Shows
Troubleshooting AgileA New Boat Every DayWhat can a solo around-the-world sailing race teach us about software development? In this episode, Squirrel and Jeffrey discuss the ‘Maintenance Race’ - a story of robust preemptive maintenance, which highlights the importance of proactive maintenance in your agile team.
Links:
- Stewart Brand's chapter: https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/the-maintenance-race/the-maintenance-race/7
- Brian Marick, Ease and Joy: http://exampler.com/ease-and-joy/
- Previous episode on root-cause analysis: https://agileconversations.com/blog/root-causes/
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You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com
And we'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you...
2025-11-0519 min
Oddly InfluencedE52: Emotions as conceptsAn elaboration on episode 49's description of the brain as a prediction engine, focusing on a theory of what emotions are, how they're learned, and how emotional experiences are constructed. Emotions like anger and fear turn out to be not that different from concepts like money or bicycle, except that the brain attends more to internal sensations than to external perceptions. If the predictive brain theory is true, the brain is stranger than we imagine; perhaps stranger than we can imagine. Main sourcesLisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference...
2025-06-2033 min
Oddly InfluencedE51: Constructed memories (a nugget)Memories appear to be constructed by plugging together stored templates. Do concepts operate the same way?SourcesSuzi Travis, "False Memories are Exactly What You Need", 2024.Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017.CreditsImage of street warning from Dublin, Ireland, via Flickr user tunnelblick. Licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
2025-06-0905 min
Oddly InfluencedE50: the preferred level of abstraction (a nugget)We see a creature near us, and we describe it as a dog. Why that and not "mammal" or "animal"? And if that dog's a Springer Spaniel, and we know it's a Springer Spaniel, why do we nevertheless call it a "dog"? In an apparent digression, I discuss the idea in cognitive science of a "basic level of categorization" (or abstraction). While we construct hierarchies and taxonomies, we tend to operate at one specific level: one that's not too abstract and not too concrete. SourcesGeorge Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories...
2025-06-0816 min
Oddly InfluencedE49: Metaphors and the predictive brainIt's fairly pointless to analyze metaphors in isolation. They're used in a cumulative way as part of real or imagined conversations. That meshes with a newish way of understanding the brain: as largely a prediction engine. If that's true, what would it mean for metaphorical names in code?Sources* Lisa Feldman Barrett, "The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017. (I also read her How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017) but found the lack of detail frustrating.)* Andy Clark, Being There...
2025-05-2019 min
Oddly InfluencedE48: Multiple metaphorsWhen we name a class name `Invoice`, are we communicating or thinking metaphorically? I used to think we were; now I think we aren't. This episode explains one reason: ordinary conversation frequently uses multiple metaphors when talking about some concept. Sometimes we even mix inconsistent or contradictory metaphors within the same sentence. That's not the way we use metaphorical names in programming.SourcesLakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980. (I worked from the first edition; there is a second edition I haven't read.)Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997. Lisa F...
2025-05-1627 min
Oddly InfluencedE47: Oops! The Winston W. Royce StoryIn 1970, Winston W. Royce published a paper “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems.” Later authors cited it as the justification for what had come to be called the "waterfall process." Yet Royce had quite specifically described that process as one that is "simplistic" and "invites failure."That's weird. People not only promoted a process Royce had said was inadequate, they cited him as their justification. And they ignored all the elaborations that he said would make the inadequate process adequate. What's up with that? In this episode, I blame metaphor and the perverse affordances of d...
2025-03-1426 min
Oddly InfluencedE46: How do metaphors work?Conceptual metaphor is a theory in cognitive science that claims understanding and problem-solving often (but not always) happen via systems of metaphor. I present the case for it, and also expand on the theory in the light of previous episodes on ecological and embodied cognition. This episode is theory. The next episode will cover practice.This is the beginning of a series roughly organized around ways of discovering where your thinking has gone astray, with an undercurrent of how techniques of literary criticism might be applied to software documents (including code). Books I...
2025-02-2632 min
Troubleshooting AgilePsychologically Safe AND Smashing ItBalancing psychological safety and high standards is crucial for high performance in your tech team. Join Squirrel and Jefferey for a discussion on this, plus the misconceptions around perks and productivity, in this week’s episode of Troubleshooting Agile
LINKS
- Safety vs standards article: https://www.leadingsapiens.com/psychological-safety-vs-high-standards/
- Challenge article: https://www.nobelcoaching.com/tag/challenge/
- Flow book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow
- Brian Marick: http://www.exampler.com/ease-and-joy.html
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You'll find free videos and practice material, plus our book Agile Conversations, at agileconversations.com
And we'd love to hear any th...
