What I'm doing now
Questions There are a few questions I’m particularly invested in right now: How should we treat “domains” when investigating expertise? How …
Posts on Ben Scofield
Recent content in Posts on benscofield.com
Latest posts
Knowledge elicitation as intervention
If you’re not reading Cedric Chin’s Commoncog essays, you’re missing out. The most recent one (Tacit Expertise Extraction, Software …
Infocom games and accessing knowledge
Another brick in the usefulness of the graph model of knowledge: back in the 80s, I played various Infocom games – essentially, interactive …
Conceptual graphs as understanding
Students struggle more in classes where they have less background knowledge of the subject. Research to expand an area of knowledge is …
Tapestry
Some time ago, I was reading a book about the history of jazz in China, and something about it put me off. On reflection, I realized that my …
A future without linters
I have a vision of a wonderful future. A future without arguments about camelCase and snake_case. A future without debates over tabs and …
Judging expertise
One of the reasons researchers focus on experts instead of expertise is that it seems easier to find the one than the other — you can look …
Building Reg Watch
Ragtag partners with Insightus to protect North Carolina voters
TMTOWTDI and expertise
One of the guiding principles of the Perl programming language is TMTOWTDI — there’s more than one way to do it (where “it” is “pretty much …
Everyday expertise
The Winter Olympics are on! We’re in the first week of watching athletes who’ve spent years honing their skills and now get to amaze us with …
My January in reading and podcasts
I had so much fun doing my Reading and Podcast years in review for 2017 that I’ve decided to do more frequent look-backs this year. I don’t …
The continuity of expertise
One of the (many) things that makes research on the highest levels of expertise challenging is that — by definition — there aren’t that many …
Expertise and attention
So, my last few posts started to describe a theory of expertise as something like: the set of factors acquired over time that help someone …
My 2017 in podcasts
I had a lot of fun doing my post about my reading for the past year , so I figured I’d take a shot at doing something similar for my podcast …
My 2017 in reading
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts — three years, to be exact — but I had a few goals going into this year that I wanted …
Expertise: success in a domain
So, in my last post I defined expertise as the set of acquired factors that contribute to success in a domain, and waved my hands at …
Expertise (n.)
If we’re talking about “expertise” instead of “experts,” it’s only natural to wonder what “expertise” actually is. Hold on to your butts, …
Expert (n.)
I’m doing a deep dive into the research on expertise (or, maybe more accurately, continuing to dive into that research — it’s been something …
Attention, please
I’m flying back from Nordic Ruby (my first conference talk in three years; my last one was at Nordic Ruby, too, which made for a lovely …
My 2014 in Reading
I had a lot of fun writing up my year in reading last year, so I thought I’d do it again for 2014. Goals I mentioned in last year’s post …
Wanting to be, not to do
It’s about a month and a half until my 10th wedding anniversary, and I’ve been reflecting on how I was feeling before I got married. I …
Predictions for Comixology+Amazon
Note: I don’t have any special insight into the business arrangements here; I haven’t been paying as much attention to the comics industry …
Postmortems: trust and confidence
I am a strong believer in the value of a good postmortem after a customer-affecting incident — and after internal incidents, and after …
Two problems with antifragility
I’m no fan of Nassim Taleb (of black swan, antifragility, and needing-an-editor fame), but I forced myself to finish his last book …
My 2013 in reading
I’ve been using Goodreads reliably this year to track my reading (well, the book and graphic novel portions of my reading). Over the last …
Problems with self-organization
I just listened to the November 21st episode of the Freakonomics podcast , on what economists call “spontaneous order .” It’s an interesting …
On valuing people
Ernie and I are going through many of the same experiences right now, so his post on how interviews are broken resonated with me. In …
On contact management
I have a problem: every time I open up an application that has a contact list, I find something confusing or frustrating. With Skype, it’s …
On interview coding
Oh hey, I’m unemployed again (this time was, sadly, involuntary – my company shut down). That means I’m doing a lot of talking, to hiring …
On Ansible
In my post on flexible infrastructures, I mentioned in passing that I was managing my ops work with Ansible rather than the more traditional …
On a flexible infrastructure
I’ve been having a lot of fun over the past couple of weeks shading into the ops side of things – I’ve been experimenting with an …
On GitHub, DDOSs, and deploys
When GitHub goes down, you can almost hear the wailing in the streets. GitHub has cemented itself as a central part of many development …
On a schema.rb mystery
Imagine, if you will, a database table with your average, everyday foreign key. It’s an INTEGER column. Now, imagine a coworker opens a pull …
On the conference I'd like to see
I’m in Sweden at the moment, taking part in an amazing Nordic Ruby conference. Yesterday, I gave a talk called Better: A Field Guide to …
On what I want to do
We just wrapped the 2013 edition of RailsConf, and I’m both exhausted and excited. There’s nothing quite like being surrounded by 1500 of …
On fairness and developer salaries
I’m taking advantage of being funemployed by taking a few online courses, including Dan Ariely’s A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior …
On my productivity
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my upcoming funemployment (which has since begun). I mentioned in that post that my past jobs have …
On "monitoring"
I’m at Monitorama this week; it’s been a great conference, but a weird one for me. This is the first conference I’ve been to in years where …
On my recent brush with rhabdo
First off: thank you to everyone who sent their thoughts and well-wishes. It was extremely heartening to open up Twitter or Facebook and see …
On taking time to think
I’ve gotten into a really bad habit when it comes to my work: every job in software development I’ve ever had has essentially been an …
On remote work
I've worked remotely to a greater or lesser extent for three or four years now -- ranging from working from home a few days a week to being …
On "people" problems
My friend Justin Gehtland tweet this a bit ago: At its root, every problem is a *people* problem, because only people have problems.Without …
On Integrity
Some years ago, I remember hearing about a novel (short story, maybe?) by a futurist-minded science fiction author. The premise is that in …
On Radical Honesty
OK, who's heard of Radical Honesty? My introduction to it was in AJ Jacobs' My Life as an Experiment. The premise is that you don't lie, and …
On Self-knowledge
Picking up on that "how do I know what I think" quote -- let's start to tie a little bit of this into topics that might be more interesting …
On Self-Deception
I was listening to an interview with Dan Ariely on NPR earlier today -- he was talking about topics from his latest book (The Honest Truth …
On Levels of Description
I've been fascinated by levels of description for as long as I can remember: physics, chemistry, and biology as a kid -- with both expected …
On Interface Segregation
As promised, here's the first installment of my Fractal Design series. I'd like to kick things off with what might seem to be an odd choice …
On Fractal Design
I'm on my way back home after a great Ruby Hoedown in Nashville, where I gave a talk called "Fractal Design." This is the second(ish) time …
On This Blog
Oh! I should mention -- this is the fourth, fifth, or twenty-third incarnation of my blog, all told. It's running on Posterous, which …