- I am in Sophia Antipolis.
- Sophia where? Are you in Greece?
- No, just the name of this place is Greek, but it's actually in France. The closest French town is Antibes and Antipolis is the Greek version of it.
- Far out, man!
- Yes, this is the Silicon Valley of Europe!
- La Vallee de Silicon?
- Well, yes, there are dozens of startups and bigger IT companies here!
- How come?
- They built it and the companies came.
- Eh?
- Sophia Antipolis is a constructed city nearby Nice. A little bit like Las Vegas?
- I thought the casino was in Monaco?
- It is, but the city feels very made-up, very artificial. You can hardly walk anywhere...
- Because of the dog pooh?
- No, because there are no sidewalks. You are supposed to have a car, or use busses.
- They must cost a big penny?
- No, I paid 1€ for the bus trip from Nice Airport to Sophia Antipolis, which is about 30 km.
- That's value for money!
- Yes and had I not jumped out too early, I would have enjoyed it more.
- You had a premature ejection?
- No, my instructions told me to step out in the middle of nowhere, although the bus would have continued to the right direction. And it was raining. That's when I noticed, you can't walk anywhere.
- What did you do? (I'm shivering with excitement, does he eventually find his hotel room and a working Wi-Fi connection to write his sad and wet story on his blog?)
- I walked for a while getting wet. I thought it made no difference as my luggage was wet already when it came out of the plane. Maybe this time Air Berlin was trying out an external luggage transport system.
- You're kidding, right?
- When I ran out of sidewalk, I had to take a bus. The bus driver took no money. He just said it's free.
- You're pulling my leg!
- No, it's all true. I stepped out at a roundabout. Only one roundabout too far, this time.
- Oh, no!
- Oh, yes. Some time later, I resolved to taking a bus the other way and the driver was extremely kind and told me that the next stop would be my roundabout and that he was going to stop at it. The timetable didn't mention the stop on his line, though.
- What do you mean roundabout?
- Yeah, they have roundabouts everywhere. And they have their names. You can find Carrefour (that's roundabout in the local dialect) de Garbejaire, which is the one too far and Carrefour (there's that word again) de G.Pompidou, which is closest to my hotel. When I got there, my mind was a bit sunnier. Only the weather wasn't. It started pouring down, but now I had a goal.
- The hotel?
- Yes, now I knew where I was and I would get to my hotel room in daylight.
- Did you?
- Well, I'm writing this blog entry on my bed, in my hotel room, with the radiator blasting as hot as can be to dry out my shoes, socks, jeans and jacket. They are wet because I was wearing them in the rain.
- Well, how else do clothes get wet?
- By being in a wet suitcase being dragged for mails in the rain. My three shirts are all patchy with water and one of them is downright dirty. It's a blueish-white shirt and the patches are far too visible. I'll need to do some laundry soon.
- Boy, you must be exhausted.
- No, I'm energized to get back on track.
- What about your contacts in Sophia Antipolis? Are you going to visit many software houses?
- The current plan is to just go knock on some doors on Wednesday and Thursday. The problem is that the companies don't seem to have doors, but gates and knocking on gates is maybe easy but it's also pretty ineffective.
- What are you going to do?
- I'm still trying to deliver my message about Tick-the-Code to as many companies as possible. It is after all a win-win I'm selling.
- The customer benefits because his developers write better code, which they can extend quicker and without so many errors..
- Wow, you know my stuff!
- Yes, I've been reading your writings on www.qualiteers.com/downloads.php. Have you written anything new?
- As a matter of fact, I just finished a paper on software maintainability. I call it "Software Maintainability in Practice: A Good Riddance of Internal Defects!"
- That's quite a name.
- Charles Dickens used it first.
- Dickens knew software?
- No, he used the phrase "a good riddance of" to mean that getting rid of something was a blessing and that we were better off without it.
- Ahh.
- In it I list code examples of how to improve source code internally, without touching the functionality.
- Isn't that called refactoring?
- You're absolutely right. Martin Fowler's book "Refactoring" made the term famous and I mention the book and XP in the paper.
- You show Windows code as example. Isn't that like taking candy from a child?
- I don't mean Windows XP, I mean Extreme Programming, the mother of all agile methods! That's where refactoring is part of a day.
- Ahh.
- So, anyway, in the paper I come to the conclusion,..
- Yes?
- ..that manual code inspections are inevitable. Testing and static analysis tools (or any kind of tool, for that matter) can never cover all internal defects. Modularity issues require human ingenuity and to know whether a comment is a good one or a bad one, one needs to understand what it says. No machine understands.
- No machine understands.
- Machines can repeat, associate and seem understanding, but they are not.
- They are not.
- Just like you, mere programs can be entertaining, but they lack that spark of creativity that makes humans humans.
- Isn't that a bit redundant?
- See, right there, you jumped to the conclusion that I was being repetitive, when I said "humans humans".
- Isn't that a bit redundant?
- If I keep doing that, you'll be the repetitive one. You cannot truly understand humans, humans do.
- Isn't that a bit redundant?
- Good bye.
- Bye bye! (Isn't that a bit redundant?)