2025-01-1525 min
Oddly InfluencedE45: The offloaded brain, part 5: I propose a software design styleIn this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to explore this further at nh.oddly-influenced.dev, a blog that will document an app I'm beginning to write. In my implementation, I plan to use Erlang-style "processes" (actors) as the core building block. Many software design heuristics are (implicitly) intended to avoid turning the app into a Big Ball of Mud. Evolution is not "interested" in the future, but rather in how to add new behaviors while minimizing...
2023-12-3138 min
Oddly InfluencedE44: The offloaded brain, part 4: an interview with David ChapmanIn the '80s, David Chapman and Phil Agre were doing work within AI that was very compatible with the ecological and embodied cognition approach I've been describing. They produced a program, Pengi, that played a video game well enough (given the technology of the time) even though it had nothing like an internal representation of the game board and barely any persistent state at all. In this interview, David describes the source of their crazy ideas and how Pengi worked.Pengi is more radically minimalist than what I've been thinking of as ecologically-inspired software design, so...
2023-12-0443 min
Oddly InfluencedE43: The offloaded brain, part 3: dynamical systemsScientists studying ecological and embodied cognition try to use algorithms as little as they can. Instead, they favor dynamical systems, typically represented as a set of equations that share variables in a way that is somewhat looplike: component A changes, which changes component B, which changes component A, and so on. Peculiarities of behavior can be explained as such systems reaching stable states. This episode describes two sets of equations that predict surprising properties of what seems to be intelligent behavior.Source:Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011Either mentioned or came this close to...
2023-11-0725 min
Oddly InfluencedE42: The offloaded brain, part 2: applicationsSuppose you believed that the ecological/embodied cognitive scientists of last episode had a better grasp on cognition than does our habitual position that the brain is a computer, passively perceiving the environment, then directing the body to perform steps in calculated plans. If so, technical practices like test-driven design, refactoring in response to "code smells," and the early-this-century fad for physical 3x5 cards might make more sense. I explain how. I also sketch how people might use such ideas when designing their workplace and workflow. Books I drew uponAndy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain...
2023-10-2734 min
Oddly InfluencedE41: The offloaded brain, part 1: behaviorEmbodied or Ecological Cognition is an offshoot of cognitive science that rejects or minimizes one of its axioms: that the computer is a good analogy for the brain. That is, that the brain receives inputs from the senses; computes with that input as well as with goals, plans, and stored representations of the world; issues instructions to the body; and GOTO PERCEPTION. The offshoot gives a larger causal role to the environment and the body, and a lesser role to the brain. Why store instructions in the brain if the arrangement of body-in-environment can be used to make it a...
2023-10-1231 min
Oddly InfluencedEXCERPT: Concepts without categoriesThis excerpt from episode 40 contains material independent of that episode's topic (collaborative circles) that might be of interest to people who don't care about collaborative circles. It mostly discusses a claim, due to Andy Clark, that words are not labels for concepts. Rather, words come first and concepts accrete around them. As a resolute, concepts are messy. Which is fine, because they don't need to be tidy.SourcesLouise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011MentionedEmily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow...
2023-09-2915 min
Oddly InfluencedEXCERPT: Christopher Alexander’s forcesSoftware design patterns were derived from the work of architect Christopher Alexander, specifically his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. This excerpt (from episode 39) addresses a problem: most software people don't know one of Alexander's most important ideas, that of "forces". SourcesChristopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, 1977.Mentioned (or that I wish I'd found a way to mention)Gamma et al, Design Patterns, 2004Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design, 2003. I also like Joshua Kerievsky's pattern-language-like description of study groups, "Pools of Insight".Brian Marick, "Patterns failed. Why? Should we care?", 2017...
2023-09-2714 min
Oddly InfluencedE40: Roles in collaborative circles, part 2: creative rolesThe last in the series on collaborative circles. The creative roles in a collaborative circle, discussed with reference to both Christopher Alexander's forces and ideas from ecological and embodied cognition. Special emphasis on collaborative pairs.SourcesMichael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011MentionedEmily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", 1891 (I think version 2 is the original. Dickinson's punctuation was idiosyncratic, but early editions of her poetry conventionalized it.)Talking...
2023-09-2545 min
Oddly InfluencedE39: Roles in collaborative circles, part 1Farrell describes a number of distinct roles important to the development of a collaborative circle. This episode is devoted to the roles important in the early stages, when the circle is primarily about finding out what it is they actually dislike about the status quo. In order to make the episode more "actionable", I describe the roles using Christopher Alexander's style of concentrating on opposing "forces" that need to be balanced, resolved, or accommodated. SourcesMichael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, 1977.
