Aircraft Carriers and Paper Airplanes
What’s more valuable, a big old company with assets, or a small nimble company with ideas?
dynamics in action
Morning Stance
It is 7:09. One child is out, and I have returned to bed. Alexa will wake me at 7:15. Six minutes: I could make my bed or do tiny morning yoga. Six minutes of rest is useless; I’ll feel worse afterward. What am I likely to do? I picture the probability space in front of …
Zooming in and out, for software and love
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 …
Reasons, heuristics, and revealed intentions
In a complex system, we can’t predict consequences. As Cynefin expresses it: in complexity, we determine causality in retrospect, not ahead of time. So how do we make decisions? We have to guess, try things, see what happens, react to that. We use reasons and heuristics. There are some consequences we do predict, and these …
Never and Always mean “right now”
I have this saying that I learned from dating in high school and college: In love and anger, ‘never’ and ‘always’ mean ‘right now.’ When in love, there is a feeling of “I will always love you” and sometimes “I could never be with anyone else.” Cuddled up to a lover, there is a feeling …
Action is a process. Reasons matter.
Knowledge work has to be done for the right reason to be done well. If I choose to implement a feature because I’ll get some reward for it, like a gold star on my next review, then I will implement it far enough to check the box. I won’t get it smooth, or optimal. I …
Reductionism with Command and Control
In hard sciences, we aim to describe causality from the bottom up, from elementary particles. Atoms form molecules, molecules form objects, and the reason objects bounce off each other is reduced to electromagnetic interactions between the molecules in their surfaces. Molecules in DNA determine production of proteins which result in cell operations which construct organisms. …