In this era of declining computer science enrollments â and ongoing concern over the math and science competency of American students â I believe it is time for technical institutions to undertake similar soul-searching. In particular, we need to rethink the historic divorce of science and engineering from the so-called liberal arts â those nominally intended for "free men."
Things I wish CompSci courses would teach
1. effective email communication and managing online teams (cf. Open source governance) 2. event-based multi-core programming (cf. Erlang, the Actor model, NSOperation) 3. real-world profiling and optimization (cf. DTrace) 4. data-parallelism via the GPU (cf. OpenCL - Open Compute Language) 5. "holistic" application design (cf. interface-first programming )
Character-Driven Branding
Steve Jobs once famously claimed that Apple's Executive Team spent "zero" time focused on branding; instead, they worry a lot about "who they are", and ensuring that their actions are consistent with that. While that may reflect the luxury Apple has as one of the world's best-known brands, it raises a crucial point. In today's... Continue Reading →
Poppendiecks on Lean Software Development
Thomas and Mary Poppendieck are to Lean Product Development (for Software) what Charles and Ray Eames are to design. LPD can be considered the project management aspect of Agile, to complement the software engineering practices of, e.g., Behavior-Driven Development. Some of my favorite essays from their website are: Train-Wreck Management The Challenges of Bringing Lean... Continue Reading →
It’s the System, Stupid
A brilliant essay by my new favorite website, on Lean Software Development.Which is more important - process or people? It helps if we trade in the overloaded word "process" and use "system."In the article "Managing a Living System, not a Ledger" H. Thomas Johnson says "Managers at Toyota believe that improving the system is the... Continue Reading →
Eben Moglen: Public Policy in the “Free” World
Yesterday Eben Moglen made headlines during the O'Reilly Radar at OSCON with a (somewhat) surprising attack on "Open Source" in general, and (more surprisingly) Tim O'Reilly in particular: Eben Moglen Wacks Tim O'ReillyEben Moglen Challenges Tim O'Reilly to Join the ConversationEben Moglen Berates Open SourceToday Eben had the stage to himself, to share his thoughts... Continue Reading →
Authentic Storytelling on the Inside
In my hero Seth Godin's book All Marketers are Liars, he describes the power of authentic stories in the context of outbound communication. Stephen Denning (formerly of the World Bank) brings that same perspective to internal communication in The Leader's Guide to Storytelling. He not only shows how the power of authentic narrative can bring about... Continue Reading →
Dips, Dead Ends, Joyrides, Lotteries, and Quests
Like everyone else there, I really enjoyed Seth Godin's visit to Silicon Valley to discuss his new book "The Dip". Not only is he a fantastic speaker, his idea of combining 5 free books and a talk for $50 worked brilliantly, in that I somehow managed to feel like I got both for free. :-)... Continue Reading →
Behavior-Driven Development
After hearing about RSpec, I ran into the idea of Behavior-Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development is an Agile development process that comprises aspects of Acceptance Test Driven Planning, Domain Driven Design and Test Driven Development. RSpec is a BDD tool aimed at TDD in the context of BDD. My personal aesthetic tells me that this may well be The Next Big Thing... Continue Reading →
Microformats Governance
In a Lenten-induced fit of penance, I just proposed revamping the Governance of Microformats. It'll be interesting to see how many worm-cans I've opened up... [Initial Email to microformats-discuss]This issue has come up several times before, but never seems to have gotten traction. So (as part of my Lenten penance 🙂 I've finally decided to... Continue Reading →
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