2023-09-1432 min
Oddly InfluencedE38: The trajectory of a collaborative circleCollaborative circles don't have a smooth trajectory toward creative breakthrough. I describe the more common trajectory. I also do a little speculation on how a circle's "shared vision" consists of goals, habits, and "anti-trigger words." I also suggest that common notions of trust or psychological safety may not be fine-grained enough to understand circle-style creative breakthroughs.I continue to work from Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.Mentioned"Bright and dull cows"Sam Kaner, Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, 1996Brian Marick, "Seven Years Later: What the Agile...
2023-08-2427 min
Oddly InfluencedE37: Resilience engineering with Lorin HochsteinAn interview with Lorin Hochstein, resilience engineer and author. Our discussion was about how to handle a complex system that falls down hard and – especially – how to then prepare for the next incident. The discussion is anchored by David D. Woods' 2018 paper, “The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic Rules that Govern Adaptive Systems”, which (in keeping with the theme of the podcast) focuses on a general topic, drawing more from emergency medicine than from software.Lorin HochsteinResilience engineering: Where do I start?WebsitePublicationsBlogTalksMentionedBrendan Green, "The Utilization, Saturation, and Errors (USE) method", 2012?How Knig...
2023-08-1444 min
Oddly InfluencedE36: BONUS: One circle-style history of Context-Driven TestingI was a core member of what Farrell would call a collaborative circle: the four people who codified Context-Driven Testing. That makes me think I can supplement Farrell's account with what it feels like to be inside a circle. I try to be "actionable", not just some guy writing a memoir.My topics are: what the context-driven circle was reacting against; the nature of the reaction and the resulting shared vision; how geographically-distributed circles work (including the first-wave feminist Ultras and the Freud/Fleiss collaboration); two meeting formats you may want to copy; why I value shared...
2023-08-0347 min
Oddly InfluencedBONUS: a circle-centric reading of software development through the 1990s, plus screech owlsMichael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) describes how groups of people follow a trajectory from vague dislike of the status quo, to a sharpened criticism of it, to a shared vision (and supporting techniques) intended to displace it. The development of so-called "lightweight processes" in the 1990s can be viewed through that lens. I drag in a little discussion of binary oppositions as used in Lévi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology (1963) and later work.MentionedThe first NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968The SAGE air-defense networkDavid L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, “A Rational Design Pro...
2023-07-2130 min
Oddly InfluencedE34: /Collaborative Circles/, part 1: a teaser Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) is about how groups of people ("circles") begin with discomfort about the status quo and, after collaboration and discussion, make creative breakthroughs. It's based on six case studies. Four are circles of artists and painters, one looks at the early development of Freud's psychoanalysis, and one is devoted to a particular group of "first wave" feminist agitators.This episode aims to tempt you to want to learn more: by summarizing two of Farrell's case studies. My original thinking was that Farrell's model of circle development would be g...
2023-07-0424 min
Oddly InfluencedE33: Interview: Jessica Kerr on /Games: Agency as Art/Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their tools.) @jessitron is another of those people who apply ideas from outside software to software, including in her role as a developer advocate at Honeycomb, a company that aims to make the workings of software visible to its developers. Were she not engaging, personable, and enthusiastic, she'd be scarily like me. This...
2023-06-0641 min
Oddly InfluencedE32: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 3: expertise, panopticism, and the Big Visible ChartThe final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improvement via exhibitionism. Final reflections on Foucault.SourcesMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975.C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000.Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 1999.Other sourcesMississippi State University Extension, "Dairy Cattle Judging".Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings (PDF), Miran Božović (ed.), 1995.The Koepelgevangenis panopticon is described in "The Panopticon Effect" podcast episode. (There is no transcript, but there is a longish na...
2023-05-0832 min
Oddly InfluencedE31: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 2: the factoryAn intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a disturbing theory for the problem-solvers among us, so I make it more palatable by comparing it to a cult horror movie from 1997.SourcesMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 Vincenzo Natali, script f...
2023-05-0119 min
Oddly InfluencedE30: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, and voluntary panopticism, part 1Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the mid-1700s: from punishment as vengeance, to punishment as persuading the minds of many, to punishment as correcting the personality of one. BooksMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 Random other stuffBrian Marick, "Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism" (text and video), 2009The environment of evolutionary adaptednessThomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962N.W. Mogensen, "Cr...
