Month: November 2011

Basics: Formatting Numbers for Tabular Display

Here is the first, in hopefully a series, of posts about basic software design. Though not nearly as sexy as a location-based mobile social network with behavioral profiling for ad optimization (probably a real thing), doing basic software design well is one of our “secrets” at Oasis Digital. So here goes.

Today’s topic is how numbers should be formatted for tabular display. This comes up quite frequently in data-centric applications. For an example, consider this mockup of a working-hours-per-person display screen, example 1:

It looks quite nice with the numbers formatted trivially as whole numbers. What if someone worked 4.56 hours, though? How would that appear? To accomodate that possibility, you might always show two digits to the right of the decimal point like so, example 2:

… which is OK, but not great – all those extra zeros distract the viewer from the essence of the data. One thing you should never do, though, is something like this:

This is horrible. If you feel tempted to write software that displays data like this intentionally, please step away from the computer now. This breaks the rules of writing numbers that we all learned in primary school, probably before the age of 10: always line up the decimal point. Instead, for that particular set of numbers, the is reasonable:

So is the answer to always display as many decimal digits as the data could possibly have? Perhaps, but only if you are unable to dynamically change the format based on the contents of the data. Examples 2 and 4 show a safe but unimpressive approach.

If you have the tools and skills to create a high quality solution, aim higher: dynamically choose the right number of decimal digits, to fit the specific data in question, then apply that same format uniformly to all the numbers. The output will therefore look like #1 if the data permits, and like #4 if the data requires it, but will not needlessly fill a column with 0s as in #3. This is more work, but is a more polished, professional result.

Group Programming, Projectors, and Big Screen HDTV

I’ve done a fair amount of pair programming over the years. My “Ward Number” is 1, if anyone recognizes the reference. But we pair only occasionally at Oasis Digital. Like Jeff Atwood, we don’t live the pair programming lifestyle. For our particular mix of people and problem spaces, we’ve found the sufficient amount of pairing is roughly a couple of times per week, a couple hours at a time. We’re a partially distributed team, so this often occurs via screen-sharing tools instead of at the same desk.

However, we do something perhaps even more “extreme” than pair programming: we spend a few hours every week programming in larger groups, sometimes as many as three of us in person and a couple more remotely. Why would anyone do that?

  • To attack particularly hard problems
  • To resolve important detailed design issues
  • To share our programming style and culture
  • To freshen old skills
  • To build new skills
  • To efficiently pass knowledge 1->N, rather than 1->1

I don’t quite know what to call this. Group programming? Cluster programming? N-tuple programming?

Regardless, we encounter an unavoidable issue: it is not pleasant for several people to cram in front of a PC monitor, even a large one, closely enough to read it. We’d rather spread out, particularly for sessions lasting a couple of hours straight.

In the past at other firms I’ve solved this by working in a conference room with a projector. This doesn’t work very well. Most projectors have a maximum native resolution of 1024×768, or occasionally a bit higher, and those with reasonably high resolution are quite expensive. The reward for spending that money is continuous fan noise and an exhaust heat plume blowing on someone sitting on the unlucky side of the table.

This time we went a different direction: our group programming lair features:

  • 40-inch LED-LCD HDTV, with a native resolution of 1920×1080, which generates no noise or heat, at less cost than a mediocre projector
  • A dedicated computer, so noone’e development laptop is occupied
  • wireless keyboard and mouse can be easily passed around
  • Speakers and a standalone mic, for very clear Skype audio
  • Nearby tables to accomodate everyone’s laptops, with 22/23 inch extra displays available

It isn’t pretty:

It is very effective. We can comfortably work together in this area for hours, easily reading the screen from 6-8 feet away. (As I write this, I note that the room needs better chairs, a less beige color scheme, a printer that isn’t older than my teenager, and more Apple hardware.)

This approach isn’t for everyone; it requires a willingness to move furniture and buy non-standard equipment. I’d love to hear from anyone else doing something similar. In particular, I wonder how it compares to Pivotal’s setup.