Blog post: From Puzzles to Products Abstract What does it mean to grow from a new developer to a senior one? What is the difference between programs and software? I started my career solving puzzles in code. Then I added understanding about the business, and about running software in production, and about making that software …
Today in standup, a colleague reported that a GitHub isn’t sending the hooks it did last week, after we wrote code to handle it, and it’s a problem for us. “Did you contact GitHub?” “I asked around, and I heard they’re very unhelpful.” So no, he didn’t contact GitHub. The people writing that hook will …
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When we learn math, geometry, and logic in school, we’re always talking about things that are holding still. The element is in the set or it isn’t. The angle is acute or obtuse or right or we can’t know. Things are related or not. A thing has a property, or doesn’t. Code can have properties. …
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is the OODA loop, first recognized in fighter pilots and then in the Toyota Production System. It represents every choice of action in humans and higher level systems: take in sensory data, form a model of the world, choose the next action, make a change in the world. At least …
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 …