My research and teaching interests involve on the design of abstract devices such as legal arguments and computer programs. Over time, I have studied this topic through a variety of lenses, including AI, knowledge-based systems, software patterns, agile software development, and programming languages.
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If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a…
I first became acquainted with Pat Conroy's work when, as a freshman in college, I watched The Great Santini as a requirement for one of my honors courses. This film struck me as both sad and hopeful. Since then, I have seen a couple of other movies adapted from his novels.
Earlier this year, many people were passing around this article about "re-learning how to be yourself online". Near the end the author reaches a set of questions that are motivating him:
I like this passage from John Urschel Goes Pro , about the former NFL player who is pursuing a Ph.D. in math:
I concur so strongly not only because he writes about RSS, which I'm on record as supporting and using. I enjoy rolling my own simple software in almost any domain. Simple has a lot of advantages. Under my control has a lot of advantages. But the biggest advantage echoes what Dr. Drang says: Programming is often more…
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
I recently found myself reading a few of Gregor Hohpe's blog posts and came across Design Patterns: More Than Meets The Eye . In it, Hohpe repeats a message that needs to be repeated every so often even now, twenty years after the publication of the GoF book: software patterns are fundamentally about human…
My previous agile theme, on organic planning , has implications for how we design and implement solutions -- for making decisions that "stick". Derek Sivers recently used an apocryphal story about walkways to express a similar principle: