To My Mother on her Shared Facebook Post

The tl;dr is NOPE, but I'll post the whole of it here, and then break it down a bit.

Original Text

Hallelujah...Hallelujah
Everyone needs to read this.
CBS and Katie Couric must be in a panic and rushing to reassure everyone that this is not network policy--re Andy Rooney's commentary on prayer. Folks, this is the year that we RE-TAKE AMERICA!
Andy Rooney and his prayer:
I don't believe in Santa Claus, but I'm not going to sue somebody for singing a Ho-Ho-Ho song in December. I don't agree with Darwin, but I didn't go out and hire a lawyer when my high school teacher taught his Theory of Evolution.
Life, liberty or your pursuit of happiness will not be endangered because someone says a 30-second prayer before a football game. So what's the big deal? It's not like somebody is up there reading the entire Book of Acts. They're just talking to a God they believe in and asking Him to grant safety to the players on the field and the fans going home from the game.
But it's a Christian prayer, some will argue.
Yes, and this is the United States of America, founded on Christian principles. According to our very own phone book, Christian churches outnumber all others better than 200-to-1. So what would you expect -- somebody chanting Hare Krishna?
If I went to a football game in Jerusalem, I would expect to hear a Jewish prayer.
If I went to a soccer game in Baghdad, I would expect to hear a Muslim prayer.
If I went to a ping pong match in China, I would expect to hear someone pray to Buddha.
And I wouldn't be offended. It wouldn't bother me one bit.
When in Rome ......
But what about the atheists? Is another argument.
What about them? Nobody is asking them to be baptized. We're not going to pass the collection plate. Just humor us for 30 seconds. If that's asking too much, bring a Walkman or a pair of earplugs. Go to the bathroom. Visit the concession stand. Call your lawyer!
Unfortunately, one or two will make that call. One or two will tell thousands what they can and cannot do. I don't think a short prayer at a football game is going to shake the world's foundations.
Christians are just sick and tired of turning the other cheek while our courts strip us of all our rights. Our parents and grandparents taught us to pray before eating, to pray before we go to sleep. Our Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. Now a handful of people and their lawyers are telling us to cease praying.
God, help us. And if that last sentence offends you, well, just sue me.
The silent majority has been silent too long. It's time we tell that one or two who scream loud enough to be heard that the vast majority doesn't care what they want. It is time that the majority rules! It's time we tell them, "You don't have to pray; you don't have to say the Pledge of Allegiance; you don't have to believe in God or attend services that honor Him. That is your right, and we will honor your right; but by golly, you are no longer going to take our rights away. We are fighting back, and we WILL WIN!
God bless us one and all...Especially those who denounce Him. God bless America, despite all our faults, We are still the greatest nation of all. God bless our service men who are fighting to protect our right to pray and worship God.
Let's make 2019/2020 the year the silent majority is heard, and we put God back as the foundation of our families and institutions. And our military forces come home from all the wars.
Keep looking up.
If you agree with this, please pass it on. Copy and paste! Amen!

Taking this at face value

First, I'd like to point out that Andy Rooney cannot possibly have penned this "prayer" recently (2019) as he has been dead since 2011. Katie Couric hasn't worked for CBS since 2011 as well, so I suppose that is consistency of a sort.

I don't believe in Santa Claus, but I'm not going to sue somebody for singing a Ho-Ho-Ho song in December.

That's probably factually accurate. Rooney doesn't seem particularly litigious, and he said this in "Sincerely, Andy Rooney":

We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.

 Things are about to start going downhill on this, if you hadn't picked up on it.

I don't agree with Darwin, but I didn't go out and hire a lawyer when my high school teacher taught his Theory of Evolution.

Rooney would have been in high school in the mid-1940s. It's possible that since the Scopes trial that human evolution would have been taught, but seems unlikely that it would have been featured as the unifying theory of biology that it is understood as today until a couple decades later.

Life, liberty or your pursuit of happiness will not be endangered because someone says a 30-second prayer before a football game. So what's the big deal? It's not like somebody is up there reading the entire Book of Acts. They're just talking to a God they believe in and asking Him to grant safety to the players on the field and the fans going home from the game.

If the players, of their own volition, have a prayer at the beginning of a game, that's perfectly fine. The old adage "as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school," is as true as ever. Nobody is saying the students cannot exercise their religion (within reason) any way they want in school or in extracurricular activities. Where the problems start is when faculty and staff lead prayers, or that a religious leader is brought in to lead a prayer. More on that in a bit.

But it's a Christian prayer, some will argue.

Nope, irrelevant.

Yes, and this is the United States of America, founded on Christian principles.

That's quite a claim. While many of our founding fathers were deists and/or Christians, that does not make our country founded on Christian principles. Whole books have been written contesting this notion. Please tell me how having a celestial dictator who made a human sacrifice to himself as atonement for sinful creatures he made is the basis for the 3 branches of government with checks and balances between them.

