Adam Keys is Thinking

Mercedes (is it ok if I call you MB?), I think we need to talk. You’re doing great in Formula 1, congratulations on that! That said, you’ve gone in a weird direction with your passenger car dashboards. I suspect there are five different teams competing to win with these dashboards and I don’t think anyone, especially this car enthusiast, is winning overall.

Here’s your current entry-level SUV, the GLA. If my eye is correct, this is one of your more dated dash designs:

[caption id=“attachment_3827” align=“alignnone” width=“634”] All the buttons![/caption]

Back in the day, I think, you had someone on staff at MB whose primary job was to make sure your dashboards had at least 25 buttons on them. This was probably a challenging job before the advent of the in-car cellular phone. However, once those became common, that was 12 easy buttons if you just throw a dial pad onto the dash. And you did!

So it’s easy to identify this as an older design from the dozens (43) of buttons. But the age of this design also shows from the LCD. One, it’s somewhat small. Two, and more glaringly, you simply tacked the LCD onto the dashboard. What happened here? Did you run out of time?

I think you can do better. The eyeball vents are nice though!

Now let’s look at a slightly more modern, and much further upscale, design. Your AMG GT coupe:

[caption id=“attachment_3828” align=“alignnone” width=“673”] All the suede[/caption]

OK so you lost most of the buttons in favor of bigger, chunkier buttons. That’s good! You also made a little scoop in the dash for the LCD. That’s progress, but the placement still feels awkward. I know that’s where all your luxury car friends put the LCD now, but you’re so dominant in F1, maybe you can do better here too?

Can we take a moment to talk about the interactions a little? Your take on the rotary control is a little weird. You’ve got one, and it’s got a little hand rest on top of it. That seems good. But then the hand rest is also a touch interface for scribbling letters? Seems weird! I’ve never used that, but I’m a little skeptical.

Next, you’ve gone through some weird stuff with your shifters. You had a really lovely gated shifter on the S-class couple as long ago as the early 90’s! Lately you’ve tried steering column shifters, and now it seems you’ve settled on a soap-shaped chunk of metal that you move up and down to change directions and put it in park. I feel like you should give up the physical shifter thing and just go with (you’re gonna like this) more buttons.

My parting thought on the GT’s interior is this: width. Your designs impart a sense of tremendous girth in the dash, making the car feel bigger. We’ll come back to that immediately…

Finally, one of your most recent designs, the E-class sedan:

[caption id=“attachment_3829” align=“alignnone” width=“867”] All the pixels![/caption]

Again with a regal sense of width. Personally, I don’t like it. It makes your car seem like a giant sofa.

You are making great progress on reducing the number of buttons. Again, kudos.

OK, clearly you got a great deal on LCD panels. Plus, an almost equally good deal on eyeball vents. Good for you!

Also you put an analog clock on the dash. So that’s nice.

I don’t think we’re going to like this giant piece of software and glass thing for very long. Did you see Her? There are hardly any displays in it. All the computers are somehow inhabited by the characters, either by talking to them or interacting within a projection. Why take one of your classic instrument clusters, make that an LCD, and occasionally project information onto the windshield if the driver or passenger needs to see it there? Just a thought!

I’m a little split on the design of your wheel there. It’s nice that technically it’s a 3-spoke design but really, if you count, it’s 4 spokes. The lamest number of spokes. Perhaps with the split you were trying to add more negative space and perhaps evoke a very old, SL-like 2-spoke design? That’s a nice gesture, but I think you missed here. Surely you could engineer a straight-up 2-spoke wheel?

In summary:

• fewer buttons, less noticeable screens, more seamless interactions
• a few retro design elements (eyeball vents, analog clocks) are great, too many is too much
• reduce your five design teams (screens, buttons, wheels, interactions, A/C) down to two: driving interactions and auxiliary interactions

Hope that helps!

Sometimes I look over the options and constraints to choose something suboptimal. I have to pick the least-bad solution.

I recently chose a least-bad way to write a test. In a Rails app, the most sensible thing to solve my problem was something like this:

[code lang=text] def propagate_from_child_to_parent model_parents.find_each(&:do_a_sideeffect) end [/code]

In the test, I ended up having to write this assertion

[code lang=text] expect_any_instance_of(ModelParents).to receive(:do_a_sideeffect) [/code]

This kind of stub and assertion is clearly a smell. But, consider the alternatives:

• stub out the child model object under so that find_each returns a stub object that I can make sure do_a_sideffect is called on
• try to hack around ActiveRecords associations so it returns the same object as I inject in my test
• seek out some other result of do_a_sideeffect that I could assert on

In the end, it felt like the shady mock+assertion was the best choice. Using that particular assertion says “slow down and pay attention, a special thing is happening here”. It’s not something I want to do every time, but it was the least bad solution in this context.

Our programming languages are often structured around the problem domain of compilers and the archaic (for most of us) task of converting things people understand to a thing the computer can execute.

Why don’t our languages have deeper support for the ways we reason about problem domains or the ways we struggle to reason. For example, why aren’t state machines and checking their sanity (or marking their unsoundness) a thing in pretty much any language?

