an answer, we necessarily cut our work short.
• Individuals are free to work on any projects, and provide patches at any place they feel it's worthwhile. No individuals "own" any project, except to enforce the formal processes. A single project can have many variations, each a collection of different, competing patches.
• Projects export formal and documented interfaces so that upstream (client) projects are unaware of change happening in supplier projects. Thus multiple supplier projects can compete for client projects, in effect creating a free and competitive market.
• We tie our supply chain to real users and external clients and we drive the whole process by rapid cycles so that a problem received from outside users can be analyzed, evaluated, and solved with a patch in a few hours.
• At every moment from the very first patch, our product is shippable. This is essential, because a large proportion of patches will be wrong (10-30%) and only by giving the product to users can we know which patches have become problems that need solving.

SOD is a hill-climbing algorithm, a reliable way of finding optimal solutions to the most significant problems in an unknown landscape. You don't need to be a genius to use SOD successfully, you just need to be able to see the difference between the fog of activity and the progress towards new real problems.

People have pointed out that hill-climbing algorithms have known limitations. One gets stuck on local peaks, mainly. But this is nonetheless how life itself works: collecting tiny incremental improvements over long periods of time. There is no intelligent designer. We reduce the risk of local peaks by spreading out widely across the landscape, but it is somewhat moot. The limitations aren't optional, they are physical laws. The theory says,this is how innovation really works, so better embrace it and work with it than try to work on the basis of magical thinking.

And in fact once you see all innovation as more or less successful hill-climbing, you realize why some teams and companies and products get stuck in a never-never land of diminishing prospects. They simply don't have the diversity and collective intelligence to find better hills to climb. When Nokia killed their open source projects, they cut their own throat.

A really good designer with a good team can use SOD to build world-class products, rapidly and accurately. To get the most out of SOD the designer has to use the product continuously, from day one, and develop his or her ability to smell out problems such as inconsistency, surprising behavior, and other forms of friction. We naturally overlook many annoyances, but a good designer picks these up and thinks about how to patch them. Design is about removing friction in the use of a product.

In an open source setting, we do this work in public. There's no "let's open the code" moment. Projects that do this are in my view missing the point of open source, which is to engage your users in your exploration, and to build community around the seed of the architecture.

What is innovation? What are the talents?

http://zguide.zeromq.org/page%3aall#Licensing-and-Ownership

In the dominant theory of innovation, brilliant individuals reflect on large problem sets and then carefully and precisely create a solution. Sometimes they will have "eureka" moments where they "get" brilliantly simple answers to whole large problem sets. The inventor, and the process of invention are rare, precious, and can command a monopoly. History is full of such heroic individuals. We owe them our modern world.

Looking more closely, however, and you will see that the facts don't match. History doesn't show lone inventors. It shows lucky people who steal or claim ownership of ideas that are being worked on by many. It shows brilliant people striking lucky once, and then spending decades on fruitless and pointless quests. The best known large-scale inventors like Thomas Edison were in fact just very good at systematic broad research done by large teams. It's like claiming that Steve Jobs invented every device made by Apple. It is a nice myth, good for marketing, but utterly useless as practical science.

Recent history, much better documented and less easy to manipulate, shows this well. The Internet is surely one of the most innovative and fast-moving areas of technology, and one of the best documented. It has no inventor. Instead, it has a massive economy of people who have carefully and progressively solved a long series of immediate problems, documented their answers, and made those available to all. The innovative nature of the Internet comes not from a small, select band of Einsteins. It comes from RFCs anyone can use and improve, made by hundreds and thousands of smart, but not uniquely smart, individuals. It comes from open source software anyone can use and improve. It comes from sharing, scale of community, and the continuous accretion of good solutions and disposal of bad ones.

Here thus is an alternative theory of innovation:

1. There is an infinite problem/solution terrain.
2. This terrain changes over time according to external conditions.
3. We can only accurately perceive problems to which we are close.
4. We can rank the cost/benefit economics of problems using a market for solutions.
5. There is an optimal solution to any solvable problem.
6. We can approach this optimal solution heuristically, and mechanically.
7. Our intelligence can make this process faster, but does not replace it.

There are a few corollaries to this:

• Individual creativity matters less than process. Smarter people may work faster, but they may also work in the wrong direction. It's the collective vision of reality that keeps us honest and relevant.
• We don't need road maps if we have a good process. Functionality will emerge and evolve over time as solutions compete for market share.
• We don't invent solutions so much as discover them. All sympathies to the creative soul. It's just an information processing machine that likes to polish its own ego and collect karma.
• Intelligence is a social effect, though it feels personal. A person cut off from others eventually stops thinking. We can neither collect problems nor measure solutions without other people.
• The size and diversity of the community is a key factor. Larger, more diverse communities collect more relevant problems, and solve them more accurately, and do this faster, than a small expert group.

