#002 – Weird Things About Time with Andrew Burke

Ardent Development Podcast

Andrew Burke has been a professional independent developer for over 20 years, working in everything from HyperCard and Lotus Notes to Ruby on Rails and iOS. Besides building software for various businesses, he teaches web development, speaks at conferences, and has several SaaS products and iOS apps on the side. In his spare time, he also does fan art mash-ups of iconic science fiction ships and characters with equally iconic Nova Scotian scenery – which are surprisingly popular in Halifax.
In this episode, Derek Hatchard and Ron Smith talk with Andrew about some weird things about time and what lessons software professionals can learn from history. From politicians and Popes debugging algorithms to century-long deployments of changes, it’s a radically different scale than a typical software project.

Where to find Andrew Burke

@ajlburke on Twitter

On the web at http://www.shindigital.com/

Andrew’s other projects include:

• http://www.beancountertech.com/
• http://www.remembary.com/
• http://www.starshipsstarthere.ca/

His “4 Weird Things About Time” talk from ConFoo Montreal is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM3LUB_MVa4

Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter.

Follow @ardentdev

Transcript

Derek: Welcome to the Ardent Development I’m Derek Hatchard, here with Ron Smith. And today we are talking with Andrew Burke. Andrew has been a professional independent developer for over twenty years working in everything from HyperCard and Lotus Notes to Ruby and rouse and iOS. In addition to building software for various businesses he teaches web development, speaks at conferences and has several SaaS products and iOS apps on the side. And in his spare time, he also does fan art mashups of iconic science fiction ships and characters with iconic Nova Scotian scenery which is actually pretty cool. they are surprisingly popular. But they are fun. I think my favorite is the fisherman demanding the return of Firefly. So welcome Andrew. It’s good to have you on.

Andrew: Thanks. Good to be here.

Derek: Today we’re talking about weird things about time and this is something that you’ve been basically on the conference circuit. I guess it was 2015, you did that talk. An insanely popular talk a lot of people still tell me how much they enjoyed that talk. You have done it in Montreal, Vancouver and I don’t know where else. Talking about time has me thinking we are recording this in December which starts with the DEC which to me means 10 but December is the 12th month of the year. So what the heck is up with that?

Andrew: Yeah that’s the first weird thing about time I talk about in the talk. Anybody who’s a programmer knows that the closer you look at things like times and dates the weirder and weirder it gets. And I’ve had a lot of times in my career where I get really frustrated with time and date tracking and time zones and stuff. So I started really looking into things and got really kind of got obsessed about how all these you know calendars work and where are the names for things come from and how these systems fit together. And I found they kept reminding me of stuff in software and so the first thing I talk about is if you ever notice that the last four months of the year have the wrong name. So September has a 7 in the name but it’s actually the ninth month of October and November and yet December. That’s sort of it’s a good hook to get people started in the top because everyone’s like hot never noticed that before. And what’s funny is that a lot of people figure that it’s because people put July. You know the Romans put July and August in. And you know after August you have September and that’s where the names are on because July was named after Julius Caesar. And August was named after Augustus Caesar so they named these months after these emperors and a lot of people said that was my first impression was they were just added these months and stuck him in there. But it turns out those months were actually named quintilis and sextilis before they recalled June, July and August, and it was actually it turned out half of the months of the year had the wrong names because quintilis has a five in it and sextilis still has a six. So that got me even more interested in how things fit together and eventually I discovered that it looks like a very very very early Romans just didn’t bother counting the first part of the year. So they basically started in March and went to December and they only had ten months but those months were still about 30 days. The beginning of the year which is you know what we now have is January and February. They just didn’t bother because it’s muddy and gross and if you’re a farmer or a warrior there’s nothing you can do it just sort of hung out at home and waited until they could do stuff and that’s when they started labeling, labeling the months. Obviously that didn’t last very long once they got more sophisticated and the culture got bigger. But that sort of was supposedly the origin of where the month names come from is that they just didn’t bother naming a whole chunk of their year which I found kind of fascinating.

Ron: Still kind of feels that way in January and February right.

Andrew: Exactly. I mean I sort of thought about having, like in the Maritimes we could have, we could have a sort of a everything from January until maybe About April we could just have this month called you know, terrible. Or something, or you know we just, yeah why bother counting the time until like you know when it’s a snow and like mud and rain and you know and you know there’s some of those times a year and so you get the same thing there were. We still have snow on the ground in late April, and it’s kind of depressing. So yeah I was thinking about like how we name these things that reflects the world that we’re in and the context are in and and especially the developers I always think about as an engineer you sort of want to cover everything and be really really thorough, but often users don’t want to know all of the terrible stuff. So you know, if the Romans could actually skip out a whole six of the year and eventually end up taking over the known world anyway, it’s good to sort of think about maybe where you’re what what you can skip in your UI or your you know process, that would actually still make it useful for users. So that’s the kind of thing the whole talk is kind of got a lot of that kind of thing, where the weird stuff that happened in history turns out to kind of reflect on stuff we do all the time as developers. That’s kind of been one of the fun things about doing that.

Derek: Yeah. And it really is a fun task. I encourage everybody to go watch one of the YouTube recordings of it, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. So it kind of caught your interest and I know when you came to speak in New Brunswick a couple of years ago you already had a recording of the talks. Walk us through a little bit of how did this evolve from have learned a few things to, I’m going to go and really ...