The Original Bike Shed Email | Hacker News Reader

The Original Bike Shed Email

freebsd.org

99 pointsgthank23 comments

Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading it before they can decide if it is interesting. At least two man-weeks will be spent reading your email. Many of the recipients will have to pay to download your email.

I wish HN had this warning next to the "add comment" button. It would improve my posts.

On HN, it's more like:

Your message is about to be sent to several hundred thousand very bored people that have nothing better to do. At least two man-weeks worth of time will be spent reading your message instead of looking at lolcats.

It's fun to think everyone is participating because they value everyone else's commentary, but HN is really just a bunch of talkative people mentally in between other tasks.

A related, and fun implementation of the Bikeshed email:

  http://blue.bikeshed.com/
  http://yellow.bikeshed.com/
  http://red.bikeshed.com/
  http://gainsboro.bikeshed.com/

Lots more colors to choose from, my favorite is Blue, because blue is the best.

It even supports hex colors. And this is much better than blue:

http://ff3323.bikeshed.com/

http://ff00ff.bikeshed.com/

as a new father I shouldn't but I find http://baddad.bikeshed.com/ relaxing.

Poul-Henning Kamp is an incredible FreeBSD hacker, started the varnish project, and was a fantastic person to follow when I subscribed to the freebsd-* mailing lists. He's one of my hacker superstars.

I love examples like the Bike Shed.. Another good one is the "Chicken and the Pig" story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig

Mine is Shaving the Yak. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_t...

The most common bikeshed problem with web development is with design and user interface. We nicknamed this the 'cornflower blue' problem (fight club reference). Everybody thinks they know what good UI and design is, and they will certainly let you know what they think is right.

I am sure many of you have had the exact same problem, and have also resorted to hiding a new project from various staff members just to prevent the project from becoming a quagmire.

My heart goes out to all passionate, dedicated graphic designers. Who would do this job? Not I, for all the tea in China.

Not only does everyone think they know what good design is, and let you know what they think is right, they'll be looking at you thinking 'what do we need you for? why are we wasting money on you?'

You need to first justify your existence, then justify your abilities to people who know better anyway. Who needs this grief?

The bikeshed email (I knew of it before I knew of Parkinson's work) was a defining moment for me in software development. I refer to it often. It was even the subject of my longest blog post: http://softwaremaven.innerbrane.com/2010/03/why-you-care-abo....

It is interesting that this email came up today on HN, along side the article from Zed Shaw on how he is dropping the Python requirement from Mongrel2 and the debate it has sparked.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1712035

So this is why the sleep[1] function from Python accepts floating point numbers: to avoid any future bike shedding.

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/time.html#time.sleep

Is there an inside joke here?

Because I'm quite certain that Parkinson's bike shed allegory was commonly used among software development teams well before 1999.

As the article (email) says, it's from a book printed in the 1960s.

Yes, it's an allegory related by Cyril Parkinson, originally in his lectures, and then eventually in his eponymous book. I'm familiar with it.

My question is: why is the subject of this thread "The Original Bike Shed Email", when there were undoubtedly lots of Bike Shed emails prior to October 1999?

Maybe there were, but I haven't found them. Maybe the title should be "The Earliest Bike Shed Email I've Seen". Also, it gives a pretty thorough explanation of the history behind it, something left out by most references I've seen.

Because this was the "Original Bike Shed Email" that gave rise to, oh, http://www.sheddingbikes.com.

I think this was posted more in response to Zed's popularity now than because of Parkinson's idea as demonstrated on the FreeBSD discussion.

Actually, I posted it because somebody linked it earlier today in a comment and it was the best (and earliest) explanation of the Bike Shed phenomena (in a software context) I'd seen.

Gotcha. I must have been influenced after having just read the "why I booted python from Mongrel2" article. :)

I could have sworn that was the submission where I found the comment, but I couldn't find it again for my reply, so who knows?

This is ironic, right?

(I jest, but in-depth meta-analysis of community remains solidly, eternally and earnestly hilarious.)

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