Review: The God Delusion (1)

The God Delusion

I recently bought the paperback edition of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. There is additional information about the topics and a discussion forum on his website RichardDawkins.net. The hardcover edition was described as the surprise bestseller of 2006.

Chapter 1 – A deeply religious non-believer
Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly true for Einstein and Hawking.

“An atheist in the sense of a philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand.”

Especially Einstein says that he does not believe in a personal God. Further he mentions ” If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” Einstein is a religious non-believer.

Theist, Deist and Pantheist
There are a few definitions which help to understand the different ideologies in the first chapter. For example is the difference between the theist and the deist important and interesting. It helps to find what kind of believer you are.

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who , in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. A deist too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws the govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness the governs it’s workings. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.

Einstein used the word “God” many times but it is clear today that he used “God” in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense.

The last part of the first chapter deals with the great amount of respect humans have for religion. For example it is normal to openly discuss ones political or economic interests but to have an opinion (and share it openly) of how the Universe began or about who created the Universe is much more difficult. We are used to not challenging religious ideas. The author gives much more examples to confirm this statement.

Regional Architect Forum 2008 with Ivar Jacobson

On software development

The first paragraph of each description is the summary from the microsoft site. The remaining part summarizes the key ideas I took with me from this event.

Speakers

Ivar Jacobson

We have the great pleasure to invite you to the next Regional Architect Forum with Ivar Jacobson, as the “father of RUP” probably one of the most influential people in the field of software development processes. He will share his extensive practice-based experience with us. 

Additional Material:
Podcasts from Ivar Jabson and more
Agile Requirements with Use Cases

Roger Bösch

Roger Bösch will then take you through the Microsoft development process. 

Ronnie Sauermann

Ronnie Sauermann will introduce you to Cloud Computing a possible major and radical change in our industry.

Getting Good Software, Quickly and at Low Cost (Ivar Jacobson)

Good software can be described as extensible, usable and reliable. Quickly means that you have a good team of competent and motivated people. Low cost can be achieved by reusing components. Make software as simple as possible, BUT not simpler! The hype of CMMI is almost over, SCRUM is now the new fashion trend.
Getting good software quickly at low cost is what we all are striving for. The approaches to achieve this goal change over time. Some ideas have become main-stream and pushing them is like throwing in open doors. Use cases, architecture, components, iterations are great, but we also need to be agile. BUT, how do we integrate all these ideas into something useful that can help organizations to deliver good software, quickly and at low cost? The answer is Practices!

Documentation is important so that other people can take on your work BUT focus on the essentials. If you don’t document you don’t get promoted because nobody can take on your work . So what are the essentials:
- It’s less than a few percent of what experts know about these things
- It is placeholder for conversation

Nobody reads long documentations or process manuals. Document just the essential things, the things that are really important to understand the subject.

The new paradigm shift is from “Process is First Class Citizen” to “Practices are first Class Citizens”. For more information visit the website of Ivar Jacobson.

Software development process @ Microsoft’s Developer Division (Roger Boesch)

As one of the largest software development company worldwide, processes are also a very important topic at Microsoft itself. In the Developer Division, Microsoft uses a feature driven approach, where feature crews driving more then 1000 features from planning to the next release. Hear how we’ve implemented it on TFS, tracking progress and keep quality high in our own product: Visual Studio Team System.

For Microsoft delivering at time is most important because of the huge marketing campaigns behind the products. For measuring quality they have 16 quality gates to pass which are all automatic.
Features are developed is an isolated way. If they pass the quality gates they are merged into the main branch. Some amazing statistics about Team Foundation Server @ DevDiv (Sept. 2008):

- 370 Mio. Files for Version Control
- 490 000 work items (To Dos)
- 560 000 check ins
- 4500 registered Users

Cloud Computing (Ronnie Sauermann)

The coming shift to cloud computing could be a major change in our industry. As its name suggests, this kind of platform lets developers write applications that run in the cloud, or use services provided from the cloud, or both without requiring your own IT infrastructure. Microsoft is now starting to offer services in the cloud like Sql Server Data Services and Silverlight Streaming. The goal of this session is to explain what Cloud computing is, the impact that can have on how you build applications and demonstrate the current Microsoft offering in this space.

The CloudDB is NOT a hosted SQL Server or a typical relational DB but more a property bag. Cloud Computing means that you use a big infrastructure of somebody else and pay for what you use.