Idea Dump

Since reading Getting Things Done, I always carry something to take notes on (the hipster PDA is my favorite). So I record ideas, and when processing my notes I enter them into a list. But I thought I’d start dumping most of them here instead.

I have a backlog, so I’ll dump a few at a time until I catch up.

• I thought about looking at various definitions of design in the context of the design of the Clock of the Long Now. (Danny Hillis’ clock project is very interesting, and I recommend listening to his “Progress on the 10,000-year Clock” talk to get a sense of the wide range of factors that comes into play when designing something that is to last for thousands of years. The talk is available from the Long Now Seminar Downloads page.)
• Also from Danny Hillis’ talk, I liked the notion that everything that evolves, and in which its evolution is somehow discernible, could be considered a clock. Trees are clocks, and so on.
• About generating code, as more and more software development tools do – you draw boxes and arrows (UML), and out comes code. The tendency is to generate more code, instead of writing less by using good foundations (see Rails). I had some thoughts about applying this to brick-and-mortar architecture, and to city planning; generating houses. There’s a disconnect between the diagrams and the reality, whether that be lines of code or concrete. (When I thought about this, there was something in this analogy that revealed well why generating code is bad. I can’t remember it, though.)
• I thought about applying Oblique Strategies to programming, and felt that it somehow shows why programming is not art.
• When reading Erich Gamma’s preface to the second edition of Extreme Programming Explained, I thought about how XP is like GTD, in that both are actually self-improvement methods. XP is based on a deep understanding of developing software, rather than some Corbusian idea of pure order, such as in the tools and approaches suggested by, for instance, the Gartner Group in the context of Enterprise Architecture. I feel that GTD as well is based on what works, and many times it runs counter to your preconceived notions about getting your stuff together (pure order). Cf. the XP paradigm “stay aware, improve, adapt” and Merlin Mann’s idea that any method that helps you become more self-aware will help.

That’ll do for now.