Complexity in Ecological Systems. by Robert E. Ulanowicz It’s about ecology, complexity, and a considerable bit of philosophy. Very readable. Unfortunately only available in dead-tree. “Life itself cannot exist in a wholly deterministic world!” Concept: auto-catalytic loops This book explains how evolution works. Evolution works by “try shit and see what happens” — perturb and test, …
The inaugural REdeployConf wrapped up yesterday (as I write this). I’m already feeling withdrawal from intense learning and conversations. I’ll attempt to summarize them in this post. The RE in REdeploy doesn’t mean “again” (lo, it is the first of its kind). RE stands for Resilience Engineering. It is a newish field, focused on sociotechnical …
It’s all that THAT Conference is not THOSE conferences. It’s about the developer as more than a single unit: this year, in multiple ways. I talked about our team as a system — more than a system, a symmathesy. Cory House said that if you want to change your life, change your systems. As humans, our greatest power …
In Why Information Grows (my review), physicist César Hidalgo explains that the difference between the ability to produce tee shirts vs rockets is a matter of accumulating knowledge and know-how inside people, and weaving those people into networks. Because no one person can know how to build a rocket from rocks. No one person understands …
a telling question. This puzzler says something about our culture. It says we think in terms of causes that happen before their effects. That we don’t believe in reflexive causality. In life, everything interesting is a circle. The mitochondria breaks down sugar, the proteins use the energy, they keep up the cell wall, the cell …
The other day in Iceland, a tiny conference on the Future of Software Development opened with Michael Feathers addressing a recurring theme: complexity. Software development is drowning in accidental complexity. How do we fight it? he asks. Can we embrace it? I ask. Complexity: Fight it, or fight through it, or embrace it? Yes. Here, …
(originally published in the SD Times) How do we influence the operation of a complex dynamical system like a team? How do we get a development team to function closer to our preferences, and still let people operate as self-actualized humans? In Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero describes complex systems such as people in terms …
Or: the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming. (video, or TL;DR, or abstract) At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins …
Read moreCollective problem solving in music, art, science, and software
There’s this church near my house, with a statue of Mary Magdalene. She’s the picture of deference. As a child and as a Christian, I was raised to see deference as a virtue, to find this statue beautiful. As an adult and as a systems thinker, I learned that deference is dangerous. Nora Bateson pointed …
“Why” is a terrible word because it’s overloaded. Often when we ask “why” we mean “for what purpose” — we’re looking for intention. In the bigger questions (bigger than one person’s decision), that doesn’t make sense. “Why do we let people buy those dangerous guns?”In a system the size of our country, there is no “for what …