Afleveringen

  • In 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 their metabolic cost. That's similar to, but not the same as, "Big O" efficiency, perhaps because the constant factors dominate.

    The question I'd like to explore is: what would be a design style that accommodates both my need to have a feeling of intellectual control and looks toward biological plausibility to make design, refactoring, and structuring decisions?

    Sources

    Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997Ray Naylor, The Mountain in the Sea, 2022Erlang processes (explained using Elixir syntax)

    Mentioned

    Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder, "Big Ball of Mud", 1999TetrisIllinoisNew Hampshire

    Prior work
    What I'm wanting to do is something like what the more extreme of the Extreme Programmers did. I'm thinking of Keith Braithwaite’s “test-driven design as if you meant it” (also, also, also) or Corey Haines’s “Global Day of Code Retreat” exercises (also). I mentioned those in early versions of this episode's script. They got cut, but I feel bad that I didn't acknowledge prior work.

    Credits
    The image is an Ophanim. These entities (note the eyes) were seen by the prophet Ezekiel. They are popularly considered to be angels or something like them, and they're why the phrase "wheels within wheels" is popular. I used the phrase when describing neural activation patterns that are nested within other patterns. The image was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and was created by user RootOfAllLight, CC BY-SA 4.0.

  • In 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 it makes a good introduction to the next episode.

    Sources

    Philip E. Agre, Computation and Human Experience, 1997, contains a description of Pengi, but is much more about the motivation behind it and also a discussion of "critical technical practice" that I think is nicely compatible with Schön's "reflective practice". I intend to cover both eventually. Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, "Pengi: An implementation of a theory of activity", 1987

    Chapman links

    Meaningness.com (including greatest hits)I found his ideas about Vajrayana Buddhism intriguing

    Other

    A recording of a Pengo gameThe foundational text of ethnomethodology is notoriously (and, some – waves – think, gratuitously) opaque. I found Heritage's Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology far more readable. I've enjoyed the Em does Ca (conversational analysis) Youtube series. The episode on turn-construction units hits me where I live. She talks about how people know when, in a conversation, they're allowed to talk. I'm mildly bad at that in person. I'm somewhat worse when talking to a single person over video. I'm horrible at it when on a multiple-person conference call, with or without postage-stamp-sized video images of faces.

    Credits

    The Pengo image is by Arcade Addiction. Retrieved from Wikipedia. Fair use.

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  • Scientists 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, 2011

    Either mentioned or came this close to being mentioned

    James Clerk Maxwell, "On Governors", 1868 (PDF)Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Embodied Cognition", 2020Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Computational Theory of Mind", 2021Wikipedia, "Dynamical Systems Theory"Nick Bostrom, "Letter from Utopia", 2008/20

    Credits

    The image is from Maxwell's "On Governors", showing the sort of equations "EEs" work with instead of code.

  • Suppose 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 upon

    Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 2005

    Also mentioned

    Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, 1998I mentioned a session of the Simple Design and Test conference.The sociology book I contributed to: The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, 2009, edited by Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik. My chapter, "A Manglish Way of Working: Agile Software Development", is inexplicably available without a paywall.The MIT AI Lab Jargon FileI believe the original publication about CRC cards is Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham, "A laboratory for teaching object oriented thinking", 1989. I also believe the first book-type description was in Rebecca Wirfs-Brock et. al., Designing Object-Oriented Software, 1990. The idea of "flow" was first popularized in MihĂĄly CsĂ­kszentmihĂĄlyi's 1990 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The idea of the hedgehog and the fox was popularized by Isaiah Berlin in his 1953 book The Hedgehog and the Fox (a wikipedia link).The original developer of the Pomodoro technique describes it here. There was a book about it, but Goodreads has been sufficiently enshittified that I can't find it. Perhaps you might be interested in Reduce PTSD and Depression Symptoms in 21 Days Using the Pomodoro Method instead? Because Goodreads prefers that.The Boy Who Cried World (wikipedia)

    Credits

    I was helped by Steve Doubleday, Ron Jeffries, and Ted M. Young.

    I took the picture of Dawn in the tango close embrace.

  • Embodied 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 automatic?

    This episode contains explanations of fairly unintelligent behavior. Using them, I fancifully extract five design rules that a designer-of-animals might have used. In the next episode, I'll apply those rules to workplace and process design. In the final episode, I'll address what the offshoot has to say about more intelligent behavior.

    Sources

    Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997

    Mentioned or relevant

    Passive Walking Robot Propelled By Its Own Weight (Youtube video)Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 1984Guy Steele, "How to Think About Parallel Programming – Not!", Strange Loop 2010. The first 26 minutes describe programs he wrote in the early 1970s. Ed Nather, "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer", 1983. (I incorrectly called this "the story of Ed" in the episode.)Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, 2022Andrew D. Wilson, "Prospective Control I: The Outfielder Problem" (blog post), 2011

    Credits

    The picture of a diving gannet is from the Busy Brains at Sea blog, and is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Deed.

  • This 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.

    Sources

    Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011

    Mentioned

    Emily 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 Heads, "Psycho Killer", 1977Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997. (This is the source for much of the argument, but I'm relaying it second hand, from Barrett.)

    Credits

    The image titled "Girl seated in middle of room with books; smaller child standing on stool and wearing dunce cap" is via the US Library of Congress and has no restrictions on publication. It is half of a stereograph card, dating to 1908.

  • Software 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".

    Sources

    Christopher 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 (video and transcript)"Arches and Chains" (video) is a nice description of how arches work.Ryan Singer, "Designing with forces: How to apply Christopher Alexander in everyday work", 2010 (video)

    Credits

    By Anneli Salo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia Commons

  • The 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.

    Sources

    Michael 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, 2011

    Mentioned

    Emily 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 Heads, "Psycho Killer", 1977Paul Karl Feyerabend, Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, 1995Michael J. Reddy, "The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language", in A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 1979 (wikipedia article)Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (Turing Award lecture), 1984

    Credits

    The picture of the umbrella or rotary clothesline is due to Pinterest user MJ Po. Don't tell Dawn it's the episode image.


  • Farrell 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.

    Sources

    Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.Christopher 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 (video and transcript)"Arches and Chains" (video) is a nice description of how arches work.Ryan Singer, "Designing with forces: How to apply Christopher Alexander in everyday work", 2010 (video)"Rational Unified Process" (wikipedia)James Bach, “Enough About Process, What We Need Are Heroes”, IEEE Software, March 1995.Firesign Theatre, "I think we're all bozos on this bus", 1971. (wikipedia)"Bloomers" (wikipedia article about a style of dress associated with first-wave feminists).

    Credits

    The picture is of Dawn and me sitting on our "Stair Seat", where we observe the activity on our lawn, sidewalk, and street. Which mainly consists of birds, squirrels, and people walking dogs. But it still fits Christopher Alexander's pattern of that name.

  • Collaborative 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, 1996
    Brian Marick, "Seven Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out", 2008

    Image credits

    The image is of a route map for a particular cave complex in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, USA. There is not a nice linear path from the starting point to (any) destination. This is also true of creative work, like collaborative circles. The image is in the public domain.

  • An 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 Hochstein

    Resilience engineering: Where do I start?WebsitePublicationsBlogTalks

    Mentioned

    Brendan Green, "The Utilization, Saturation, and Errors (USE) method", 2012?How Knight Capital lost $500 million very quickly. Link and link.Lucy Tu for Scientific American, "Why Maternal Mortality Rates Are Getting Worse across the U.S.", 2023David Turner, A Passion for Tango: A thoughtful, Provocative and Useful Guide to that Universal Body Language, Argentine Tango, 2004 Fixation over fomites as the transmission mechanism for COVID: Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?, Zeynep Tufekci (may be paywalled)The safety podcast about a shipping company flying a spare empty airplane: PAPod 227 – What-A-Burger, Fedex, and Capacity, Todd Conklin, podcast

    Correction

    On pushing, pulling, and balance, A Passion for Tango says on pp. 34-5: "The leader begins the couple's movement by transmitting to his follower his intention to move with his upper body; he begins to shift his axis. The follower, sensing the intention, first moves her free leg and keeps the presence of her upper body still with the leader. [...] The good leader gives a clear, unambiguous and thoughtfully-timed indication of what he wants the follower to do. The good follower listens to the music and chooses the time to move. The leader, having given the suggestion, waits for the follower to initiate her movement and then follows her." He further says (p. 34), "As a leader acting as a follower, you really learn quickly how nasty it feels if your leader pulls you about, pushes you in the back or fails to indicate clearly enough what he wants."

    Apologies. I was long ago entranced by the idea that walking is a sequence of "controlled falls". Which is true, but doesn't capture how walking is a sequence of artfully and smoothly controlled falls. Tango is that, raised to a higher power.

