Little details

I was registering to Red Hat Virtual Experience forum and was filling the usual “name-address-can we contact you” form when, to my surprise I got a form validation error because the password was not between 4 and 8 characters long. Yes this is right, one of the big enterprise software houses are running an online web site where the maximum password length is 8 characters, a length that is known to be “crackable” with medium levels of ability and resources. I don’t even want to discuss the 4 characters length passwords.

This is one of those little details that can turn the credibility you have in a company with 180 degrees.

The sad thing is that I see this kind of behavior a lot lately and most from ‘big’ names. For example passwords that can only be alpha-numeric in a IBM program site I am part of  – it crashed when I included a couple of ‘non-standard’ characters, one of the banks I opened an account recently required fixed 8 numeric characters passwords for its online banking systems and so on. After so many big security leaks that originated with a week password guessed, you would expect this to change. For example December last year, Gawker network was completely hacked and thousands of records with personal data were stolen.

It Takes All the Running You Can Do, to Keep in the Same Place

Leigh Van Valen proposed the Red Queen evolutionary hypothesis  that introduced the idea that there is a constant ‘arms race’ between co-evolving species. The term is taken from the  Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass where Red Queen tells Alice:

it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

Van Valen found that improvement in one species will lead to improvement in the co-evolving species because when a species develops a special ability (for example foxes running faster) it’s co-evolving species will also  improve its ability (for example, rabbits running faster).

OK, so what all that has to do with software development? It just occurred to me that there are a couple of parallels we can draw with that:

Competitive frameworks are improving side by side.

If a framework stops to evolve it is likely a target for extinction. It is a very visible phenomenon these days that if a framework improve a certain aspect it is borrowed by other frameworks. The same is true with programming languages.

Software developers are continously improving their skills

There are always new things to learn and if you stop, you will drift away. If one does not learn, the others will and he’s knowledge will sun be obsolete. You must lean every day just to stay in the same place!