Notes on software, teams, AI and how people think. Written on and off since 2015.
2017
- cato and his anticsWhat Cato the Younger’s Stoic discipline, incorruptibility and famously grisly death, as told in Rome’s Last Citizen, suggest about leadership.
- green problems, a teal umbrellaProblems of the green, family-like organisation, such as tribalism and chaos, and how a teal organisation with a greater purpose aims to fix them.
- struggleWhat Sebastian Junger’s Tribe says about modern life lacking belonging and purpose, and how Stoic practice and tribe-like teams can help.
- a yes is a noWhy saying yes to everything crowds out what matters, and how to prioritise, replace bad habits and treat time as the scarcest resource.
- communication between culturesWhy hierarchical and flat organisations struggle to communicate, and how assuming less and using generalist expert-communicators helps build trust between them.
- teams, organisations, and the likeOrganisational phases from red to teal, drawing on Team of Teams, Reinventing Organisations and Extreme Ownership, and what self-managing teams require.
- the daily mundaneOn the urge to escape everyday dullness by creating drama, as in A Scanner Darkly and Fight Club, and why minimalism and having less to lose can help.
- the knownsUsing Rumsfeld’s known knowns and the Johari window to classify information and attitudes to learning, and how generalists and specialists handle the unknowns.
- mma and grapplingWhy MMA is the rawest sport to watch, how it exposed the myths of single martial arts, and why grappling is the safer hobby given head trauma.
2016
- maker manager bothWhy makers and managers need opposite schedules, and how a maker-manager can cope with role switching through routines and respect for others’ time.
- self-helpWhy self-help deserves more credit: memorable stories like Zorba the Greek and Meditations, and lasting habits, beat quick motivational fixes.
- temporary choicesWhy temporary code tends to become permanent, and why accepting good enough work as flawed but lasting beats both perfectionism and hurried quick fixes.
- mental coupling and languagesA theory that languages, spoken or programming, get coupled to the context where we learn them, and why a first programming language carries lingering shame.
- attentionWhy attention has become a scarce meta-commodity, and how to protect it from notifications, multitasking and the mind’s own internal feed.
- in praise of podcastsWhy podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience make commutes and workouts useful, and the catch of forgetting details and sources of what was heard.
- brownfield kintsugiTreating old, patched-up software like kintsugi pottery: a source of insight for greenfield successors, or gradually refactored when not too brittle.
- dunning, kruger, the expert and the impostorWhy growing expertise exposes how much is still unknown, so early Dunning-Kruger overconfidence can turn into impostor syndrome.
- best practisesWhy best practices should be agreed on by those who use them, enforced by automation instead of annoyed colleagues, and kept simple enough to change.
- tactWhy tact is not lying but telling hard truths with consideration for the listener, drawing on Jocko Willink, Nonviolent Communication and The Anatomy of Peace.
- golang and positive constraintsRevisiting an old Go program to argue that forced constraints, like Go’s simplicity, curb showing off and choice paralysis and make software easier to maintain.
- genes, memesGenes and memes as replicating information, and why evolution may be better seen as a story of information than of biology, leading to digital intelligence.
- this vs that vs notWhy debating which framework is best in absolute terms misses the point, and how team, organisation and project constraints should drive technology choices.
2015
- narcos, and the war on drugsReactions to Netflix’s Narcos and its portrayal of Pablo Escobar, arguing that drug prohibition fuels the crime and violence it is meant to fight.
- neomania and vintage projectsOn neomania in software, the cost of chasing every new technology, and why old projects with real users can beat cutting-edge ones that nobody uses.
- productivityWhy doing the right things and sometimes less beats maximising output, with routines, a single daily priority and the power of saying no.
- jack of all tradesWhy being a generalist can beat specialising, from sunk costs and identity to adaptability, and why single-purpose machines favour broad human skills.
- a silly arpugerA fond look at an easy-to-start action role-playing game with cooperative play and endless loot hunting that suits any state of mind.
- crypto and securityThoughts on Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, cryptography and information security, and how to weigh the benefits of security against its costs.
- integrationsWhy integrating with third-party systems is hard to estimate: poor documentation, slow communication and weak support, and why quick hacks are not done.
- free willWhat Sam Harris’s Free Will suggests about determinism, and why seeing people as products of their inputs still allows accountability and more empathy.
- pattern recognisersKurzweil’s How to Create a Mind and the idea that thinking is built from hierarchically linked pattern recognisers in the neocortex.
- inflation of good ideasWhy ideas like agile, Scrum and MVP lose their meaning when buzzword hype leads to shallow, partial adoption.
- dogmasHow the Scientology documentary Going Clear illustrates dogmatic belief and sunk costs, and how the same pattern appears in software methods.
- gene testingExperiences with a 23andMe DNA test: what the results showed, how hard raw genetic data is to interpret, and the privacy trade-offs of sharing it.
- self-deceptionNotes on the book Leadership and Self-Deception: how self-betrayal and justification trap people “in the box” and damage relationships and teamwork.
- confabulationHow replaying Grim Fandango exposed false memories, and the ways the mind fabricates, distorts and reinforces memories it cannot verify.
- abundance part 2, generalismWhy developers should be good generalists who learn new libraries quickly, instead of being tied to one framework by narrow job requirements.
- tomorrowA review of the first Tomorrow conference, with talks by Taleb, Honkonen and others on optimism, flat organisations and how beliefs shape behaviour.
- data, of considerable sizeOn big data and data science: how data piles up, how correlation gets mistaken for causation, and how numbers are misread or deliberately misrepresented.
- antifragile software developmentHow Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility applies to software teams, development practices, codebases and organisations that gain from change.
- decisions and routineWhy limited willpower makes decision fatigue real, and how routines, outsourced decisions and persistence save mental energy for what matters.
- rereadingWhy rereading books is worth the time despite a long unread pile, and how context, speed and sunk cost shape what sticks from non-fiction.
- public speaking and comfort zoneLessons from nervous technical talks: focus on content and genuine enthusiasm over polish, keep slides simple, and use exposure to widen the comfort zone.
- the abundance of javascript librariesWhy so many JavaScript libraries and frameworks appear, and how to cope with the pace by learning underlying patterns and trusting older technology.
- the lindy effectHow the Lindy effect, from Antifragile, suggests that ideas and technologies that have lasted are likelier to last, and why to study ideas over implementations.
- concentration and musicHow shutting out distractions and listening to slow instrumental music, ambient sounds or songs on repeat helps a programmer reach flow at work.
- programming, slowHow fast and slow thinking from Kahneman and biases like anchoring, overconfidence and sunk costs affect programming, and how introspection helps catch them.
- programming, fastHow experienced programmers write code and make design decisions by intuition, and when that fast System 1 thinking can be trusted.