The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
— Leo Tolstoy-
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- An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming, 3rd ed
- Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
- From Dawn to Decadence
- Notes towards a set-objective language.
- To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
- You are correct: westerners care more about Boston than Baghdad
- Why the law is slow, impersonal and obsessed with details
- Anatomy of Movement
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Category Archives: Systems
To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
So, it’s been a while since I wrote a book review. And I have, in fact, been reading the odd book here and there. I read everyone’s favourite late-noughties manifesto The Lean Startup, which was a few good insights smothered … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Software Engineering, Systems
Comments Off on To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
The Essence of Hayek (Part 1)
In April I wrote a long, winding review of Drift into Failure. I was very proud of it: in the space of several thousand words I visited complex systems, fuzzy logic and the usefulness of positivistic thinking. It met with … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Economics and public policy, Systems
1 Comment
Waltzing with Bears
Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister are probably best known for the book Peopleware (unreviewed). It’s a justly famous book in my industry, containing as it does generous lashings of both wit and wisdom. Sadly, it is a book more honoured … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Software Engineering, Systems
2 Comments
A not-so-brief aside on reigning in chaos
Everything that humans touch eventually becomes complex, whether we like it or not. (Blog posts too. This one started out as a comparison of three competing software system alternatives and subsequently bloated into a discussion of chaos in computer systems.) … Continue reading
Posted in Robojar, Software Engineering, Systems, Technical Notes
27 Comments
Fat and Simple
In my trade we commonly mention the truism that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. I bring this up because I’m about to do what every smart person likes to do: drastically simplify a … Continue reading
Posted in Diet, Systems
21 Comments
War and Peace and War
Grand theories of history never quite go out of fashion. The impossible complexity of human society so cheerfully refutes our understanding that we have to fall back on intuitive pattern-matching to make sense of it (after a while, this becomes … Continue reading
Drift into Failure
Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker , is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. “Thought provoking” is usually a shorthand used by buttered-up friends of the author to mean “I agree” or “he/she provided a … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Systems
4 Comments