The unhelpful answer is “because you can write a state machine in library code”. Which leads me to ask, why don’t we have popular state machine clones? Why is there no xUnit or Sinatra of state machines that is widely cloned to fresh and exciting languages?

The cynical answer is “because many programmers don’t want to think that hard”. The optimistic answer is that there’s room for someone to capture this problem space as well as xUnit did for programmer testing or Sinatra did for turning URL-like strings into method calls. You could be famous!

My favorite advice on the topic of method visibility (i.e. public vs. private) comes from Python creator Guido van Rossum. It goes something like “we’re all adults here” and says it’s not really a necessary thing for compilers/runtimes to hide methods from specific callers. Don’t go mucking around in other object’s implementations. I still think that’s mostly right.

Except, coming up to speed on a new code base is vastly easier when there’s some delineation of the waterline between an object’s public API which it expects other objects to use and its private implementation which it does not. It tells me a) the private methods are open for change and refactoring and b) below the private “waterline”, don’t bother going any deeper when spelunking to figure out how this program works.

In a new or strange codebase, every little bit of tractability helps.

GraphQL is gaining purchase outside of the JavaScript communities and this seems like a pretty good thing. Shopify and GitHub have jumped on board. Absinthe (Elixir) and graphql-ruby have caught my attention, though I haven’t had an opportunity to tinker with them yet.

That said, I like that GraphQL (and JSON API) let service developers focus on exposing a specific data model and optimizing access to it rather than taking a side quest through REST API design. For application developers, building screens and interactions with the data they need defined inline seems like a big win for contextual understanding.

As ever, the risk of using any kind of mapping layer, whether its objects and relational data or JSON object graphs to downstream service calls, is creating a naive, one to one mapping that create awkwardness and inefficiency.

Ron Jeffries, Refactoring – Not on the backlog!

Simples! We take the next feature that we are asked to build, and instead of detouring around all the weeds and bushes, we take the time to clear a path through some of them. Maybe we detour around others. We improve the code where we work, and ignore the code where we don't have to work. We get a nice clean path for some of our work. Odds are, we'll visit this place again: that's how software development works.

Check out his drawings, telling the story of a project evolving from a clear lawn to one overwhelmed with brush. Once your project is overwhelmed with code slowing you down, don’t burn it down. Jeffries says we should instead use whatever work is next to do enabling refactorings to make the project work happens. Since locality is such a strong force in software, it’s likely that refactoring will help the next bit of project work. Repeat several times and a new golden path emerges through your software.

In other words, don’t reach for a new master plan when the effort to change your software goes up. Pave the cow paths through whatever work you’re doing!

As self-driving cars inch closer to a daily reality, the Trolley Problem seems to have entered our lexicon. In short, should a self-driving computer choose to avoid hitting a bunch of people and kill its single occupant as a result? Turns out people expect the car to protect the greater good second and their own skin first.

Maybe out our current political environment of unfettered gun violence, climate change, Trump-lead racism, Brexit-fueled xenophobia, and general apprehension about losing what we thought we’d earned are a kind of longer-term but still serious Trolley Problem. Would you vote to improve society at large even if it meant taking yourself down a ego/prestige/money notch?

Well when I put it that way, things seem pretty bleak!

I happened across an Alan Kay essay, Enlightened Imagination for Citizens, and it kinda helped me get through that bleakness. Some highlights:

In a raging flood, a man risks his life to save a swept away child, but two years earlier he voted against strengthening the levee whose breaching caused the flood. During an epidemic people work tirelessly to help the stricken, but ignored elementary sanitation processes that could have prevented the outbreak. More astoundingly, as many as 200,000 Americans die each year from diseases spread by their own doctors who have been ignoring elementary sanitation (including simply washing their hands when needed), but who then work diligently to try to save the patients they have infected. Studies show that about 80% of Americans are “highly concerned” about climate change, yet this percentage drops to less than 20% when the issue is combined with what it will cost to actually deal with these changes.

Regarding our inability to reason about dynamic systems:

One of the reasons the consequences were not imagined is that our human commonsense tends to think of “stability” as something static, whereas in systems it is a dynamic process that can be fragile to modest changes. One way to imagine “stability” is to take a bottle and turn it upside down. If it is gently poked, it will return to its “stable position”. But a slightly more forceful poke will topple it. It is still a system, but has moved into a new dynamic stability, one which will take much more work to restore than required to topple it.

On acting now instead of acquiring a perfect answer or solution:

When the costs of an imperfectly understood event are high or essentially irreversible, measures have to be taken even when perfect proofs are lacking. This idea is understood by most developed societies—and carried out in the form of levees and pumps, food and water stocks, etc.—but is nonetheless resisted by many of the voting public.

Perhaps the solution is to get ourselves representatives that excel at reasoning and legislation instead of politics and fundraising?

One of the reasons we are a republic with a democratic base is that the representatives can be selected to be “the best and the brightest” from the population as a whole (this was another early ideal for the great American experiment). We could argue that the current representatives are “all too representative”, but this is part of a slide in our political and social systems that needs to be shored up and improved. The idea of “national service” is now just a whisper, but it is what needs to be brought back into the forefront of what it means to be a citizen.