Summary of January, 2003
The major themes of January, 2003 were how writers work, Walt Disney, artificial creativity, how TV series producers work, lean development, and the science of networks.
The month started with me unclogging my brain after the holidays, when I had thought a lot about the parallels between software development and writing fiction. For instance, I read a very fascinating essay by Edgar Allan Poe, titled The Philosophy of Composition, where he detailed the creation of The Raven (a poem of his). I was surprised by how strict and methodical his process seemed.
See the following posts:
- Post-christmas notes #2 (of January 1)
- Post-christmas notes #4 (of January 3)
Agustín Schapira wrote in his weblog (which seems to be gone now) to say that Jorge Luis Borges commented on Poe’s essay in the prologue of Doctor Brodie’s Report, and that he didn’t agree with Poe’s account of the writing process.
I also read Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney to see what I could learn about how they ran things in the beginning at Disney. I only mentioned it briefly; most of what I blogged from it was in December, 2002.
I saw the Bicentennial Man on TV and began thinking about AI and creativity. See the following posts:
- Post-christmas notes #4 (of January 3)
- A link to and quote from a Douglas Hofstadter’s book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought (of January 3)
- Robotic creativity (of January 4)
I also read and thought about the organization of teams making TV series, such as Sopranos, Friends, etc., and also daily soap operas, where there are loads of writers involved. See the following posts:
- Post-christmas notes #3 (of January 2)
- Post-christmas notes #5 (of January 6)
Then I found and read the draft of Tom and Mary Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development, which is a great book, as is evident by the number of posts:
- Lean development (of January 7)
- Lean development #2 (of January 8)
- Lean development #3 (of January 8)
- Lean development #4 (of January 13)
- Lean development #5 (of January 13)
- Lean development #6 (of January 13)
- Lean development #7 (of January 14)
- Lean development #8 (of January 17)
I read Danny Hillis’s article about Feynman, which was great.
I found Matt Webb’s weblog, which remains one of my top favorites since then.
Then I began reading Albert-László Barabási’s Linked: The New Science of Networks, which influenced my thinking for a long while:
- Linked #2 (of January 20; the first post about the book was in November, when I leafed through it the first time)
- Linked #3 (of January 22)
- Linked #4 (of January 26)
- Small Worlds (of January 27)
- Linked #5 (of January 27)
I launched my now abandoned side blog, Irrational Software. I still liked the idea of editing and reposting old stuff as articles, but it took too much effort and caused my weblogging to suffer.
Lastly, I also got a very flattering offer to join a group of very talented webloggers, which I eventually turned down after much thought because I was afraid I would get stage fright. I think my posts are best when I write things for myself, trying to ignore that others are reading this. I easily slip into a mode of writing where I polish every word and sentence, and spend hours just to write a few paragraphs. That happened to the mission statement I wrote before I finally said no thanks.