Jason Yip

Software design and implementation should be a joyous art, a kind of high-level play. If this attitude seems preposterous or vaguely embarrassing to you, stop and think; ask yourself what you've forgotten. Why do you design software instead of doing something else to make money or pass the time? You must have thought software was worthy of your passion once.... -- EricRaymond in TheArtOfUnixProgramming

Engineers build for the future, not merely for the needs of men but for their dreams as well. Thus, inherently, the engineer's work is a fearless optimism that life will go forward, and that the future is worth working for. --DwightDavidEisenhower?

Engineering can be seen as a family of paths crossing a solution space -- in this case a space defined by all the possible arrangements and combinations of geometry, time, and material properties that might satisfy the particular specifications of a design. Filtering a good design out of these possibilities by simple, direct calculation is impossible both because of the enormous number of variables and because there are always elements in the specifications -- like aesthetics or ergonomics or compatibility with the corporate image -- that can't be reduced to a number or folded into a common denominator. What humans do in these cases is: think up a completely wrong (but sincerely felt) approach to the problem, jump in, fail, and then do an autopsy. Each failure contains encrypted somewhere on its body directions for the next jump: 'strengthen this part,' 'tie this down next time,' 'buy a better battery.' Good engineering is not a matter of creativity or centering or grounding or inspiration or lateral thinking, as useful as those might be, but of decoding the clever, even witty, messages solution space carves on the corpses of the ideas in which you believed with all your heart, and then building the road to the next message. --FredHapgood?

I work for ThoughtWorks.

CruiseControl developer so I'm quite interested in all aspects of ContinuousIntegration.

Jason, you rule. You are a great asset to CruiseControl. You've helped me understand the project so well, and made the wiki so much better. Thanks. -- RandyNovick

Was a member of the ChicagoAgileDevelopers until I moved back to Calgary... and then moved to Melbourne, where I was part of the MelbourneExtremeProgrammingUsersGroup ...and then Sydney where I was a member of the SydneyXpActivityClub ...and then back to Calgary... and now back in Sydney.

I believe that ThereIsAlwaysAnotherProblem, am interested in MartialArtsAsSoftwareDevelopmentMetaphor, and I think network gaming is GolfForGeeks.

Attended XpTwoThousand as a LowlyGraduateStudent?

MyersBriggs personality type: INTJ

GregorcLearningStyle?: AbstractSequential?

Outside of software development, my other main interest is martial arts and computer gaming.

mailto:j.c.yip@computer.org

If you want some insight into my musical tastes, check out my LaunchCast station http://www.launch.com/launchcast/friend?a=jchyip

Favourite web comics in order of niftiness:

Have you seen http://c2.com/w4/cc/wiki.cgi?JasonYip recently ? I would have reverted what looks like spam, but I couldn't figure out how to get to the previous version.

CategoryHomePage