-
Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. – Laughing Meme
I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly.
“Theory 1: Nothing we “know” about software development should be assumed to be true.
Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport.
Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it.
Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering.
Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have.
Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness.
If you aren’t shipping, you aren’t learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn’t worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to.
I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we’d make it to 50 engineers before things broke down.
Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally.
Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying.
Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change.
Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon.
“
-
“In other words, surveys should not be testing whether people understand the headlines in today’s science stories, but whether they have enough basic knowledge to understand the headlines 20 years from now.
“What you’re not trying to do is measure, do they know what the SARS virus is, or what the West Nile virus is — but do they understand what a virus is?” Miller says. “What we should be doing is thinking about measuring the constructs that people need to know.””
-
dy/dan » Blog Archive » Learning Calculus Without Direct Instruction
The middle road . . .
Comments are well worth reading.
-
Imitation vs Innovation in Motion Pictures
Wonder about this and education . . .
“We find that big-budget movies benefit more from imitation, but small-budget
movies favor novelty. This leads to interesting market dynamics that cannot be produced by a model
without learning.” -
How Will Real-Time Tracking Change the N.F.L.? – The New Yorker
“At the moment, the N.F.L. is being tightfisted with the data. Commentators will have access during games, as will the betting and analytics firm Sportradar. Users of the league’s Xbox One app, which provides an interactive way of browsing video clips, fantasy-football statistics, and other metrics, will be able to explore a feature called Next Gen Replay, which allows them to track each player’s speed and trajectory, combining moving lines on a virtual field with live footage from the real one. But, for now, coaches are shut out; once a player exits the locker room on game day, the dynamic point cloud that is generated by his movement through space is a corporately owned data set, as outlined in the league’s 2011 collective-bargaining agreement.”
-
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
-
My thoughts on Ele Prolif in the Beta : pathofexile
“Does anyone else think the current beta implementation of Elemental proliferation is the incorrect way to nerf OP burn builds?”
— I just liked this crazy sentence I found accidentally.
-
Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Trap set for car-damaging creature
““There are paw prints, fine, course hairs mixed in all the mangled parts and what look to be bite marks,” said Fred Griffin, the general sales manager. Griffin and his employees have their own theories of what it could be. These include bigfoot, a wolf and a chupacabra. “
-
“The Japanese Preschool’s Pedagogy of Peripheral Participation,”
““The Japanese Preschool’s Pedagogy of Peripheral Participation,”, Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin describe a twofold strategy commonly deployed in Japan to deal with preschoolers’ conflicts: machi no hoiku and mimamoru. The former means “caring by waiting”; the second means “standing guard.” When children come into conflict, the teacher makes sure the students know that she is present, that she is watching — she may even add, kamisama datte miterun, daiyo (the gods too are watching) — but she does not intervene unless absolutely necessary. Even if the children start to fight she may not intervene; that will depend on whether a child is genuinely attempting to hurt another or the two are halfheartedly “play-fighting.”
The idea is to give children every possible opportunity to resolve their own conflicts — even past the point at which it might, to an American observer, seem that a conflict is irresolvable. This requires patient waiting; and of course one can wait too long — just as one can intervene too quickly.”
-
Rising to Your Level of Misery at Work – The New York Times
“Today, however, a whole class of hyper-competent Americans will never find their level of incompetence. Instead, they will suffer a similar principle in which they rise to their level of misery.
Here’s how it works: Ambitious, hard-working, well-trained professionals are lifted by superiors to levels of increasing prestige and responsibility. This is fun and exciting — until it isn’t.
Arthur C. Brooks
Economics, social science and happiness.
What Your Vacation Says About You AUG 18
We Need Optimists JUL 25
The Thrill of Political Hating JUN 8
How to Avoid Commencement Clichés MAY 12
Andy Warhol’s Guide to Public Policy APR 11
See More »People generally have a “bliss zone,” a window of creative work and responsibility to match their skills and passions. But then the problems start. Those who love being part of teams and creative processes are promoted to management. Happy engineers become stressed-out supervisors. Writers find themselves in charge of other writers and haranguing them over deadlines. In my years in academia, I saw happy professors become bitter deans, constantly reminiscing about the old days doing cutting-edge research and teaching the classes they loved.
“
-
“Eventually, the court ordered that a blood test be performed on Fairchild’s third child immediately following the birth. When the blood test was performed right after the birth, the results showed that Fairchild was not the mother.
This only brought about more confusion, but eventually, doctors were able to figure out the reason behind everything. It turned out that Fairchild was a chimera, which essentially means that she had the cells of a lost twin in her ovaries.”