Summary of March, 2003

March, 2003 was focused mainly on complexity science and urban planning.

Throughout the month, I kept coming back to thoughts about complex adaptive systems and software, fueled by reading the book Complexity, which I finished this month. See these posts:

• Learning and adaption in software development (of March 2)
• Blinded by technological sophistication (of March 3)
• Changes in complex systems (of March 7)
• Software systems are complex systems (of March 9)
• Perpetual novelty (of March 13)

I read a little about urban planner James Rouse, who designed the largest planned community in America, Columbia, Maryland. Planned versus “spontaneous” cities is something I want to read more about. Posts:

• Blinded by technological sophistication (of March 3)
• James Rouse and Columbia links (linkdump of March 3)

I continued to read about urban planning, namely Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I as often as I could linked to software development:

• City planning and software development (of March 16)
• Strange evolution (of March 25)
• A planned, controlled community (mentions EPCOT; of March 26)
• On the EPCOT film (of March 26)
• A fabric of objects (of March 27)

Two of these posts also talked about Disney’s EPCOT, which originally was Walt Disney’s experiments with planned communities. I saw a short film that was made to present the ideas behind EPCOT, and probably to raise funds. This was very interesting along with reading Death and Life. See these posts:

• A planned, controlled community (March 26)
• On the EPCOT film (of March 26)
• No standards to follow (of March 27)

Having encountered expensive project management methods at work, I blogged about this and how I feel them to run counter to the nature of software, and tried to draw analogies to fiction writing and technical writing. A few days later, I participated in a very creative meeting, and wondered why we just can’t invent our own rules, as we go.

I launched my Swedish weblog.

I wrote about Edward de Bono’s principles of simplicity and software development, which received some linkage from different weblogs and apparently was appreciated.

Then there was a post titled Conceptual clarity and test-driven development which I’m having ambiguous feelings towards. I couldn’t really express what I was thinking, but it might be something of value there, somewhere.