This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Micah Elliott.
Original Post: Laws to Live By
Feed Title: Micah Elliott
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MicahElliott
Feed Description: Follow Micah as he makes connections around the Portland area, participates in community hacking events, explores the blogosphere, bounces ideas around, and tries to change the world by catching a big wave.
Geeks love to classify and name things. We like things to be tidy and well-defined. We like to put things in buckets and directories and tables, and we like to associate things with tags and attributes. What's difficult, though, is recognizing and classifying situations and phenomena. But at some level we are able to categorize them under laws or principles, usually in the namesake of the person who discovered them.
For example, your boss just told you that you must immediately stop using that wretched wiki because... uh... it doesn't support some MS Word feature, and Word is what we use on this team. Really, it's just that since his promotion to management, the Office suite has become his livelihood, and he just can't figure out wikis. This well-known phenomenon -- of bosses rising to a level of incompetence -- is the Peter Principle. Or maybe this is better classified as Rothbard's law -- that everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
Some of the laws are invalid, though. Your boss probably subscribes to, and thrives on, Parkinson's Law, and that's why he told you that you have three months to complete what he estimated to be a nine-month project. And thanks to Warsaw's First Law, you're now into the third year.
At one exciting time in my life I actually went through the complete print copy of the New Hacker's Dictionary, and made a list of all the laws mentioned. I think the list had some 15 entries, most of which I was getting pretty good at citing. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that many of the laws have now been gathered in a wikipedia page of eponymous laws! That list might be worth memorizing, though many of them don't apply directly to software. And it's certainly not comprehensive. Other places to search are the C2 wiki, for laws, principles, and theorems; and the Jargon File.
Another fun way to geek-out is to practice classifying types of bugs. Expect an enumeration here sometime soon.
If you liked this post, you might also be interested in Wikipedia's list of eponyms, and also the list of paradoxes. If you see any problems with this post, please refer to Skitt's Law.
Previous Topic
