symmathesy – Page 2

Keynote: Collective Problem Solving in Music, Science, Art, and Software

July 17, 2020November 5, 2019

(originally titled: “On the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming”) Blog write-up Abstract There’s a story to tell, about musicians, artists, philosophers, scientists, and then programmers. There’s a truth inside it that leads to a new view of work, that sees beauty in the painful complexity that is software development. Starting from The …

Learning as becoming

September 6, 2019

businesses… need a new worldview… that shifts the emphasis… from success as accomplishment to success as learning. Jeff Sussna, in Designing Delivery “Success as learning” doesn’t mean learning lessons. This is not learning as facts. This is learning as becoming. It is learning that bakes into who we are and how we do things, bakes …

Developers are system changers

September 4, 2019

Some people work in a system, and some people work on a system. Like, you can be the person who washes the dishes, or the person who installs and maintains the dishwasher. You can be the person who assembles the reports every week, or the person who automates that report assembly. (Jacob Stoebel told this …

Generativity

August 11, 2019August 11, 2019

Generativity is about caring about what comes after you. In a social context, it’s when old people care about subsequent generations, instead of maximizing their own happiness for the last few years. In business, it’s when executives care about the health and outcomes of the whole executive team, instead of their own career after this …

The artifact and the process

August 10, 2019

again: Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. Sometimes in the creation of an artifact, the artifact itself is less important than the process of creating it. Wardley Maps are like that too – it’s about the thought that goes into creating them, …

Every action has two results (Erlang edition)

August 11, 2019August 10, 2019

Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. I learned this from Erlang, a purely functional yet stateful programming language. Erlang uses actor-based concurrency. The language is fully immutable, yet the programs are not: every time an actor receives a message, it can send …

An old idea in a new context is new.

August 4, 2019August 4, 2019

“Ideas don’t spring fully formed from the mind of an individual. Ideas emerge between people.” Avdi Grimm, in his closing keynote at Southeast Ruby, told how when he sets out to write a talk, he wants to go out on his deck and walk back and forth until he squeezes the ideas out of his …

Certainty, Uncertainty, or the worst of both

June 29, 2019

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 …

Designing Change vs Change Management

June 4, 2019June 4, 2019

Our job as developers is to change software. And that means that when we decide what to do, we’re not designing new code, we’re designing change. Our software (if it is useful) does not work in isolation. It does not poof transition to a new state and take the rest of the world with it. …