So, when we trust the solitary experts, they make classic mistakes. They focus on ideas, not problems. They focus on the wrong problems. They make misjudgments about the value of solving problems. They don't use their own work.

Can we turn the above theory into a reusable process? In late 2011, I started documenting C4 and similar contracts, and using them both in ØMQ and in closed source projects. The underlying process is something I call "Simplicity Oriented Design", or SOD. This is a reproducible way of developing simple and elegant products. It organizes people into flexible supply chains that are able to navigate a problem landscape rapidly and cheaply. They do this by building, testing, and keeping or discarding minimal plausible solutions, called "patches". Living products consist of long series of patches, applied one atop the other.

SOD is relevant first because it's how we evolve ØMQ. It's also the basis for the design process we will use in Chapter 7 - Advanced Architecture using 0MQ to develop larger-scale ØMQ applications. Of course, you can use any software architecture methodology with ØMQ.

To best understand how we ended up with SOD, let's look at the alternatives.

Philosophy, Ultimate Wise

http://zguide.zeromq.org/page%3aall#toc89

By Pieter Hintjens, CEO of iMatix

Psychology of Software Architecture

Dirkjan Ochtman pointed me to Wikipedia's definition of Software Architecture as "the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprise software elements, relations among them, and properties of both". For me this vapid and circular jargon is a good example of how miserably little we understand what actually makes a successful large scale software architecture.

Architecture is the art and science of making large artificial structures for human use. If there is one thing I've learned and applied successfully in 30 years of making larger and larger software systems, it is this: software is about people. Large structures in themselves are meaningless. It's how they function for human use that matters. And in software, human use starts with the programmers who make the software itself.

The core problems in software architecture are driven by human psychology, not technology. There are many ways our psychology affects our work. I could point to the way teams seem to get stupider as they get larger or when they have to work across larger distances. Does that mean the smaller the team, the more effective? How then does a large global community like ØMQ manage to work successfully?

The ØMQ community wasn't accidental. It was a deliberate design, my contribution to the early days when the code came out of a cellar in Bratislava. The design was based on my pet science of "Social Architecture", which Wikipedia defines as "the conscious design of an environment that encourages a desired range of social behaviors leading towards some goal or set of goals." I define this as more specifically as "the process, and the product, of planning, designing, and growing an online community."

One of the tenets of Social Architecture is that how we organize is more significant thanwho we are. The same group, organized differently, can produce wholly different results. We are like peers in a ØMQ network, and our communication patterns have a dramatic impact on our performance. Ordinary people, well connected, can far outperform a team of experts using poor patterns. If you're the architect of a larger ØMQ application, you're going to have to help others find the right patterns for working together. Do this right, and your project can succeed. Do it wrong, and your project will fail.

The two most important psychological elements are that we're really bad at understanding complexity and that we are so good at working together to divide and conquer large problems. We're highly social apes, and kind of smart, but only in the right kind of crowd.

So here is my short list of the Psychological Elements of Software Architecture:

• Stupidity: our mental bandwidth is limited, so we're all stupid at some point. The architecture has to be simple to understand. This is the number one rule: simplicity beats functionality, every single time. If you can't understand an architecture on a cold gray Monday morning before coffee, it is too complex.
• Selfishness: we act only out of self-interest, so the architecture must create space and opportunity for selfish acts that benefit the whole. Selfishness is often indirect and subtle. For example, I'll spend hours helping someone else understand something because that could be worth days to me later.
• Laziness: we make lots of assumptions, many of which are wrong. We are happiest when we can spend the least effort to get a result or to test an assumption quickly, so the architecture has to make this possible. Specifically, that means it must be simple.
• Jealousy: we're jealous of others, which means we'll overcome our stupidity and laziness to prove others wrong and beat them in competition. The architecture thus has to create space for public competition based on fair rules that anyone can understand.
• Fear: we're unwilling to take risks, especially if it makes us look stupid. Fear of failure is a major reason people conform and follow the group in mass stupidity. The architecture should make silent experimentation easy and cheap, giving people opportunity for success without punishing failure.
• Reciprocity: we'll pay extra in terms of hard work, even money, to punish cheats and enforce fair rules. The architecture should be heavily rule-based, telling people how to work together, but not what to work on.
• Conformity: we're happiest to conform, out of fear and laziness, which means if the patterns are good, clearly explained and documented, and fairly enforced, we'll naturally choose the right path every time.
• Pride: we're intensely aware of our social status, and we'll work hard to avoid looking stupid or incompetent in public. The architecture has to make sure every piece we make has our name on it, so we'll have sleepless nights stressing about what others will say about our work.
• Greed: we're ultimately economic animals (see selfishness), so the architecture has to give us economic incentive to invest in making it happen. Maybe it's polishing our reputation as experts, maybe it's literally making money from some skill or component. It doesn't matter what it is, but there must be economic incentive. Think of architecture as a market place, not an engineering design.

These strategies work on a large scale but also on a small scale, within an organization or team.