Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Someone to Watch Over Me

In my work as well as at home it is always nice to have someone help me get my todo list done. Whether it is a honey do list or a work breakdown structured list from work, it is nice when I have the chance to have another set of eyes to make sure I did everything. Of course I didn’t think this applied to my honey do list, but my 6 year old son taught me something interesting this last week. I have been trying to fix our trash compactor for the last month or so. The problem is it is just hard to open the door. First thing I did was pull all of the garbage that fell behind the trash bin. That seemed to help some, but it was still really hard to open the door. Next I took the bin out and made sure all of the tracks were working fine. Then I started taking apart the wheel assembly. Putting it back together and tightening all of the screws. It was better but still hard. I was very frustrated and out of patience with this appliance from the underworld. Then my 6 year old son flipped the red switch that said,  “locked” to “unlocked,” and everything worked fine.

So, like a typical engineer I was looking for a hard problem to solve instead of looking for something obvious. This tends to be the case not just at home with household appliances, but at work as well. This could not just be for us engineers either. In the software engineering world there is a big movement to perform something called Pair Programming. Basically two people sit down to one computer and write code together. One person typing the other making sure the program is working, typed in correctly ,etc...

Can you imagine someone looking over your shoulder making sure you are typing correctly? Sounds annoying and it can be at first. But the results are huge according to some research that there can be up to 50% decrease in the number of mistakes (bugs) made in the code. Two people tend to consider more design alternatives, find bugs faster, and fix problems right the first time. I have used pair programming a couple of times in my career and in every case I have seen great improvement in hitting timelines, with higher quality.

However, I have also seen engineers not wanting to work nicely together. Maybe it goes back to elementary school when we are graded individually. Not as a group or team often. It is kind of funny. We teach kids in kindergarten to play together. By 3rd grade you are not allowed to share answers with your classmates, that is cheating. In fact one of the largest complaints about pair programming is who gets the credit. Especially when annual reviews come around. Somehow we have to overcome the social barriers that have been ingrained in us to not share or work together.

As I learned with my trash compactor, pair programming helps find solutions that would be otherwise overlooked. Even a 6 year old can see the obvious things that years of my domestic appliance repair was overlooking.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Patience and Patents


About 7 years ago I went through a patent harvesting exercise with my employer. It was 2005 and there was a big push in the software industry to patent everything they could. So they could be leveraged in licensing technologies between companies. The lawyer and my team submitted 14 patent applications and the waiting process began. About a year later I left the company and pretty much forgot about the patents. One day about 2 years later I got an email from one of the members of my former team. To my surprise,  we had been award 4 patents. Over the next year 2 more patents were approved. Not notice from my former employer. I found out thanks to “Google Scholar” monitor  (very cool tool that monitors your name and publications you have). Then silence; Nothing happen for 4 years and all of a sudden in the last 3 months 3 more patents were awarded.

I have lots of questions about the patent process. Maybe someone that has experience in this can give me some ideas.

  • Why has it taken so long?
  • Why does there seem to be some renewed interest in 7 year old patents.
  • Do patent applications expire sometime?
  • Is the high tech sue happy atmosphere today affecting number of patents filed and the time it takes to be reviewed? (Samsung and Apple for example)

With all of the renewed interest in my old patent applications, it reminds me of the old team I worked with, the cool technology we created, and the fun we had. So I guess the benefit of a long patent process might be nostalgia. I have lots of questions

DWP