2023-04-1929 min
Oddly InfluencedE29: Interview: Trond Hjorteland on a radical approach to organizational transformationOpen Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mindshare in the software world. It has similarities to Agile, but leans into self-organization in a much more thoroughgoing way.For example, in an OST organization, teams aren't given a product backlog, they create it themselves.if a team decides they need to slow the pace of delivery to learn new things or to spend more time refactoring, their decision is final.pay is based on skills, not productivity, s...
2023-04-1044 min
Oddly InfluencedE28: /Governing the Commons/, part 4: creating a successful commonsI describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement.As with earlier episodes, I'm leaning on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action. I also mention James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I discuss starting with episode 17.More about Gal Oya and similar projectsUpho...
2023-03-1419 min
Oddly InfluencedE27: /Governing the Commons/, part 3: Man, 63, seeks software teams, any age. Object: matchmakingA short episode that encourages members of software teams to give Elinor Ostrom's ideas a try, in two ways:1. I'm arranging for Elinor Ostrom's intellectual heirs to provide support.2. Your situation is not worse than those of Sri Lankan farmers in the Gal Oya irrigation system. A commons-style approach helped them, so why couldn't it help you?I'm looking for teams who want to collaborate with Indiana University's Ostrom Workshop, and I intend to provide financing.
2023-03-0909 min
Oddly InfluencedE26: /Governing the Commons/, part 2: the key mechanismsOstrom's core principles for the design of successful commons: how to monitor compliance with rules, how to punish non-compliance, how to resolve disputes, and how to participate in making rules. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1990Erik Nordman, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action, 2021"The dirty little secret of contract law" Image of lobster buoys from Flickr user Raging Wire, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
2023-03-0129 min
Oddly Influenced/Governing the Commons/, part 1: setting the sceneThis is the first of two or three episodes that draw on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action. What I hope is that those lessons apply to the problem of keeping codebases from devolving into unworkable piles of crap. Ostrom has nine design principles for designing successful commons governance. I mention them all in this episode, and provide Ostrom's summary below. In the descriptions, "CPR" stands for "Common Pool Resource" (that is...
2023-02-2026 min
Oddly InfluencedBONUS: Seeing like a personality surveyMy goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.”TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything. You might guess, from the previous episode, that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going on: What does "open to experience" mean, actually? How much less open are conservatives?Key sources:John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Mode...
2023-02-1313 min
Oddly InfluencedPersonality and destinyIt’s hard to predict how personality traits will affect behavior in new situations.We don’t have a good grasp of the difference between a “new situation” and “a variant of an old situation.”Small differences in the situation (like recent good luck) can make a big difference in how traits like “helpfulness” are expressed. So you'll probably need to try it and see ("probe-sense-response"), rather than assume you can find out enough to predict ("sense-analyze-respond").Summary sources:John M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, 2005. (This is focused on questions in the philosophical idea of "virtue e...
2023-01-3028 min
Oddly InfluencedThis is not an episode (a diversion into what makes explanations good)The key message begins with the observation that categories and concepts have central examples and fuzzy boundaries. The idea that categories are usefully defined by boolean-valued necessary and sufficient conditions is outdated. The stock example is the question: "Is the pope a bachelor?" The answer is, "Well, technically", but there are clearly more central examples that capture more of the concept's connotations. (See Lakoff's 1987 Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Gregory L. Murphy's 2004 The Big Book of Concepts is more exhaustive and covers different theories.)Examples teach you what lays within the...
2023-01-1632 min
Oddly InfluencedLegitimate peripheral participation: the book and the ideaJean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991. Note: I'd say this is the least readable of the books I've covered so far, especially if you're allergic to jargon-heavy academic social science. On the plus side, it's only 123 pages (excluding bibliography and index). Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, 1998"I sure as hell am not going to share my knowledge here for free!"Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 1996CreditsThe episode image is "Apprentice" by Louis Emile Adan (1839-1937), circa 1914, original copyrighted by Braun&Co., N...
2023-01-0222 min
Oddly Influenced/Talking About Machines/: copier repair technicians and story-tellingJulian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, 1996CreditsImage of a person using a copier via Mr. Domingo.
2022-12-2232 min
Oddly Influenced/Seeing Like a State/, part 3: the users, the clientsJames C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it.Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, The Russian RevolutionCreditsImage of a cow being given a physical exam ("bright or dull") courtesy Dawn Marick.
2022-12-0733 min
Oddly Influenced/Seeing Like a State/, part two: recognizing your High Modernist eidolonJames C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through. Here's a review. "Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was" is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, but I wouldn't read it...
