Re: Do We Need a New Internet?

That was the question asked by the New York Times in this article.

If you were in for the short answer and want to leave that quickly... here it is. No.

What I really liked about this article how that "growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over".

Start over? What happen when you start over? Ask Netscape, dBase, and many other. Joel Spolsky have written this inside his blog in April 2000. Close to 9 years ago and I still agree with him. But those are private company that failed because they were in a competition with other companies. That can't be true for the internet right? The current network is now spread to pretty much all countries in the world. The United States of America are still among the leaders and the ones bringing bright ideas/technology to improve what we already have. If America were to drop out of the Internet and start their own thing, 2 things would happen.

First the network would stay alive (how many countries can just start over?). And America would seriously lag behind... like Netscape, dBase, etc. Sound familiar? Yep. That's it's... starting from scratch.

What I really disliked in the article is that "[...] users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety". Americans already did this and nobody is really more safe. I'll refer to my good friend Ben to take over for this one: "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.".

So... No. There won't be any new "Internet". We must focus on what we already have. Like Joel Spolsky already wrote in this April 2000 article, "It's harder to read code than to write it". Taken on an IT side, it would mean that it's harder to understand how everything is working than to just start over and start from scratch. Starting from scratch is easy because you have a green field but just like the current network, it would become really fast as close to what it is today. If it's faster, people will find bigger things to transfer. If it's safer, people will find bug in the software somewhere and exploit them. If you have less freedom... that will always be gone.

So stop complaining. Fight for Net Neutrality but please stop believing that starting anew will solve all your problems. Most of the time... it only bring other problems that you haven't seen before and nothing would have really changed.

Response on "A Rant on Professionalism"

Chad Myers' posted this post about making changes and trying to improve our profession. Here is my comments.

There was a time back then that blacksmith were forging metal to make tools, weapons, nails, etc. What the blacksmith was doing was not recorded anywhere and was true craft. What he learned, he passed this information  back to his students. With time, it became a science with predictable results.

Building software is a little bit how blacksmith were doing tools 300 years ago. We do have some methodology but none are guaranteed to give a successful software. I've seen lot of developers who just code away the features until the software works. I also know developers who are proud of what they do and try to improve the way they build software.

I find it really sad that people try to kill a methodology that produced one mistake or a failed project. Each methodology have their own benefits and disadvantage. Waterfall development have their place (believe it or not) when the requirements are fixed an will probably never changed as it is often the case in code that will go inside hardware or into outer space (see this article about the NASA software development for the shuttle). Agile is mostly good inside business with requirements that change along the way (80% of all development?). But the methodology is not the only thing to blame. There is unskilled developers, inexperienced team leader, unrealistic promises/deadlines, salesmen that promised more than the team could deliver, etc. All those elements can bring down a project whatever the methodology you are using.

On the Usage of tools

Tools can get you so far as where you want to go. Tools can't help you decide on where you are going. That's why I believe in ALT.NET. I don't care where the tools come from. If it's not ready and reliable, I'm not using it. Entity Framework looks good but guess what? I'm not using it for production. Too early. LINQ? Solid enough. For data mapping, we use LINQ to SQL for simple scenarios but I've used LLBLGen Pro, CodeSmith NetTier, SubSonic (not NHibernate yet but I promise I'll give it a try). Notice something in this list? No tools from Microsoft beside LINQ to SQL. DataSet and DataAdapters were nice but were not flexible/extensible easily and hardly fitted inside your model.

Whatever is done, bad technology choice can also lead to a project failure. We are far away from a methodology choice.

Conclusion

I totally agree with Chad on this. Much is left to do. But before we can make our craft a science... we must keep on trying new methodology, gather success AND failure. We must learn from every choice we make.

Without this, we're only going backward.