    Credits

    The episode image is from the cover of A Passion for Tango. The text describes the cover image as an example of a follower's "rapt concentration" that, in the episode, I called "the tango look".

  • I 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 techniques over shared vision; how circles develop a shared tone and stereotyped reactions, not just a shared vision; and, the nature of “going public” with the vision.

    Mentioned

    Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, 2001.Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Quoc Nguyen, Testing Computer Software, 1993.Édouard Manet, Le DĂ©jeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), 1863.context-driven-testing.com (including the principles of context-driven testing), 2001?Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2002.Association for Software Testing.Elisabeth Hendrickson, Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, 2012.Jonathan Bach, "Session-Based Test Management", 2000.Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain, 1972. (It's the second in a series that begins with Master and Commander.)

    Four articles that demonstrate personal style:

    James Bach, “Enough About Process, What We Need Are Heroes”, IEEE Software, March 1995.Brian Marick, "New Models for Test Development", 1999.Bret Pettichord, "Testers and Developers Think Differently", 2000.James Bach, "Explaining Testing to THEM", 2001.

    Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing and related:

    Cem Kaner, "Improving the Maintainability of Automated Test Suites", 1997. (This contains the conclusions of LAWST 1 as an appendix.)The LAWST Handbook (1999) and LAWST Format (1997?) describe the meeting format.The "Pattern Writers' Workshop" style is most fully explained in Richard P. Gabriel, Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (2002). James Coplien, "A Pattern Language for Writer's Workshops" (1997), describes writers' workshops in the "Alexandrian style" of pattern description (the one used in the seminal A Pattern Language). "Writers Workshop Guidelines" is a terse description.

    Image credit

    The image is the painting Le DĂ©jeuner sur l'herbe.

  • Michael 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 LĂ©vi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology (1963) and later work.

    Mentioned

    The first NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968The SAGE air-defense networkDavid L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, “A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It”, 1986The Alphabet of Ben Sira. For the story of Lilith, see this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast: "Lilith Unfair"Etymology of "sinister"Wulf Schiefenhövel, "Biased semantics for left and right in 50 Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages", 2013Edsger Dijkstra, "On anthropomorphism in science", 1985Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", 1975 (enthusiastically)Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, 1980Peter Adamson, "Plato's Phaedo" (podcast)John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 1999

    Credit

    The image of the screech owl is by permission of Erica Henderson. It was inspired by the "Doamurder, West Virginia (The Book of Genesis, Part 1)" episode of the Apocrypals podcast. I bought my Lilith T-shirt from their merch store, which also contains sticker versions, etc.

  • 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 generally applicable to software teams dissatisfied with the status quo of development and who didn't fit common models like forming-storming-norming-performing. As I dug into the details, I realized it's not as widely applicable as I'd hoped, at least without substantial customization. So the episode ends with some reasons you might not want to listen to the next one. But I hope you do!

    Other sources and references

    Cem Kaner and James Bach, Context-driven testing, 2012?Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2001Donald Davidson, "Lee in the Mountains", 1938The "Yes, and..." rule in improvisational comedy. See also Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). Looking for links, I also noticed Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration (2015), which seems to be a more standard business book. I haven't read it.

    Credits

    The episode image is "Ulysses and Nausicaa" by Charles Gleyre. In theme and style, it's the kind of art the Impressionists were rebelling against.

  • 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 conversation is about C. Thi Nguyen's book Games: Agency as Art, whose blurb starts, "Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency."

    Jessitron links

    jessitron.com (symmathesy)MastodonTwitterHer calendar for observability office hours

    References

    C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 2020Pandemic (cooperative board game), 2008Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010The "Farm to Tabor" podcast episode: "Donut science, cars, & grassfed beef", 2018James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998

    In the podcast, I mentioned classic English country gardens. I riffed a bit on Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia". It "explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from 'one of the most significant contemporary playwrights' in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written." I cut the riff out because – embarrassingly – I couldn't remember the names of either the play or its author. From personal experience, I can recommend this full cast performance for a road trip. On that trip, we also listened to the Alzabo Soup podcast's multi-episode commentary.

    Photo credit: me

  • The 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.

