I think of “command and control” as one thing. Is there a difference? That common phrase notwithstanding, command and control are two alternative structures, more opposites than synonyms! Command (like in the military) allocates responsibilities to parts of the hierarchy. So a general is tasked with winning a war, and each officer under them is …
Y’know how sometimes a particular logged-in user isn’t authorized for some option, so you don’t show it to them? Don’t do that to people. Tell me it’s there, tell me I can’t do it, tell me who can. This is what happens when you hide it: Dave and I exist in different worlds, and we …
When explaining your favorite tool, ya wanna say “just install this!” “Simply change the configuration.” “Customizing it is easy.” Don’t! Steps that feel easy, simple, trivial to you are that way because of the experience you have in the tool. You understand how it works, you know what it’s like to install it, you understand …
Learning is a struggle against “the illusions of commonsense perception” (Maria Popova). When it was obvious that the Earth stood still and the Moon moved, Kepler wrote a novel about traveling to the moon and meeting a civilization who believed, based on their commonsense perception, that the Moon stood still and the Earth moved. If …
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 …
Art has progressed from “inner coherence” to contextual, interrelated meaning. Can software get there too?