Summary of April, 2003
The major theme of April, 2003 was urban planning, but I blogged about a few other things as well.
As the month, began, I was still reading Jane Jacobs’s great book on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book I think of as belonging to the literature of complexity science. Cities are complex adaptive systems, and Jacobs describe their nature brilliantly. See these posts:
- Compensating for lack of feedback (of April 2)
- About parallels between city planning and software architecture (of April 10)
- On the planned versus the spontaneous (of April 11)
- About clean starts (of April 14)
- Some quotes from the book (of April 21)
- Wondering about what to read next (of April 25)
I thought about what you need to do to salvage a bad situation where a group or team of people are involved. When things are bad, teams often get stuck instead of finding out what’s wrong and fixing it. My opinion is that you either should do a full restart from scratch or, if you can’t do that, create the “feeling” of a clean start: rearranging the office, doing things in another order, envisioning where you want to be, and really believing that you’re already there. Jane Jacobs wrote that in dealing with bad neighborhoods, you can’t just bulldoze and rebuild.
I read and commented on Brian Hayes’s article The Post-OOP Paradigm.
I thought again about why there’s a bias towards the rational in software development. One of my strongest convictions is that software people need to look more to other creative professions to learn about how to do things well. Software development is too rational and formal (or wants to be).
I posted two link dumps for articles about Eric Bonabeau and biological models for computing, following a talk of his at this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
I began reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.