    Sources

    Michel 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 sources

    Mississippi State University Extension, "Dairy Cattle Judging".Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings (PDF), Miran BoĆŸović (ed.), 1995.The Koepelgevangenis panopticon is described in "The Panopticon Effect" podcast episode. (There is no transcript, but there is a longish narrative.)Ron Jeffries, "Big Visible Charts", 2004."Brainless slime mold grows in pattern like Tokyo’s subway system", 2022 (video).

    Contact links (if you want the bonus episode on "Edgelord Foucault")

    Email: [email protected]: @[email protected]

    Picture credit
    BigVisibleCharts.com (archived), Marty Andrews.

  • An 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.

    Sources

    Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 Vincenzo Natali, script for the movie "Cube", 6th draftPeter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. The chapter I cite is “Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage”

    Other mentions

    On large language models and "a judicious amount of randomness", Stephen Wolfram's "What Is ChatGPT Doing 
 and Why Does It Work?" is good. Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, 1987Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002The Eastern State Penitentiary was a model prison that featured solitary confinement, a Bible as the only possession, and piecework in the cell. It was the founding institution of what came to be called "The Pennsylvania System." See also "Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison With a Past".I mention an idea I got from Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. I don't exactly remember the sources. For Rorty, it was probably Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Fish, it might have been Is There a Text in This Class?Image credit

    The image is the Albion flour mill, completed in 1786, which was possibly the referent of Blake's "dark satanic mills" in his poem Jerusalem:

    And did the Countenance Divine,
    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
    And was Jerusalem builded here,
    Among these dark Satanic Mills?

  • Part 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.

    Books

    Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000

    Random other stuff

    Brian 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, "Crimes and Punishments in Eighteenth-Century France", 1977Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776Kieran Healy, "Escaping the Malthusian Trap", an animated graph showing the relationship between the population of Britain and its GDP over time, illustrating the discontinuity caused by the industrial revolution.Wikipedia article about the cult horror movie "Cube"

    Credits

    The image is of Adam Smith's pin factory, possibly from EncyclopĂ©die ou Dictionnaire raisonnĂ© des sciences, des arts et des mĂ©tiers (1751–1780). D. Diderot & J. d’Alembert.

  • Open 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, so as to encourage multi-skilled people.team work is organized so that there are career paths within the team, rather than advancement depending on leaving a team and rising up in a hierarchy.

    OST is even more radical at the levels above the team. Unlike scaled-agile approaches like SAFe or LeSS, OST changes the jobs of the people higher in the org chart just as much – or more? – than people at the leaves of the tree. Specifically, the shift is from order-giving to coordination at different timescales. Individual "leaf" teams are responsible for the short term, the next level up is responsible for the medium term and external partners, and the CxO levels focus on the long term.

    This episode is an interview with Trond Hjorteland, who – after experience with Agile – did an impressively deep dive into OST.

    Sources
    As noted in the podcast, there's not much accessible documentation about OST. However, Trond and his merry band of (mostly) Agilists have begun work on a new site. Trond has also written "Thriving with complexity using open sociotechnical systems design", originally published in InfoQ.

    Trond's blog.
    Trond is on Mastodon at @trondhjort.


    Image credit
    The image is from the cover of the Marvel Comics graphic novel Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More.

  • I 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 projects

    Uphoff, N.T. "People's Participation in Water Management: Gal Oya, Sri Lanka". In Public Participation in Development Planning and Management: Cases from Africa and Asia, ed. J.C. Garcia-Samor, 1985Perera, J. "The Gal Oya Farmer Organization Programme: A Learning Process?" In Participatory Management in Sri Lanka's Irrigation Schemes, 1986.Korten, D. "Community Organization and Rural Development: a Learning Process Approach", Public Administration on Review 40, 1980 (Philippines, Bangladesh)Korten, F. "Building National Capacity to Develop Water Users' Associations: Experience from the Philippines, World Bank working paper 528, 1982Rahman, A. "Some Dimensions of People's Participation in the Bloomni Sena Movement", United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1981 (Nepal)Rabibhadena, A. The Transformation of Tambon Yokkrabat, Changwat Samut Sakorn, Thammasat University, 1980 (Thailand).

    Refactoring books I have liked

    Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999William C. Wake, Refactoring Workbook, 2003Joshua Kerievsky, Refactoring to Patterns, 2004Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage, Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, 2006

    The Strangler Fig pattern

    Fowler's original blog postA case study I commissioned, way back when.

    Credits

    "Agriculture in Extreme Environments - Irrigation channel for wheat fields and date palms" by Richard Allaway is licensed under CC BY 2.0.