Humans are magic because we are components of many systems at once. We don’t just build into systems one level higher, we participate in systems many levels higher and everywhere in between. In code, a method while is part of a class which is part of a library which is part of a service which …
“there appear new laws and even new kinds of laws, which apply in the domain in question.” David Bohm, quoted by Alicia Juarrero He’s talking about the qualitative transformation that happens in a system when certain quantitative transition points are passed. Qualitative transformation I notice this when something that used to be a pain gets …
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. …
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. …
“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 …
A few hundred years ago, we decided that circular causality was a logical fallacy. All causes are linear. If something moves, then something else pushed it. If you want to see why, you have to look smaller; all forces derive from microscopic forces. Yet as a human, I see circular causality everywhere. autocatalytic loops in …
A quick definition, without the narrative Symmathecist: (sim-MATH-uh-sist) an active participant in a symmathesy. A symmathesy (sim-MATH-uh-see, coined by Nora Bateson) is a learning system made of learning parts. Software teams are each a symmathesy, composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all their tools. The people on the team learn …
What makes one system more organized than another? More developed, more … civilized? How can we measure advancement? In Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective, Robert Ulanowicz has an answer. Along the way, he answers even bigger questions, like: how do we reconcile the inexorable increase in entropy with the constant growth, learning, and making going on around …
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 …