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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
Naturally intelligent systems do not passively await sensory stimulation. They are constantly active, trying to predict (and actively elicit) the streams of sensory information before they arrive…. Systems like that are already (pretty much constantly) poised to act. We act for the the evolving streams of sensory information that keep us viable and serve our …
The other day there was a tweet about a Chief Happiness Officer. Later someone remarked about their Agile Transformation Office. It seems like we (as a culture) think that we can add qualities to systems the way we add ingredients to a recipe. Systems, especially symmathesies, aren’t additive! Agility, happiness, these are spread throughout the …
Gregory Bateson talks about distinct levels of learning. From behavior to enlightenment, each level represents change in the previous level. Zero Learning: this is behavior, responding in the way you always do. The bell rings, oh it’s lunchtime, eat. This does not surprise you, so you just do the usual thing. Learning I: this is …
“Code, as a medium, is unlike anything humans have worked with before. You can almost design right into it.” me, in my Camerata keynote But not totally, because we always find surprises. Complex systems are always full of surprises. That is their frustration and their beauty. We live in complex systems. From biology up through …
(this is a transcription of the talk by the same name. Here is a video.) Collaboration is crucial in software teams – and not only among people. We need our software, our tools, and our automations to collaborate as well. But what does that mean? I have four prerequisites for you here, and then four precautions …
The other day, AWS announced its latest plans to work around the license of ElasticSearch, a very useful open source project cared for by Elastic. “At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution… does not advantage any one company over another. …