sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: The rise of foxy thinking
date: 4-Jan-2013

The rise of foxy thinking

Now that we've survived the Mayan Apocalypse I predict that 2013 will see the rise of the generalist over the specialist.

This article last year from Harvard Business Review by Vikram Mansharamani, lecturer at Yale and author of 'Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst' references Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" which contrasts hedgehogs that "relate everything to a single, central vision" i.e. specialists, with foxes who "pursue many ends connected...if at all, only in some de-facto way" i.e. generalists. Berlin's essay is itself based upon the Greek poet Archilochus who wrote that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Software storytelling
date: 22-May-2008

Software storytelling

Many cultures had, at their pre-industrial stages, a rich oral tradition of storytelling as a means of communicating knowledge, before literacy became widespread.

Bards would gather people around the fire and tell rousing tales, inspiring and edifying a new generation of citizens with their practiced craft of passing along knowledge, morals and cultural values using the medium of entertainment. It seems that now, certain sub-cultures have developed 'secondary orality' as Walter Ong[^1] calls it, the creation of an oral transmission that exists alongside and is enabled by modern media, radio, television and the Internet. I propose that professional software developers can use the ancient art of storytelling to enhance their daily working practices.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Everything old is new again
date: 9-Apr-2024

Everything old is new again

'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose' - (French) The more things change, the more they stay the same.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: ZDD - Zero Dependency Development
date: 22-May-2023

ZDD - Zero Dependency Development

sleepyfox

Upset

Typically when someone is upset with me, they will express it in a way that is, shall we say, sub-optimal. In an ideal world they would come to me, and calmly explain why they are upset with me, perhaps using the Non-Violent Communication template[1] like so:

• When X happens
• I feel Y
• Because I need A
• Would you be willing to B?

But this rarely happens. Instead the person who is upset may shout, cry, storm out, or a variety of other emotional responses.

sleepyfox

CI/CD and why they are not the same thing

Last Thursday CircleCI had a security breach, and now many companies are struggling, because not only do they have to rotate their credentials for one SaaS provider, but now they have to rotate ALL THE THINGS in their production and non-prod environments because EVERY SECRET EVERYWHERE for EVERY ENVIRONMENT just got leaked. Because they were all in CircleCI. Because you used CircleCI to deploy at the end of your CI step. Deploy to test. Deploy to staging. Deploy to production. And now all your base are belong to 1337 h4xx0r5.

This has caused a lot of people in a lot of companies a lot of pain.

Here are N simple strategies to enable you to avoid this pain:

1. Don't use SaaS CI/CD
2. Use SaaS CI but not to deploy

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Alexandrian Architecture
date: 09-Jan-2023

Alexandrian Architecture

My New Year's resolution: I am not going to talk about Micro-services.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: The problem with AI coders
date: 22-Jun-2022

The problem with AI coders

The problem with 'solutions' like GitHub's Copilot, and similar tech, is that it frames the problem as a problem of search. The programmer is searching for some code that does a thing (produce a HTML table with alternating coloured background rows of green and red), and that they just need to find that thing. Machine Learning has had success in this area, just look at Google's page-rank 'algorithm'.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Aikido and the philosophy of software development
date: 11-Oct-2013

Aikido and the Philosophy of Software Development

I ran an impromptu session at the Software Craftsmanship and Testing conference in the UK a couple of weeks ago, that turned out to be rather well received - though I suspect that this was more due to the novelty of the session rather than anything else. The spark that led to this session was a tweet by James Coplien that both he and Jeff Sutherland practice Aikido, re-tweeted by Bob Marshall.

It led me to think that if one of the two founders of Scrum were positively influenced by Aikido, perhaps Aikido has had other influences within the IT world that we are perhaps unaware of, and perhaps it would be worth talking with people about.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Demon ex machina
date: 03-Jul-2008

Demon ex Machina

Why are speed cameras like software metrics? Speed cameras are (or so we are told in the UK) a 'Road Safety initiative' that is designed to reduce the number of fatalities and serious injuries in road traffic accidents. A software metric is measurement of a software system's properties that is used (or so we are told) to increase quality and decrease cost and risk from software development projects.