By Simon Harris
Genuine curiosity is crucial to helping people understand their own barriers to change. Fiume Bacchiglione, Padua, Veneto, Italy. I am reminded day after day how important it is to remain ruthlessly curious. Smart, capable people will either solve problems for themselves, realise they don’t know how, or realise they do know how but the environment is causing them to not do anything about it. This…
Rating: ★★★★ I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? when I was a kid (c. 1982) and loved it. Not long after, I watched Blade Runner in the theatre (as was the fashion at the time) and loved that too. More recently we watched Blade Runner 2049 as a family which I also enjoyed, but certainly not as much as my memory of the original. Re-reading the book for the first time in over 40 years, I…
Rating: ★ I’d been searching for a new sci-fi book to read and, having really enjoyed The Wool series, I thought I’d give Machine Learning by Hugh Howey a go. Sadly, I did not enjoy the book overall. On a positive note, I did appreciate the author notes at the end of each story. I’m coming to appreciate that I am not a fan of first-person narratives, nor short stories. Definitely not first-person…
Rating: ★★★★★ Maintaining the iambic pentameter of the original, as well as the number of lines, this English translation totally worked for me. What more can I say? I’m certainly not about to review the story itself! Link: app.thestorygraph.com/books/3257c67c-dc13-45a0-8da9-e9d60961d5cc
Rating: ★ About as compelling as a horoscope. I never made it past chapter 2. Link: app.thestorygraph.com/books/50b533a1-4d24-4853-b296-95b2441cc577
Graphics, governance, gibberish, galactic, garbage, growth, and glitchy. I Tried Simulating The Entire Ocean. I’m pretty much never going to need to do this (and let’s face it, the math is beyond me anyway) but I love watching the way people solve these kinds of scaling problems. I think it’s also super important to show new developers (like my kids) how the creative process is iterative, with…
Rating: ★★★ I watched the Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer movie in 1996 and remember almost nothing of it. I’m not sure if that helped or hindered my enjoyment of the book. I enjoyed the book for what it is. “A good example of that sort of thing” as they say. It’s a relatively quick read with what I imagine were shocking science fiction themes in 1896. If late 19th century colonialism is your thing,…
Rating: ★★★★★ Who knew they had another book series? Apparently, everyone but me. The Mercy of Gods is the first book of The Captive’s War trilogy and brings with it a whole new world building journey. I’ll admit it took me a few chapters to get over this realisation but by the end, I was absolutely hooked, and a little sad that I’ll now have to wait for the next installment. I can only imagine…
Rating: ★★★★ Transformed is the book I wish Marty et al. had written first. At the very least, the book I wish I’d read first. It’s definitely the book I think most executives and leaders should read first if they are wanting to switch to the product operating model. Marty explains what it really means to make the shift away from the IT operating model, the challenges, the mistakes, the benefits.…
Effectively managing work in progress is crucial for fostering a healthy, empowering work environment where employees feel in control, engaged, and connected. Stone walkway, South Harbour, Helsinki, Finland. Managing work in progress (WIP) is not just about optimising operational efficiency; it’s also about fostering a healthy and empowering work environment: When there is too much WIP, people…
Font, forensic, fiefdoms, facilitation, freeloaders, frustration, focus, flavours, and fellowship. Departure Mono. A monospaced pixel font created by Helena Zhang , and inspired by early command-line and graphical user interfaces. Newly Discovered Antibody Protects Against All COVID-19 Variants. A study led by The University of Texas at Austin has identified SC27, an antibody capable of…
Enlightened, encoded, exploited, entitled, entropic, and epistemic. Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People. 1982! I was 10 and Grace Hopper was more insightful about information technology in general than most people today. Smart, funny, and can talk coherently for hours without notes. Part one ( of two ). The secret inside One Million Checkboxes. Someone…
Deception, desire, dichotomy, demotion, debt, dullards, descendants, and democracy. Cath Virginia / The Verge, Stuart Franklin No one’s ready for this. From here on in, all photos are fake unless proven otherwise. On body count. People in medieval times had and enjoyed sex, and discussed and found the topic as challenging as we do today. Exceptions & Rules. I thought this nicely encapsulated some…
Condiments, communication, crying, creating, cracking, casting, and charting. The quintessential Cantonese condiment - Fried Dace with Black Bean. I absolutely love this stuff with fried rice (seriously, I want some now just writing about it), and I found the history of it fascinating (via Adrianna Tan ). From Bike Rides to Boardrooms: The Evolution of Managing Up. It’s easy to be cynical but…
The computer 'Deep Thought', as depicted in the movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Chris Patterson on Mastodon: The advent of LLMs masquerading as artificial intelligence has made the notion of an absurdly powerful computer, constructed at great expense, and given unseemly resources to answer a meaningful question, only to return the answer “42”, feel more and more prophetic. How…
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Someone asked a question about job levels. I’m paraphrasing here for the sake of brevity and anonymity: As an early-stage startup, we made a deliberate decision to hire an experienced engineering team. As such, all our engineers have the same title. We’re now exploring the introduction of different levels and would…
Edgar Schein’s Humble Enquiry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love this so much. I have come to really appreciate how important relationship building is, and how much more effective we can be when we prioritise genuine curiosity and humility over efficient knowledge transfer and decision-making. Crash Course Pods: The Universe. I can’t get enough of this podcast series. The most awesome Dr. Katie Mack…
Rating: ★★★★ I love books that give me a coherent model and vocabulary for things I’ve observed but not necessarily put together myself. We often describe people as having a growth mindset and the book covers a lot of ground on how to foster that. As the title suggests, it also demonstrates that mindsets are cultural, and that the collective mindset is a predictor of the individual mindset. Growth…
4 lessons for high-quality software from a surprising place. Compliance can seem like a necessary evil for many developers, especially those coming from startups. Having worked in a number of regulated industries, my experience (and that of the author) is that tackling the reality of compliance head on actually “establishes a foundation for success for high-quality code and minimized risk that…
Rating: ★★★★ I had Expanse withdrawal, and Memory’s Legion proved an effective remedy. I really enjoyed this collection of short stories, each intended to fill in some part of the Expanse universe that would have been overkill for the main storyline. As a nice bonus, the audiobook also includes author’s notes narrated by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck themselves. I liked that each story goes deep on…