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Here is a piece of cynical thought: Extreme Programming works not only because of its inherent traits, but also because of some interesting side effect.

Let’s start with two simple questions: how many times have you been interrupted in your work today; be it by your boss, your superior officer, or one of your colleagues? What were you doing when you experienced the interruptions?

Those of you who, most of the time, work solo in your cubicle probably experience the most interruptions. And you were probably staring at the monitor, trying to make sense out of some important piece of code or technical document.

The reason you get interrupted is because other people do not believe that you are doing actual work, regardless of how legitimate your endeavour was. Think about it: when you are staring at the monitor, most likely the font is too small for a bystander to read with ease. If he cannot read with ease, he won’t bother with reading and will not be convinced that you are busy. Therefore he assumes that it’s ok to bother you.

Now, have you ever noticed how, sometimes, your boss walks towards you, only to realise that you are on the phone with somebody business-related, so she walks away within 5 seconds without bothering you? The reason your boss walks away is because she can hear all kinds of jargon in your conversation, so they assume (rightly) that you are onto something important.

I have come to hypothesise that one gets the fewest useless, unscheduled interruptions if he picks a working methodology that involves lots of talking, thereby letting uninvolved parties hear lots of jargon. When people hear jargon, they suddenly find reason to believe that you are doing actual work. For this reason, Extreme Programming becomes a good candidate. When you practice Extreme Programming, you are inevitably paired with a colleague, sharing one computer. When two people work together at the same computer, they inevitably talk a lot more than if each of them were working solo, and therefore they will let people around them hear a good load of jargon.

There you have it, the side effect that contributes to the effectiveness of Extreme Programming.

Note: this post is entirely meant as a meek piece of I.T. workplace satire. It is not to be taken seriously. Dear Kent Beck, if you happen to be reading this, please don’t get mad.

Gentoo Linux is not for everybody, seriously. And by that I don’t mean only the average computer user, but also the majority of application developers. Of course, this is just my opinion, which I will explain below. I do not in any way mean that Gentoo Linux is inferior to other distros either; it’s great for people who care about customisation and speed, but not for those who just want a stable, working development environment.

To many people, the biggest attraction of Gentoo Linux is that you are effectively rolling your own flavour of Linux when you install it because you pick, configure, and build everything, even the installation CD. This aspect is different from most other Linux distros for which prebuilt installation CD images and binary software packages/repositories are available. The primary reason for picking, configuring, and building everything from source is the performance gain that results when the compiler and linker are optimising code for a particular architecture, even more so if object code is statically linked.

The majority of application developers, however, do not care about the performance of the OS hosting the development environment. Therefore, the performance gain from compiling everything from source is largely irrelevant to the application developer.

Furthermore, the difference in performance between Gentoo and other distros shall be significantly reduced nowadays. Gentoo, when it was still known as Enoch, used a fork of the GCC that provided about 10% performance gain over the mainstream, official version of GCC. This difference in performance no longer exists since the fork has been merged back into the official version of GCC. If you don’t care about the performance difference that remains, you might as well download binary packages; but if you are using binary packages, what’s the point in using Gentoo?

The Portage package system that Gentoo uses is also not something that the average application developer would like. Many of the packages have too many build options, and sometimes these very same options are under documented. For instance, the last time I counted, the package for the Apache server has around 60 build options, which do not exactly correspond to the options used with the configure script of the official source package from httpd.apache.org. Documentation of the options is impossible to find; even the popular Gentoo-Portage website has no information (http://gentoo-portage.com/www-servers/apache/USE#ptabs). Some of these options conflict with each other; the only way to eliminate all of the conflicting options is by repeatedly trying to install the package, allowing the portage commandline interface, emerge, to report conflicts one at a time, so that you can eliminate one of the conflicting options one at a time.

The application developer has enough to keep his hands busy and his mind on the brink of insanity. He cannot afford to lose time with compiling the development environment.

Gentoo may be great for top notch performance in the live, production environment; but if anyone asks me to pick a distro for development environment, I would pick Ubuntu over Gentoo any day.