Idea Dump

I’m actually clearing out my backlog with this post.

• One of the things Getting Things Done most strongly advocates is clearing out your head, getting things down on paper or into your computer, as each “should” in your head contributes to mental stress. I’ve also heard that to keep your mind agile and fight dementia, you should train yourself to remember things, by avoiding to put them on lists. I guess crosswords, sex, and exercise is what GTD’ers will have to resort to.
• I really liked the sushi restaurant conveyor belt metaphor for RSS. I wish newsreaders could more fiercely exploit this metaphor.
• There’s a tension between engineering and art in software development. Each project is an exploration. Perhaps it isn’t art, but a form of craft – but it isn’t just engineering, and hackers aren’t painters.
• An older note I’ve forgot what I thought about as I wrote it, and I’m not quite sure what I was getting at: “Why do we tend to formulating theories, when we’re actually a pragmatic animal?” I think I was thinking about how humans frequently destroy knowledge built during centuries of just doing, by analyzing and formulating theories, methods, processes, and so forth. By systematizing knowledge, knowledge is often destroyed.
• In The 7 Habits, Stephen Covey makes a distinction between leadership and management. “Management follows leadership” he says, paraphrasing “form follows function.” When I heard this (I listened to the audio version) I thought about how software architects need to be leaders and not managers.