When academic theory sounds like your job
Just a quick note about this before I forget. I ran across this paper earlier today describing patterns of behavior in problem solving. Human reliability expert Erik Hollnagel describes these four modes of problem solving:
- Strategic
- Tactical
- Opportunistic
- Scrambled
Those almost don’t need definitions. Strategic means taking the long view; tactical taking a more short-term, rapid view. Opportunistic problem solving behavior is characterized this way:
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What is a senior developer?
After fifteen years working in web design and development I find myself at a job where I am introduced as a “senior developer.” But what is a senior developer? What makes a good one? What should be expected of me that’s not expected of the younger programmers we hire? Does it just mean I have been doing it longer, so I should be expected to do more? Is it just a marketing term? You know, as in: “You are such a big-shot we’re giving you a senior developer.”
I asked people on reddit and twitter, some of whom clearly worked in more rigidly hierarchical departments than I ever have.
What does “impossible” mean?
I really like this post by Jaques Mattheij, where he investigates what impossible means.
‘You can’t do that’ it now started to take on a new meaning: “I don’t see how you can do that”, or even “I can’t do that”. And I think that is usually its meaning. When someone tells you ‘you can’t do that’ what they really mean to say is not that it is impossible, what they mean to say is that they don’t know how to do that.
Programming and abstraction
Here’s one reason it can be hard to get a straight answer out of a programmer. When you ask them a straightforward question like “does X do Y,” they have to figure out what level of abstraction you are talking about. This can be kind of hard to explain, but I’ll give it a shot.
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Resolutions
I heard an interesting idea in a radio program recently. I don’t remember which one. But they were talking about these books that people used to keep — journals of a sort, where people would copy down things that were interesting to them, maybe annotate them a bit. There’s a special name for those books, and I can’t remember what that is, either. So that’s kind of the problem.
Last year I decided that I was going to ease off current-based reading — weblogs, newspapers, and the like — for more in-depth reading and study. By the year I was subscribed to less than five political weblogs and had abandoned most of my periodical podcast listening for classes through iTunes U. I’ve listened to hundreds of interviews with very interesting people, read lots of interesting magazine articles.
And I remember practically nothing of it except a kind of gloss, surface level understanding of the topic.
The old slows down the new
John Gruber on Apple’s tendency to abandon technology:
Classic was abandoned as quickly as possible in the transition to Mac OS X. PowerPC support was dropped in Mac OS X 10.6 three years after the last PowerPC Macs were discontinued. The 64-bit Carbon application programming interface died. It’s not that these technologies were no longer useful. It’s that continuing to support them would have slowed the company down. Time spent supporting the old is time not spent building the new. What’s With the Mac Doomsayers?
It’s something we’ve been wrestling with ourselves at work. Within hours of the official release of iOS 4 our young buck developer was agitating to dump the legacy code in our app and require the newest operating system.
And Apple certainly hasn’t made it easy for us to support older OSs — the Simulator only simulates iPad 3.2 and iPhone 4.0 devices, and the compilers produce no warnings if you’re using elements of the new operating system that won’t function on the old.
And yet, some of our customers are still — months later — loathe to upgrade. So: do we spend resources supporting a continually shrinking market? Or do we abandon laggard customers and force them to follow us into the present?
Where’s my video phone?
Here are some interesting thoughts on using video conferencing for interviews instead of the standard phone screen. Most interesting to me:
When you have video you can get a sense of the other person’s body language. I find I really miss that in regular phone screens.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but video might alleviate my intense hatred of telephone conversations. When I talk on the phone I always feel like I have half my brain tied behind my back because I can’t see the other person. Email alleviates this because I have time to think and compose, but I detest phone calls because they require immediate response on far less input.
Yes, I consider body language vital input.
Yes, I’m an INFP. Why do you ask?
The New Computer Flame Wars
Despite still being installed on more computers than anything else, has it struck anyone that the old Apple vs. Microsoft feud seems to be irrelevant? I don’t think I’ve heard “Microsoft” and “future of computing” in the same sentence unless they were joined by the phrase “is not the.”
The Microsoft / PC end of this argument’s been taken up by Google, which is — on the whole — a much better and stronger class of opposition. Microsoft’s main advantage was that they were ubiquitous and cheap. So is Google. But Google is also also effective and useful, two features lacking on Microsoft computers for two operating systems.
Apple Vs. Adobe I’m still trying to get. Well, trying to put in more succinct terms, anyway. There’s a philosophical battle here, too, but I think it’s more between Apple and Flash developers. Adobe is merely fighting to maintain market share; their Flash platform has always relied on the perceived ubiquity of the Flash Player, which is a sort of browser-in-a-browser. If a Flashless browser becomes popular, then that’s bad marketing news for Adobe.
Of course, so is whining in public, which is all I’ve seen Adobe do recently.
My biggest problem with Facebook
I understand why a lot of people are upset about Facebook opting them into exposing their private lives over and over and over again. I also understand why people are upset over Facebook’s complicated privacy rules, which seem designed to confuse. I’m bothered by those things, too. But I don’t have anyone stalking me, or any crazy ex-wives, and everyone at work pretty much already knows about my political and religious views because they’ve read parts of this blog. So a lot of what people want to “keep secret” has not really been a secret for me.
Flash is bad for the iPhone and iPad
Steve Jobs recently outlined the Applethink on Flash, giving six reasons why they refuse to support it on the Touch devices. Some of the arguments are weaker than others — I mean, come on, Flash isn’t open but it’s certainly more open than Apple’s touch devices have been.
But Jobs really only had to make one argument: even if Flash worked as intended on Touch devices, it still wouldn’t “work.”