2022-11-3025 min
Oddly InfluencedE17: James C. Scott’s /Seeing Like a State/, part oneJames C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.devCreditsSatellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2022-11-2122 min
Oddly InfluencedInterview: Glenn Vanderburg on engineeringMentionedOne of Glenn's talks on engineering.The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986. The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.Glenn's o...
2022-11-1429 min
Oddly InfluencedInterview: Mark Seemann on /Blindsight/ and /Thinking, Fast and Slow/Mark SeemannblogtwitterCode That Fits in Your Head, 2021The booksPeter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site.Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011Also mentionedRead Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain, 2021George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", 1956Rich Hickey, "Hammock-Driven Development" (video), 2010Peter Watts, Echopraxia, 2014Poincaré's 1904 essay on creativity is described (with extensive quotes) in this article. The original source for the essay is his book The Foundations of Science, starting on page 179, a chapter t...
2022-11-0740 min
Oddly InfluencedBONUS: Lord, preserve us from totalizing systemsDDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows'Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, "The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds" (PDF)Ian Welsh, "The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred"Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001John T. Jost, A Theory of System Justification, 2004. Which I have not re...
2022-11-0326 min
Oddly InfluencedDavid Graeber’s three kinds of economiesDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011People mentionedEinar W. Høst
2022-10-3125 min
Oddly InfluencedDavid Graeber, gift economies, and open source projectsDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000CreditsPicture of a Kula ring gift item, Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2022-10-1723 min
Oddly InfluencedAnalogies in and around /Image and Logic/Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997The 1968 Software Engineering ConferenceAn objection to the trading zoneFauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002.Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000CreditsRoulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
2022-10-1016 min
Oddly InfluencedMini-episode: What does Galison mean by “tradition”?Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997Wikipedia on academic genealogy@made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentionedPaul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, 1998Context-driven testing website and bookThe Agile Fusion workshop descriptionPeople mentioned: Lisa Crispin, Ward Cunningham, Janet Gregory, GeePaw Hill, Simon Peyton-JonesCreditsAn image from an undated review of a staging of "Fiddler on the Roof". DuckDuckGo claims it's CC-licensed, but I can't tell. I'm gonna risk it.
2022-10-0614 min
Oddly InfluencedMini-episode: Galison doubts Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolutionsPeter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962Steven Law, "Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception?", 2018. (Also has a picture of the Necker cube, which Kuhn also uses. Come to think of it, it might be he only uses the Necker cube, not the rabbit/duck.)Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970. (The proceedings of a 1965 conference on Kuhn's ideas. It cannot have been fun for Kuhn.)CreditsFlask from DataBase Center for Life...
2022-10-0308 min
Oddly InfluencedGalison’s /Image and Logic/, Part 2: The Trading ZonePeter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997CreditsRoman coin depicting the harbor at Ostia, from the title page of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century, translated by Wilfred H. Schoff, 1912. Source unknown, but the entire book is public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
2022-09-2619 min
Oddly InfluencedGalison’s /Image and Logic/, Part 1: The stickiness of experimental traditionPeter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997Brian Marick, An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming, unfinishedBrian Marick, Lenses for the Mere Mortal: Purescript Edition, unfinishedProgramming languages: Clojure, ClojureScript, Elixir, Elm, PurescriptCreditsPhoto of proton-antiproton collision from UA5 collaboration, CERN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
2022-09-1926 min
Oddly InfluencedE7: Imre Lakatos on what persuades scientists to risk their careersLakatos in a nutshellScientists join research programmes. Research programmes are characterized by a small hard core of 2-5 postulates that guide development of theories and experiments. The hard core is not questioned from within the research programme. To be progressive, a research program must produce a series of dramatic ("novel") predictions that are confirmed by experiment. This is in contrast to the mainstream account of science, which emphasizes that it's rational to believe in a theory only if its predictions are not (yet) refuted. Lakatos's argument is that real scientists don't abandon beliefs...
2022-09-1221 min
Oddly InfluencedInterview: James Shore and Boundary ObjectsJames Shore: website, The Art of Agile Development, AOAD book club, twitterMentionedSusan Leigh Star, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept, 2010 Jeff Patton: website, story mapping articles, story mapping book, twitterGojko Adzic: website, book on impact mapping, impact mapping website, twitterDiana Larson: website, twitterAlistair Cockburn: website, twitterJessica Kerr: website, twitter, symmathesyMichael Feathers: website, twitterMiro collaboration appGather.town a collaboration app mimics more properties of physical spacePicturesA...
2022-09-0539 min
Oddly InfluencedInterview: Downsides of packages, upsides of jUnit (with Elisabeth Hendrickson and Chris McMahon) ("Packages", Part 4)GuestsElisabeth Hendrickson, @testobsessed, Curious Duck Digital LaboratoryChris McMahon, @chris_mcmahon, blogCitationsCrafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997. Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, Elisabeth Hendrickson, 2012.