 According to our very own phone book, Christian churches outnumber all others better than 200-to-1. So what would you expect -- somebody chanting Hare Krishna?

Here's a fundamental principle that our founding fathers actually wrote, Thomas Jefferson:

All . . . will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect and to violate would be oppression.

Yes, if you're going to allow Christian prayers, be prepared to allow for all the others as well. Their voices deserve equal protection.

But what about the atheists? Is another argument.[sic]

Way to grammar, pal. Definitely not Rooney.

Christians are just sick and tired of turning the other cheek while our courts strip us of all our rights. 

Which rights are those? The wall of separation between church and state PROTECTS BOTH church AND state. Y'all like walls, right? You can pray as you wish, but you don't have the right to push it in anybody's face, nor do you have the right to have a school leader push their views on children. You NEVER had the right, it just took a while for that to be brought to your attention.

Our parents and grandparents taught us to pray before eating, to pray before we go to sleep. Our Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. Now a handful of people and their lawyers are telling us to cease praying.

Again, nobody is stopping anybody from praying. Feel free.

The silent majority has been silent too long. It's time we tell that one or two who scream loud enough to be heard that the vast majority doesn't care what they want.

Yeeeeeah, the majority is being oppressed...uh, what? You don't get to do the 200-1 comparison and then talk about having your rights stripped.

We are fighting back, and we WILL WIN!

Win what, exactly? You already have the majority in all levels of government. The majority of the constituency (for now). And it has been that way for generations. You complain because gay people want to get married, trans people need to take a shit, and you're talking about winning. Spare me.

Let's make 2019/2020 the year the silent majority is heard, and we put God back as the foundation of our families and institutions. And our military forces come home from all the wars.

If the god of the bible is the basis for our families and institutions, we have some serious problems to address. But yes, I'd love the troops to come home. Why are they fighting, what are they defending, and what led to their deployment in the first place? That's a discussion for another time.

Keep looking up.

Are you sure Jack Horkheimer didn't write this?

Fact-checking

Even a second of research would have brought up one of the many sites showing this to be bunk, as least as far as it being attributed to Rooney. Even posts with the same thing from 2009 would have popped up, which would lend credence due to him being alive at the time.

Any other research on Rooney himself and his views would have yielded results like this:

I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout. 

I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does.

Separately:

Rooney also attributed voters’ reliance on religion in the recent election to ignorance. “I am an atheist,” Rooney said. “I don’t understand religion at all. I’m sure I’ll offend a lot of people by saying this, but I think it’s all nonsense.”

Also:

Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated. I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don't push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion.

Why?

You might think, dear Mother, that I'm being uncharitable. Surely we all make mistakes, having re-posted something with good conscience that was a bit inaccurate. But this is so fundamentally flawed that I thought it deserved attention. I was taught to believe little of what you see and none of what you hear. I grew up with a nice heavy tome from which unbelievable tasks could be performed. I knew enough to know that the only way to know what is true in the world is to analyze it skeptically. I knew science wasn't about proving what is right, but also disproving what is wrong.

And then I took everything religious at face value. Christianity was true, and that was that. 

I've grown quite skeptical as we now live in a post-truth society. It's troubling for me because I know what charlatans are waiting for you at the next revival. I know that you're a phone call away from a Nigerian / Indian scammer who will tell you some ridiculous story and wipe out your life savings. That even the "proper" religious institutions work in predatory ways to ensnare the downtrodden.

You fell for this article. Nothing caused you to pause and consider. Maybe it's "just Facebook" and isn't worth scrutiny. I can only hope you don't fall for worse.

Love,

Your other favorite son

QA is always the last place you look

Performing QA is as much a part of the software development process as writing code. The fact that it tends to appear as a step at the end of the development cycle does not make it less important or significant to the success of a product in an enterprise environment. The title comes from the phrase "it's always the last place you look" because you stop looking for things once you find them. QA, for most organizations, is the last step before deployment, which means it often gets short-changed. This little scenario offers a glimpse of one way that things can break down. And just to be contrary, this ISN'T going to be about Agile/Scrum/XP processes! We'll keep it old-school this time around.

As a starting point, let's take a look at the traditional waterfall model of software development. Suppose all business requirements were generated in the complete absence of any technologists.  Let's say that these pie-in-the-sky requirements, after careful debate and collaboration on the business side, are handed off to the programmers to implement. For any non-trivial project, there will definitely be some requirements which would be impossible to satisfy (for either technical or financial reasons).What happens when the programmers try to estimate the development time and then actually attempt to build the product? If they're any good, they'll have the integrity to immediately go back to the business to discuss the issues and figure out what the scope really looks like.

The process taken to its extreme requires rework, so costs to develop new features are higher, the entire process is delayed, manpower is wasted, morale is impaired, etc.

