Summary of June, 2003
The major themes of June, 2003 were learning and Christopher Alexander.
I thought about the importance of learning in software projects, and what you can do to maximize learning. See the following posts:
- About scientific discovery and the importance of failures (of June 1)
- Note about how learning is not about memorizing information (of June 1)
- Link to Dale Emery’s comments about this (of June 13)
I was listening to the audio version of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, which I liked very much, but which didn’t generate many posts. But I think it influenced my blogging in subtle ways.
I found Erik Benson’s great weblog. I only wish I had time to read more of his long posts.
I read Edward R. Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint and blogged some about it (although I had more ideas before reading it, about what I thought it was about, than afterwards; but it’s still a great essay):
- Analogy: presenters who don’t care about presentations, programmers who don’t care about code (of June 3)
- What I liked about it (of June 10)
- Tufte’s suggested reading about teaching and presentations (of June 13)
Then I began reading a lot of things either by or about architect Christopher Alexander, whose thinking I find very interesting. What’s important to note is that the adoption of patterns in the software design community is merely about expressing knowledge in a convenient format, where Alexander has the ambition to change the world. Again and again, he questions whether the software community has really understood his point.
See the following articles for more on this:
- On Linda Rising’s article on Alexander and software design (of June 10)
- On Alexander’s OOPSLA 1996 keynote (of June 19)
- More on the keynote (of June 23)
- A quote from the book A New Theory of Urban Design (of June 23)
- Another quote from the book (of June 23)
- A quote from the book Notes on the Synthesis of Form (of June 23)
- On James Coplien’s and Brad Appleton’s article on Alexander and The Nature of Order (of June 23)
- On the Nature of Order series of books (of June 25)
- On Alexander’s great article A City is not a Tree (of June 26)
- More on A City is not a Tree (of June 26)
Related to this is a review I found of Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, which claims that Christopher Alexander’s patterns paradigm isn’t applicable to software.
I read an article on Pixar’s new offices, which implied that corporate culture is top-down, whereas I’m convinced that it’s bottom-up. I also quoted things about the organization of the new office space.
I read an article on the potential solving of Poincaré’s conjecture and quoted passages about sudden flashes of insight in the history of mathematics.
Then I tried to express how some things are capable of communicating their purpose to a child of 17 months—or if not their purpose, so at least how the elements in their user interfaces work. Clearly, the things we interact with depends a lot on conventions, but some conventions (isolated and in aggregate) are intuitive even to very small children, which is interesting.
I wondered whether there’s an anatomy of booms, after reading two articles in the Wired Magazine issue guest-edited by Rem Koolhaas.
I began reading Alistair Cockburn’s Agile Software Development but didn’t finish it. I posted some quotes, though.
This month, I also experimented a lot with alternatives to UML diagrams and wondered which of Edward Tufte’s ideas could be applied to software design diagrams. This is definitely something I want to explore more, as I believe that the conventions offered by the UML are too primitive and static.