When we learn math, geometry, and logic in school, we’re always talking about things that are holding still. The element is in the set or it isn’t. The angle is acute or obtuse or right or we can’t know. Things are related or not. A thing has a property, or doesn’t. Code can have properties. …
There’s a funny thing, that when I walk into the kitchen and there’s sunscreen on the counter that I left there before yesterday’s bike ride, there’s a plate that I put to soak on the counter and there’s a book about Klimt that I had hoped to read with my coffee, this is fine. It …
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is the OODA loop, first recognized in fighter pilots and then in the Toyota Production System. It represents every choice of action in humans and higher level systems: take in sensory data, form a model of the world, choose the next action, make a change in the world. At least …
We see with our brains. Then we check with our eyes. Our retina takes in light, varying by brightness and color. It transmits information along the optical nerve to the primary visual cortex. There, specialized cells activate on outlines and contours in various orientations (horizontal, vertical, oblique). This part of the brain separates objects from …
Sometimes in software design we get this idea, “We’ll make this a rule engine. Then the business can write the rules, and they’ll be able to change them without changing the code. That’ll make it more flexible.” 🤣 The rules are code; they change the behavior of the system. Rules interact in ways that are …
Sometimes I think about, what if aliens kept humans as pets? Raised them from babies in isolation, without human language, without society. What would a human be like, outside of other humans? Not a person. As Abeba Birhane points out beautifully in her talk at NCrafts and article in Aeon, we aren’t people alone. We …
In Dungeons & Dragons (the tabletop game), there are universal laws. These are published in the Player’s Guide. They set parameters for the characters, like how powerful they should be relative to monsters. The Player’s Guide outlines weapons, combat procedures, and success rates. It describes spells, what they do and how long they last. What …
The most mentally straining part of programming (for me) is focusing down on the detail of a line of code while maintaining perspective on why we are doing this at all. When a particular implementation gets hard, should I keep going? back up a step and redesign? or back way up and solve the problem …
Des Cartes looked for certainty because he wanted good grounds for knowledge, a place of fixity to build on, to make predictions. Juarrero counters that uncertainty allows for novelty and individuation. In software, we like to aim for certainty. Correctness. Except in machine learning or AI; we don’t ask or expect our algorithms to be …
Today, another tweet about “how can I write the cleanest, best architected code?” gets piles of book references in response. Yes, we want to be good at writing code. We want to write the best code. The best code for what? “Writing code” is an abstraction, like a transitive verb without an object. I can’t …