Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.

Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.

Update – 28 April 2008 Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.

Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions. Because it is always possible, after the fact, to come up with a story about why things worked out the way they did — that the first “Harry Potter” really was a brilliant book, even if the eight publishers who rejected it didn’t know that at the time — our belief in determinism is rarely shaken, no matter how often we are surprised. But just because we now know that something happened doesn’t imply that we could have known it was going to happen at the time, even in principle, because at the time, it wasn’t necessarily going to happen at all.

Just like development, the current state of an idea in popular culture depends on the history of the idea and the random events that impinged upon it.

Hed Gulley knows one way.

Mathworks runs a biannual programming contest in Matlab. Most programming contests pit solo contestants or teams in head to head competition, each contestant working alone and submitting their entries at the end, but this one works a little differently. Entries are entered in the open. Everyone get to see every entry and everyone knows what is the best entry at all times. More than that. You can submit an entry that is only a sinle line change from the previous best entry. If your entry is faster, you are the new leader.

The contest takes place over a week and the results can be plotted and analyzed. . There are two kinds of progress. Quantum jumps and the small tweaks. Looking at the graphs it appears to me that the majority of the progress comes from the quantum jumps, maybe 75%, but I can’t really tell from the data that the article shows, although it seems like Hed has access to the appropriate data.

It is also possible that the tweaks allow a give method to be pushed to its limit and show the necessity for a new approach. Without the openness, there are more possibilities for doubt about the limits.

It would be interesting to score the contest on the basis of contestants contributions to the incremental improvement.

Link via crummy. Link to crummy via blogdigger. (Speaking of community, people in my neighborhood post a lot of interesting links.)

One aspect of Rails that hasn’t received that much attention from outsiders is the quality of the community.

I have been hanging out on the Ruby on Rails mailing list (archive). It is a great resource. Essentially everyone who has ever contributed to Rails and representatives of most of the major sites that have been deployed using Rails are regular contributors. The newest newbies hang out right next to them. It is a fascinating community.

There are about a hundred of messages a day, and dozens of new threads. Topics range from I’m having trouble installing on my platform to this feature is planned for version 1.0 to submit a patch. This is the full gamut of possibilities. There is really very little snipping or flamage. The only heated discussions that I can remember in the 6 or more months that I have been on the list have been about the rails pluralization conventions.

The interesting thing is that this list is a real community. One of the reasons for that is the care that people have exerted over the list. In regard to someone suggesting downloading a pirated copy of Agile Web Development with Rails pdf, David Heinemeier Hansson says,

I didn’t expect someone to walk into our homes and slap us in the face like this.

There is a lot to respond to in this quote, which was probably made in anger, but it reveals a flash of what makes the community work. DHH, and the other principals of the community, have a sense of pride and ownership. They care about the community

If I can build that in only of a few of the factscollector communities, I will have been wildly successful.

Update: Sept. 26th. Martin Fowler points to the general friendliness of the Ruby community as a factor in its acceptance. I’d agree. In particular, I’d draw a comparison between Ruby and Perl. If someone asks a question to comp.lang.perl.misc that has either been asked before, is well documented, or just shows that the questioner hasn’t really done their homework, they will be shot down from five directions, added to killfiles, or ignored. The leading figures of the group will be doing this.

Ask the same kind of question in the Ruby on Rails group, people will fall over themselves to answer. If someone is a little rude, or terse, in their response, they’ll apologize.

This creates a culture of openness. People have the room to ask “dumb” questions, to question how things are done, and to propose new solutions.