This blog went dark after last summer because I had to focus on Boy Scout summer camp and moving my family to a new location. But now those projects are largely taken care of, and I have some mental space to speak here again.
I have been reading two books recently:
In Creating, the author says that it is more important to acknowledge the tension between your creative vision and current reality, despite the pain that comes from realizing how far away from your vision you might currently be. This has been very hard to internalize for me. I feel depressed when things that I care about look so impossible.
Well, I gave up on Creating for a while, and one of the books that I hauled to my new house was Feeling Good. I found the core of the book in the description of the interaction between "feelings" and "thoughts".
Chapter 3 - Understanding Your Moods: You Feel the Way You Think
There, the author lays out a list of common mental errors that present themselves in people who suffer depressive symptoms. The premise of the book is that cognitive therapy focused on correcting the mental errors is helpful to relieve depressive symptoms.
Reading these books together put the two thoughts in juxtaposition in my mind, and the result was interesting. I realized that I was making some of the common mental errors in the context of creating my vision of a distributed versioned family tree.
So the principle I want to put into practice now personally is "Feeling Good with Creative Tension" by recognizing the mental errors and correcting them as quickly as is practical.
Despite the hope that these thoughts bring, I have had to refocus my efforts after being assigned to a project at work that deals with innovation on the entire corpus of pedigree data. The things I have been learning at a whole dataset level are valuable to me in thinking about how to make a distributed tree even work.
Thoughts and comments by John Sumsion about life and software.
Alma 34:38 Live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he doth bestow upon you.
28 February 2014
26 February 2014
Kent Beck about steering code via tests
I was about to send this to my team, but then I realized this is a blog post.
Here is Kent's article:
And here is a related tweet from him on that topic:
"selecting the next test is an act of design"
I've always thought about "design" as choosing which classes exist and how they relate to each other, and what methods look like, etc. Or at a system level, deciding which services exist and what their core of responsibility should be.
However, I never thought about gaming my own mind (like applying genetic algorithms to my own thoughts), and choosing to introduce tests in different orders -- in order to produce a different neurophysical response from myself.
Perhaps "design" is not just about a static system and what to include. Perhaps "design" is about acknowledging the dynamism of the human/computer programming environment, and leveraging that dynamic nature in order to get a more optimum response.
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