Bridges and Airports

2021-12-13T07:44:31.000Z

This story is not my own. It was first told to me sometime in the late 1980s by Nat Lunn, one of the senior managers at my first “real” developer job, and rightly it belongs to him. I’ve completely fictionalised it for the sake of making a more entertaining story, but the underlying wisdom comes from Nat. Mistakes, omissions or misrememberings in the telling are my own error.

Despite his C-Suite seniority, Nat remained deeply connected with the technical side of the business, and completely untouched by the ego-diseases that so frequently afflict people at those lofty organisational altitudes. He was happy to engage even

Dimensions

2021-11-26T07:30:42.000Z

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about various dimensions along which we might assess how we use code and how codebases behave as environment.

This piece takes off from my recent musing on Cognition Enhancing Technologies on my personal blog, and which the reader might find useful as background. Today’s piece is an attempt to start getting more concrete about how we might find our way out of the software-construction bottleneck we’re in.

Agile Design

2021-11-17T07:45:26.000Z

If BDUF was not such a good idea (and it really wasn’t!) then it’s hardly surprising that Agile looked so good when it came along.

Sadly a whole lot of Agile became a cargo cult, and the dogma became that all design was bad. The notion (and I’ve heard it expressed in exactly these terms) came about that, “If we just write enough tests, a design will emerge, and it will be a much better design than we’d achieve otherwise.”

Unfortunately it’s horseshit. What an agile process really implies is that we design — and redesign — every step of the way. Most agile teams fail to do

On War

2021-05-28T09:44:50.000Z

I wish to come at this topic from the side on. You must draw your own parallels and inferences.

On Industrial Foundations
High tech only happens if there are enough people to buy it. The expenses of developing and deploying any sufficiently advanced technology can only be amortised if there are enough people around who can afford to indulge in it. Not enough population, and the technology remains too expensive per unit to feasibly support a market that will pay for that tech.

Cellular

In with the Old, Out with the New

2020-09-04T08:23:38.000Z

Bring Out Yer Dead
I’ve been watching the recent “Back To The Office” propaganda coming out of the UK’s Tory government with some interest, and it has struck me that this is exactly the sort of pushback-to-Old-Stack indicator I wrote about all those months ago.

It does mean a significant (but perfectly valid) extension to the notion of what

Reinventing School

2020-07-17T11:41:58.000Z

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.

Richard BachIllusions

We’ve had a hard lockdown, and everyone is tired of it. I understand. We’ve got to get people back to work, get The Economy working again. I understand. So that means we’ve got to get the kids Back To School. And out of the way. Anyway, not all of the children forced to try and School At Home have good access to the internet for taking classes online. Especially not here in the Global South!

But if we send the kids back to school we place them

Scenario Outcomes for the 2020 US Presidential Election

2020-06-29T10:25:24.000Z

Please remember that scenarios are not predictions. They are ways to explore possible futures as a tool for formulating strategy. The probability estimates given are pure thumbsuck, intended only to show relative ranking of likelihoods in my sole opinion. Nevertheless: Remember that You Saw It Here First, Folks!

Ladieees and Gentlemen. I offer. For Your Entertainment and Titillation…

Tactics is extension in space. Strategy is extension in time.
Extension of what? Extension of power, extension of will: a projection of desired change in the world.

The word “strategy” is often used loosely to mean, “How I plan to try to do something.” It gets used more as a sort of wishful thinking than a concrete statement of intent and contingency control. When it comes to

Predicting the Future

2020-06-08T11:13:44.000Z

Stolen from a note written to GW Bush by one of his advisors, 2001.

Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review
by Lin Wells for G.W. Bush

If you had been a policy maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a

Lessons from the Covid Predicament

2020-06-04T11:49:32.000Z

So what are we learning from this shutdown/lockdown/pandemic crisis?

Just-In-Time and globalised supply chains minimise holding costs, but introduce systemic

Lindsay's Lesson

2020-05-26T10:18:15.000Z

A long time ago, in the dark days before “Agile” software or business development processes were thought up, I had the good fortune to work on a software project where Real Users were made an integral part of the development team. (I can’t go into details, otherwise I’d have to come over there and shoot you. The Official Secrets Act has a long memory and even longer arms!)

And what I mean by “integral part of the dev team” is this:

Lindsay (not her real name!) worked for the customer of the system-in-development. That is to say, she was one of the people who would actually use the system in its day-to-day

Old Stack, New Stack: Opportunities and Threats

2020-05-01T11:55:36.000Z

Musing on a piece I saw the other day by Venkatesh Rao, wherein he postulates that the Covid pandemic has forcibly, unexpectedly and violently shifted humanity off (what Rao terms) the Old Tech Stack onto the New Tech Stack, with all due caveats about the lack of testing, the inadequacies and dubious scalability of some bits of the New Stack. I mostly-agree with his characterisation of the discontinuity, and this is an attempt to divine within it the opportunities and threats than come along with any disaster. It’s half-baked thinking, so don’t read it as

Reflection on Software Architecture

2020-02-18T11:58:55.000Z

Software development is (mostly) about taking decisions. Software architecture is a process framework for guiding those decisions toward consistency with a set of prioritised goals across the development of many different systems.

Goals should, always, be driven by strategic business imperatives, even where that’s a bit indirect.

For example, there’s no direct business case for source-code version control; version control is there because it allows us to recover from mistakes, to undo poor decisions, to roll back the state of our world to something previous, known (presumably stable), and to be a time

On Discoverability and the Internet

2020-01-21T12:41:45.000Z

Some thoughts on where energy might most usefully be expended to make the internet ‘better’. It seems likely that I might write some more in this vein sometime, so consider this Part 1 of n on Discoverability…

The chief problem with the internet is (I’ve long thought) the problem of discoverability. And it’s one of the hardest things to solve. It’s also worth noting that, although it is almost never explicitly spelled out, the money thinks the same — and the money is just following where the masses lead. The most valued internet sites — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit,

Final Details - Architecture Workshop

2019-03-14T11:19:20.000Z

Eventually… we’ve finalised the details of our proposed Software Architecture Workshop and the details are here for all to peruse.

Please share the link widely and wisely with people you suspect might be interested, and ask friends, ex-colleagues, the postman and your fellow cubicle-denizens to share likewise, recursively.

We hope we’ve guessed well at the pricing, location and venue and

Camcopter Ecology

2019-02-28T07:44:31.000Z

Just how small could you make a camcopter? One with wifi that does ad-hoc p2p mesh routing? I’d guess something about the size of a bee. A Ladybug? There’s not much point in making them a lot smaller…

www.mikro2nd.net

Bridges and Airports

Dimensions

Agile Design

On War

On Industrial Foundations

In with the Old, Out with the New

Bring Out Yer Dead

Reinventing School

Scenario Outcomes for the 2020 US Presidential Election

Tactics is extension in space. Strategy is extension in time.

Predicting the Future

Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review

Lessons from the Covid Predicament

Just-In-Time and globalised supply chains minimise holding costs, but introduce systemic

Lindsay's Lesson

Old Stack, New Stack: Opportunities and Threats

Reflection on Software Architecture

On Discoverability and the Internet

Final Details - Architecture Workshop

Camcopter Ecology