Here are seven things we found interesting reading for this week.
6 Thinking modes for helping you get un-stuck
6-thinking-modes-for-helping-you-get-un-stuck/ by Sal Freudenberg. Somewhat mischievously labeled 0 to 5, where 0 is ‘Tacit’ - things you do you just “know how” to do. The others are Hierarchical, Multi-faceted, Opportunistic and Creative.
Unlearning Ineffective or Obsolete Technologies
[Unlearning Ineffective or Obsolete Technologies](http://people.stern.nyu.edu/wstarbuc/unlearn.html/](http://people.stern.nyu.edu/wstarbuc/unlearn.html) by William H. Starbuck, New York University, Published in the International Journal of Technology Management, 1996, 11: 725-737.
Often before learning something new, we have to unlearn something we know. We sometimes introduce people to practices they don’t know, or think they know, but we approach them very differently (e.g. Test Driven Devleopment). I particularly like this one: “All causal arrows have two heads.”
I found this through a summary by John Clapham. if you have a little time, read Johns’ summary, if you have more time, read Williams’.
Enabling developer migration
Robert Rees, of the Guardian writes about Enabling developer migration. If you are wondering how to let developers self-organise in to teams, while ensuring that less interesting, but valueable jobs also get done, read on. The main thing seems to be providing just enough structure and the right information at the right time: “People cannot make meaningful decisions if they don’t have the right information to inform those decisions.”. One of the interesting side effects of better advertising new roles internally was that developers had a better understanding of what other teams were up to.
How Mark Zuckerberg led Facebooks’ war to crush Google Plus
You know software is eating the world, when Vanity Fair reports on it. Antonio García Martínez on what happened inside Facebook at the time Google launched their social network. A handy read in case someone would try to convince you product development is easy when you have plenty of money and people.
The Error Model
Joe Duffy is writing a series about a shut-down operating system development at Microsoft called Midori. The Error Model is about designing with, for and around failure is not easy, this post details considerations in language and in systems design. . This is a long one - I downloaded it to my e-book reader and took some time to go through it.
Cucumber Ltd - the story so far
Cucumber Ltd - the story so far by our colleague Matt Wynne. Creating a product, even with a ton of experience, is not easy. Yet another story of “build one to throw one away”. We love seeing more dads making an effort to make work and family work together (there are some cool pictures of dads programming together with babies in a carrier).
Learning quantum mechanics the easy way
And now for something completely different: Learning Quantum Mechanics the easy way by “sideshowcrispin” (we haven’t found the authors’ one true name just yet). Quite often we build software to solve a problem. We can also build software to explore the world, or in this case, the universe. The explanation of quantum mechanics and the exploration of the developer (we are not physicists, so also don’t know how accurate this is) is well worth a read.
Why seven reads?
Don’t know ;-). Seven plus or minus two seems to be a good number, and (rationalizing after the fact), there are seven days in the week, so we can collect one thing a day, and you can read one thing a day.
This is a little experiment we’ll be running for a few weeks. We enjoy reading - not all of us at the same time, and not necessarily the same things, and we hope you’ll find these enjoyable. The hypothesis for this experiment is that it helps us better preserve the reading we love, and summarizing them helps at least one of us read them a bit more in depth and keeping track of reads that might be useful to share later.
Subscribe to our RSS feed