2022-08-2934 min
Oddly InfluencedTheories of What? or: Richard Rorty Weighs in on TDD ("Packages", Part 3)CitationsCrafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty, 1989. Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Kent Beck, 1996.Ward Cunningham on "working the program", 2004.The Mathematical Experience, Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, 1980."Elephant Talk", King Crimson, 1981 (audio)."Hammock-Driven Development", Rich Hickey, 2010 (video)."What is Hammock-Driven Development?", Keagan Stokoe, 2021CreditsImage of contrasting words from Flickr user andeecollard, Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0
2022-08-2223 min
Oddly InfluencedjUnit and What Makes a Successful Tool ("Packages", Part 2)Recombinant DNA ("gene splicing") was a wildly successful technology in the world of cell biology. Its success gave credibility to the associated "proto-oncogene theory of cancer." The theory piggy-backed on the tool. jUnit was a fairly successful tool in the world of Java programmers. But it was not as successful as recombinant DNA, and it was fairly unsuccessful at promoting its associated theory of test-driven design.This episode looks at what (according to Joan Fujimura's ideas about the history of molecular biology) is required for a tool to be successful, and why jUnit's theory didn't...
2022-08-1521 min
Oddly InfluencedE2: Viruses, Cancer, TDD, and "Packages": Part 1When TDD arrived on the software scene around 1980, it became popular very fast. Why did it succeed so well?I think it's because it was a combined theory and technology that hit the same "sweet spot" of intellectual infectiousness that the "proto-oncogene theory of cancer" did in the 1980's. Most of this episode is a history of the proto-oncogene theory. The next episode will look at case studies in software.Sources:Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer, Joan Fujimura, 1997. "Crafting science: Standardized packages, boundary objects, and...
2022-08-0820 min
Oddly InfluencedE1: Boundary ObjectsThe episode builds from the paper “Institutional Ecology, 'Translations', and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939”. It contains a brief history of how biology was changing around 1907, how scientists and collectors collaborated using "boundary objects", and how acceptance tests can be seen as boundary objects. It ends with some heretical thoughts about business alignment.Later: preparing for episode 21, I found that Étienne Wenger has some useful things to say about boundary objects in his Communities of Practice. I wrote a short summary on my blog.CreditsThanks to Ra...
2022-07-1921 min
Troubleshooting AgileWhy we still talk about AgileSquirrel and Jeffrey meditate on Brian Marick's announcement that he will no longer accept talk invitations on agile development, and the (different) reasons that both of them still use term "agile". Topics include joy at work, how it leads to profit, and the "near enemy" of that joy, which can lead to disillusionment.
SHOW LINKS:
- Listener Poll Results: https://twitter.com/TShootingAgile/status/1478640273991294983
- Brian's tweet: https://twitter.com/marick/status/1499905649970397189
- Brian's article on things left out of the Agile Manifesto: http://www.exampler.com/blog/2007/05/16/six-years-later-what-the-agile-manifesto-left-out/
- Joy at Work: http://dennisbakke.com
- Joy Inc: https...
2022-03-1620 min
The Agile Coffee Podcast74. Thankful for Lean Coffee with Friends
Diana Larsen (@DianaOfPortland), Lakshmi Ramaseshan (@LakshmiRamases2), Chris Hurney (@chris_hurney) and Colleen Kirtland (@purposecreator) join Vic (@AgileCoffee) at a seasonal (and virtual) coffee shop to discuss the following topics:
What new opportunities have you discovered in these pandemic times?
Building Values and Principles as a Collaborative Activity with Teams
The Doughnut Economics Journey Continues…
Virtual Coaches and Distanced Coaching: What’s Working for Us?
Exploring Agile Fluency
Please HELP support us by becoming a Patron: patreon.com/agilecoffee
Books and resources mentioned in this episode:
AgileFluency.org
Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams (book...
2020-11-241h 17The Agile Coffee Podcast74. Thankful for Lean Coffee with Friends
Diana Larsen (@DianaOfPortland), Lakshmi Ramaseshan (@LakshmiRamases2), Chris Hurney (@chris_hurney) and Colleen Kirtland (@purposecreator) join Vic (@AgileCoffee) at a seasonal (and virtual) coffee shop to discuss the following topics:
What new opportunities have you discovered in these pandemic times?
Building Values and Principles as a Collaborative Activity with Teams
The Doughnut Economics Journey Continues…
Virtual Coaches and Distanced Coaching: What’s Working for Us?