It seems to me that the rules apply just as well to QA as it does to programming. Following this same line of thought, once coding is done and the product is handed over to the QA team, there are going to be aspects which are impossible to test (for either technical or financial reasons). Only this time the cost penalties are even higher, as the rework goes back to the programmers AND back to the business.

Here's where a hasty decision is made far too often. One option is to have the conversations, change the product scope, re-implement some aspects of the code, and then perform the QA functions as planned. Instead, the far more convenient (and taken) option is to declare that this requirement simply "is not testable" and move on. This shows such a lack of respect to the members of the QA team. The programmers get the privilege (and responsibility) to reject and negotiate requirements, but the only option for QA is to un-gracefully bow out all together.

Let's try running this scenario again, only this time we get a programmer and a QA person to sit in on the requirements gathering. That means it's far less likely to need to rework later for issues with implementation and also with QA. Their voices can be heard while the scope and understanding of the system are being formed, rather than cemented in a pile of documents. Rework is reduced (I'm not ambitious enough to say eliminated) which promotes shorter, more predictable timelines and reduced budgets.

While the business is often concerned with the cost of delivery, often the greater emphasis is on consistency and adherence to a timeline. Failing to have programmers and QA involved early in the process introduces variability in delays. And often as a response to failures to meet milestones on time, the last steps are often rushed or ignored completely if deemed unnecessary. This path is well-worn, with an abundance of defunct projects cast on either side.

Email Quotas Aren't Stupid

http://therubberboy.com/contortionist.php

I recently heard a project manager lamenting their “limited” email. How big is our limit? Well, I assume that for the normal peons in my company it’s about a Compact Disc's worth: 600MB. That’s almost as much as Gmail’s (current) 65GB allotment for their free account, right?!? It’s only 2 orders of magnitude difference, no big deal.

sigh

Clearly, storage isn’t THAT expensive, and it wouldn’t take much effort to make everyone's email have more room to breathe. Considering the cost for storage vs the cost of time and mental capacity for your workforce, it would seem like giving larger email quotas would be a no-brainer.
While this line of reasoning could be fleshed out on its own, I’m not going down that road. Too easy. I’ll go ahead and make the argument AGAINST larger quotas.
Software professionals love to joke that 640K should be enough for everybody, even if the whole thing is apocryphal. Working with systems having finite resources is part of the work that we do. That said, I cannot quite figure out why one’s work email would need to be so large. Could you imagine what the physical equivalent would look like? How many folders and stacks of paper would be needed to keep track of that much data IN EMAIL FORM? I think the larger problem is that you’re using email wrong.

Agile vs. Estimates

Once of the most common issues I hear when it comes to Agile adoption is the "lack of estimates." I'm not sure where this notion comes from precisely. Looking at the manifesto and principles, there doesn't seem to be mention about estimation directly, but I suppose it could be construed from this one line of the manifesto:

Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation

The terms contract and negotiation have fairly negative connotations in my mind, but perhaps the business folks are more comfortable with them. After all, the work of software is to perform a service or operation in some way which saves or makes an organization money. Any time the business spends money, this is why. The customer doesn't care about PHP or HTML5 or NoSQL; your system could run on Unicorn blood and Kraken oil so long as it solves their problem. You deliver a product or service which solves a problem and they are paying you to help them solve it. Contracts are the formalization of what it means to solve their problem with the understanding of what it will cost to solve that problem. Negotiation is the process of establishing a contract, so that all parties have a common understanding.

Spell Checker

College Days

In college, the primary instructor for the Data Structures class is known for his frankness with students who need to drop his class. Either they're not prepared (despite having met the prerequisites), have too heavy a course load (the overachievers), or are not cut out for "serious" programming (weed-out). In a typical semester his roster would drop by 50% between the first day of class and the "drop date" (last day to drop a class without impacting your GPA). So, it was without great embarrassment that I dropped his class a few days in (see reason #2) and retried the following semester.

Welcome Changing Requirements

Here's another post about one of the 12 agile principles. Enjoy!

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Does that make anybody else cringe?

This is clearly for our customer's benefit. They're listed explicitly in the second sentence and implicitly in the first. It's a nice goal, but really, what's the deal with changing the requirements so late in the game? How is that supposed to work, really? How do we do that?

Self-Organizing Teams

​The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.​

This is one of those 12 Principles that raised doubts in my mind when I first read it. Most of the other principles seem patently valid. This one, though, begs a deeper dive. I'll give you my definitions and you're welcome to point out the flaws:

• Architecture - the structure of the underlying components of a system 
• Requirement - the description of functionality of a system 
• Design - the user's experience of a system 
• Self-Organizing Team - the set of people who decide to build a system

There's another word in this principle that give me the willies: Best. What does it mean to have the "best" architecture, the "best" requirement, or the "best" design? How do you know you have such a thing? How can we know that such a thing even exists?