Your not-frequent-enough reminder: English is not a programming language.
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Kevlin Henney
@kevlin@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06consultant • father • he/him • human (very) • husband • programmer • keynote speaker • technologist • trainer • writer
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Joined November 01, 2016
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Either customer support chatbots are a complete waste of time or I have just been very unlucky over the last few years.
I have never had a useful interaction or resolution from one (except to pass me to a human being, and that normally takes quite some effort). In terms of organisational hostility, they seem even worse than dial-up menu systems. My experience has left me with the perception that they are complete garbage.
Has anyone had consistently (or any) positive experiences?
One long-term benefit of the pandemic is the increased likelihood of hand-sanitiser availability in different locations, such as company sites.
This is particularly useful when there is a need to clean a whiteboard because a given company keeps both whiteboard markers and permanent markers in the same room 🤦♂️
The reading paradox: the books you don't want to end do; the books you wish would end seem never to
Pro tip: when presenting airport names by city in a dropdown list, order them alphabetically by the city name shown rather than the 3-letter IATA code 🤦♂️
Replying to
This may be my favourite software architecture quote.
Anyway, only today did I make the connection between this observation and the Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness (a.k.a. the Boots theory of socio-economic unfairness) and how organisations end up time poor or failing to prioritise appropriate work.
An 'eggcorn' is an incorrect but oddly appropriate substitution for a word (see my WordFriday definition: https://www.facebook.com/WordFriday/posts/596606817093946)
Over the years I've encountered some initialisms in software that have been expanded in a way that might be considered eggcornish, e.g., UML as Universal Markup Language (certainly reflecting the aspirations of some of overly vocal advocates) and BDD as Business-Driven Development.
What eggcorns or similar have you come across?
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"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example.
"A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
I'm speaking at KanDDDinsky 2026 in Berlin this October.
14-15 October, Park Inn at Alexanderplatz. Early-bird tickets are 800 EUR until this Friday, 31 July. After that they go up to 950 EUR.
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"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
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If you're not familiar with Sam Vimes, he's a character from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. He's captain of the watch.
The Boots theory comes from Men at Arms...
Pro tip: if your company's name and your mobile app name are unrelated, ask yourself why you're developing a product that you don't want people to remember or find easily
My latest #FlashFiction is up on 365tomorrows:
Rules and Guidance for Astronaut Welfare on Small Moons
https://365tomorrows.com/2026/07/28/rules-and-guidance-for-astronaut-welfare-on-small-moons/
As a perennial and unrepentant em dash user — if em dashes make you think AI output, let me introduce myself: I'm part of the input — I thoroughly enjoyed this defence of the em dash by Jessica Clark: https://www.mamamia.com.au/how-to-use-em-dash/
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I still remember a moment about 10 years ago (note that I say "about 10 years ago" and not "about 3652 days ago") when a project manager showed me a plan that showed me progress on a task that had been estimated at around 2 months.
"We're 52.5% complete on this task," she told me.
That many significant figures on something as woolly as progress on an estimated multi-person task is just noise.
"There *is* a chance you might be about half done, but even that's optimistic," I said.
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The difference between actual poverty and software architecture is that, usually, the costs of software architecture are self-inflicted by a business failing to prioritise appropriately.
Rather than reduce failure demand in order to increase value demand, they would rather add more people to address the failure demand.
They have the money and the time; they're just poor at budgeting.
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They want to go faster, so they push their foot harder on the accelerator — more people, latest tool bandwagon, incentives, etc. — all the while also pushing down hard on the brake with their other foot.
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Received a message telling me to expect a delivery "between 09:50am and 2:45pm". To their credit, they avoided quoting the estimated range to the minute (or to the second!), but the implication of quoting such limits to a precision of 5 minutes is nonsense given that the window of uncertainty is 5 hours.
When developing software systems, understand your domain and understand your users. Your users are human, so go with "between 10am and 3pm" to sound like you know what you're doing.
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You also see it when people are switching between units. For example, a journalist asking Google for a unit conversion on an approximate figure in one system of measurement into another.
"The car went another two kilometers (1.243 miles) before it was stopped by the police."
"He was said to be about 6 feet (182.88 cm) tall."
Such numerical solecisms are all the more ironic in outlets that claim they value accuracy in their reporting.
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You see this kind of nonsense all the time in the press as well as project progress or company performance discussions, with people reading false meaning into minor percentage point differences, differences that would be swallowed up if anyone took the time to put error bars on their numbers.
Vulture Culture by Teedy Deigh
"Did I make it big in cloud computing? No... no, I did not. We were all told having the right cloud strategy was important. Hiring a bunch of meteorologists, however, turned out not to be that strategy. That one was on me. But at least it wasn't my start-up."
@ACCU@mastodon.social Overload
https://accu.org/journals/overload/34/192/deigh/
"In researching what separates change successes from failures at organizations [...] leaders designing change were consistently more confident about employee progress on change than the employees’ actual behavior or stated experience supported. They trusted their read on the room. The data, when they gathered it, told a different story. The wider the gap, the more likely the change failure."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/creating-successful-change/202606/why-its-so-hard-to-know-if-youre-really-making-progress
Vulture Culture by Teedy Deigh, in the latest edition of @ACCU@mastodon.social Overload
"Remember all the fuss around the metaverse? Trying to build on an SF trope from the 1980s while pretending that the 1990s and three decades of the Web hadn't happened might not be a solid business plan."
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@AG100pct@infosec.exchange This is my cynical feeling. AI is far from perfect, but given the state of AI and the state of customer service bots, either (1) they are using AI from the last decade or (2) the bad experience is deliberate.
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@RupertReynolds Yes, the lack of an obvious thread that ties disparate services and companies together around what is a single workflow tells you what you need to know about the current state of CX/UX 😕
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@kevin It's a related but slightly different category: that of misleading approximations. Rather than providing needless precision, the answer is accurate, but overly suggestive, playing unreasonably with someone's reasonable expectations.
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Last weekend on my Instagram:
The Peak District
https://instagram.com/kevlin.henney
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@stevefenton That would be worthy of many social media posts, but for quite different reasons 😄
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@zudnick While I certainly believe that some people (and companies) will use this as a cynical ploy, I think that Hanlon's Razor applies far more often.
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@xris That is slightly different and is a source of another line of rants of mine.
First of all, when you are dealing with past events, they are known and are not estimates. Reporting them with both precision and accuracy is desirable. Excessive precision is quirky, but not wrong; reporting an estimate of a future event with false precision is wrong.
OTOH reporting a past event with poor approximation invariably annoying and often wrong (both in its model and its implementation).
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@bix Gotta love the 12-hour clock. Most people who use it have no proper idea how it works, and will get 12:00 AM/PM wrong (as well as getting confused about the status of 12:01).
Did some work for a logistics company a number of years ago. One of their promo posters got this wrong (or sent mixed messages, depending on your perspective) with something along the lines of "Before midday next delivery: guaranteed before 12:00 AM", which is one statement offering two very different promises 🙃
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@mrotteveel The probability of arrival between 09:50 and 10:00 is comparable to that of 09:30 and 09:50, so perhaps they should round down. Then again, the probability of arrival between 09:30 and 09:50 is...
"You're delivery will arrive today (probably)" covers, I think, most eventualities.
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@mrotteveel @bellinghman My original posting covers that: that is why you communicate 10:00–15:00. Not only is the range more accurate, but you will also receive fewer complaints than 09:50–14:45.
(And yes, there is a small psychological trick in here that is worth knowing, and for that and other reasons it is better.)
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@mrotteveel I am not debating the size of the range, which is most likely informed and hedged based on history, I am debating its false precision.