Exploring Agile Fluency
Please HELP support us by becoming a Patron: patreon.com/agilecoffee
Books and resources mentioned in this episode:
AgileFluency.org
Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams (book...
2020-11-241h 17
PawCast with GeePaw HillFrames In The Software Trade: An Example | #32We've talked about frames adding up to worldviews adding up to cultures, but it all feels pretty vague in its possible importance. We need some informal sense of how this works in practice. In the immortal words of Brian Marick, "an example would be handy right about now." Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of frequently cycling code through the source vault. People practicing CI do this several times a day. In "git" terms, they both pull/merge/push, depending on language & task, once every 15-90 minutes.
Episode 32 is live! If you are interested in becoming a...
2020-02-2107 min
Troubleshooting AgileGreenshiftingThe engineers know the project is in terrible trouble, but the executives think it's going great. This "greenshifting" anti-pattern occurs at NASA, software companies, and everywhere in between. We tell a few related stories, including a fable, and suggest methods that might work to counteract the greenshifting tendency in your organisation.
SHOW LINKS:
- "The Mushroom Song" by Steve Savitsky: http://steve.savitzky.net/Songs/mushroom/
- The SNAFU Principle (communication fable) from the Jargon File: http://skeptictank.org/files//cowtext/jargn10.htm
- Appendix F on the Challenger disaster, by Richard Feynman: https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51...
2019-06-2616 minTroubleshooting AgileGreatest Hits : Engagement and Joy in Agile TeamsDue to illness and travel, Jeffrey and Squirrel present one of their greatest hits of the past!
***
Squirrel and Jeffrey look at a recent article by Luke Tomas on the "employee engagement industry" (we didn't even know it *was* an industry!) Jeffrey rapidly links this to Brian Marick's idea of Ease and Joy at work and we all agree that engagement, happiness, and joy are all useful, but lagging, indicators of team success - so you can't improve them directly with bigger bonuses or tougher objectives. Instead alignment, focus, and autonomy work to create these results by creating the conditions...
2019-02-0624 minTroubleshooting AgileEngagement and Joy in Agile TeamsSquirrel and Jeffrey look at a recent article by Luke Tomas on the "employee engagement industry" (we didn't even know it *was* an industry!) Jeffrey rapidly links this to Brian Marick's idea of Ease and Joy at work and we all agree that engagement, happiness, and joy are all useful, but lagging, indicators of team success - so you can't improve them directly with bigger bonuses or tougher objectives. Instead alignment, focus, and autonomy work to create these results by creating the conditions for happiness and good performance.
SHOW LINKS:
- Luke Tomas, The Employee Engagement Myth: https://medium.com...
2018-10-1723 min
The Geek Joy Podcast10: This Emergent DanceEpisode 10: This Emergence Dance
With Bill Tozier @vaguery, Jason Felice @eraserhd, and Alex Harms @onealexharms
We talk about self-organizing, emergence, consulting, complexity, uncertainty yada yada yada. The music is 100% Hello, by Succès Planétaire International, found on archive.org. Tozier mentioned Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. Jason mentioned reMIND.
Here are the names I promised for googling: Ron Jeffries, Brian Marick, Stuart Kauffman, John Holland, Andrew Pickering, Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Vile Flusser.
2016-03-2151 min
JavaScript Jabber195 JSJ Rollup.js with Rich Harris and Oskar Segersvärd02:17 - Rich Harris IntroductionTwitter GitHub BlogThe Guardian02:34 - Oskar Segersvärd IntroductionTwitter GitHubWidespace02:50 - rollup.jsrollup - npm 04:47 - Caveats and Fundamental Differences Between CommonJS and AMD Modules and ES6 ModuleslodashStatic Analysis11:26 - Where rollup.js Fits in the EcosystemBundler vs Loadersystemjsjspmwebpack17:40 - Input Modules18:35 - Why Focus on Bundling Tools vs HTTP/2 20:13 - Tree-shaking versus dead code elimination 25:53 - ES6/ES2016 Support27:36 - Other Important Optimizations32:11 - Small modules: it’s not quite that simplethree.js41:54 - jsnext:main – should we use it, and what for? Picks Better Off Ted (Joe) Elementary (Joe) Ruby Rogues Episode #137: Book Club - Fun...
2016-01-201h 04
Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots156: It Has to be Valuable (Steve Tooke)Ben is joined by Steve Tooke to discuss the importance of communication, testing, and building Cucumber 2.
This episode of Giant Robots is sponsored by:
Digital Ocean: Simple and fast cloud hosting, built for developers. Use the code GiantRobots for a $10 credit towards your new account.
Links & Show Notes
Your Tests Want You to Change Your Design
The Deep Synergy Between Testability and Good Design
subtweeting
How to Design Programs
Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer- Brian Marick
Cucumber
Taking Back BDD
SwanseaCon
Steve on Twitter
Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
2015-07-2733 min
Functional GeekeryRobert C. Martin
In this episode I talk with Robert C. Martin, better known as Uncle Bob. We run the gamut from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, introducing children to programming, TDD and the REPL, compatibility of Functional Programming and Object Oriented Programming
Our Guest, Robert C. Martin
CleanCoders.com
@unclebobmartin
CleanCoder.com
8th Light
Topics
Clojure
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Ignite Your Coding
SICP Videos
Domain Driven Design
Stuart Holloway
Functional Programming as intro to programming?
Sphero
...
2013-12-3154 min
Ruby Rogues137 RR Book Club - Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer with Brian MarickThe Rogues Discuss their latest book club book: Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer with Brian Marick.Special Guest: Brian Marick. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.
2013-12-2558 min
Agile Weekly PodcastLean Startup In The EnterpriseDerek Neighbors: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agile Weekly Podcast. I’m Derek Neighbors.
Roy vandeWater: I’m Roy vandeWater.
Jade Meskill: I’m Jade Meskill.
Clayton Lengel‑Zigich: I’m Clayton Lengel‑Zigich.
Derek: Today, fresh from Twitter, we have Mike Vizdos.
Mike Vizdos: Hello.
Derek: A custom that we want to do with our special guests is we’re going to allow them to pick the topic of their choice. You get to hear what we’re passionate about all the time. We want to hear...
2013-04-1716 minJavaScript Jabber036 JSJ DOM Rendering and ManipulatingPanelAJ O’Neal (twitter github blog) Jamison Dance (twitter github blog) Joe Eames (twitter github blog) Merrick Christensen (twitter github) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Intro to CoffeeScript) Discussion 01:29 - Merrick Christensen is a new regular panel memberCascadiaJS 2012 JavaScript Modules: AMD, Require.js & Other Wins: Merrick Christensen 03:58 - DOM Rendering and ManipulatingBackbone.js Ext.js 06:49 - DifferencesLoad times Ease of use backbone.syphon 09:49 - The Ext.js approach vs the Backbone.js approach15:51 - Templating enginesdust.js handlebars.js mustache.js hogan.js underscore jquery 16:46 - handlebars.js vs mustache.js1...
2012-11-3048 min
The Java PosseJava Posse #345 - Roundup '11 - Monoids, Monads and Math, oh My!
Roundup '11 - Monoids, Monads and Math, oh My!
Fully formatted shownotes can always be found at http://javaposse.com
Recorded at the Java Posse Roundup 2011, in Crested Butte, CO, a discussion about demystifying functional programming.
Monoid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid
Monad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(category_theory)
Brian Marick's introduction to practical monads
http://vimeo.com/20717301
Using Scala's Option type
http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/Option.html
Daniel Spiewak on monads
http://www.codecommit.com/blog/ruby/monads-are-not-metaphors
F# Workflows
http://www.infoq.com/articles/pickering-fsharp-workflow
Dijkstra on teaching computer science
...
2011-03-281h 02
Devnology PodcastDevnology Podcast 015 - Jurgen AppeloIn this episode an interview with Jurgen Appelo, where we discuss topics from his book Management 3.0. We talk about complex systems thinking, and why it is relevant for software development, and we discuss the role of management in organisations with self-organising teams.
Jurgen's website is on http://www.jurgenappelo.com, and he blogs on http://www.noop.nl
On twitter he is @JurgenAppelo
This interview was recorded at the Finalist offices on the 28th of Januari 2011.Interview by @freekl and @arnetim.Audio post-production by @Mendelt.
Links for this podcast:
Jurgen Appelo: Management 3.0...
2011-02-071h 02
Devnology PodcastDevnology Podcast 015 - Jurgen AppeloIn this episode an interview with Jurgen Appelo, where we discuss topics from his book Management 3.0. We talk about complex systems thinking, and why it is relevant for software development, and we discuss the role of management in organisations with self-organising teams. Jurgen's website is on http://www.jurgenappelo.com, and he blogs on http://www.noop.nl On twitter he is @JurgenAppelo This interview was recorded at the Finalist offices on the 28th of Januari 2011.Interview by @freekl and @arnetim.Audio post-production by @Mendelt. Links for this podcast: Jurgen Appelo: Management 3.0...
2011-02-071h 02