Jorge Aranda notes A critique from Alistair Cockburn on how the Agile Software Development movement is under attack from Taylorism led me to an essay by Dave West on the philosophical incompatibilities between Lean Development and agile techniques, and this in turn led me to finally give a read to Peter Naur’s 1985 text, “Programming as Theory Building.”.. Naur’s programmer’s theories are essentially Mental Models in the sense I (and many others before me) present them, and both he and I claim that the overarching goal of a software development organization is to build those models (or theories) during the life of the project. I could actually restate my thesis contributions as extensions to Naur’s sketch in two ways: first, I explore what I think is the main challenge that software team members find today: to build consistent mental models (or in the terms of the thesis, to develop a shared understanding (Shared Language)) of the world, among potentially large groups of people, in the face of abundant, shifting, and tacit information, and unclear or exploratory goals. Second, I outline some attributes of team interaction (Team Work) that make such a challenge easier to overcome. (more)

ex-Governor of Massachusetts (more)

Contra Jeff Bezos' dream of returning to the Glorious Bundle of the Newspaper, I think we need to unbundle Journalism itself. (more)

Jason Benn: Neighborhood Update #11: the Village Retreat, Treehouse, and Cohousing. ...a one-square mile community of communities in SF that aims to recapture the vibes of a university campus, but for all generations. We’re part of a movement composed of coliving (one big rented house), cohousing (multiple adjacent owned houses), third spaces (community centers), and good vibes (I bump into friends once every 40 minutes around Alamo Square and Hayes Valley) (more)

Christopher Alexander book: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction ISBN:0195019199. I'll probably abuse Fair Use rules here shortly (at Alexander Patterns). Because it's not just about architecture, but about Design Thinking for kids, families, education systems, work, etc. (more)

book about management cybernetics by Dan Davies ISBN:1788169549 (see Accountability, Pathological)

Summary: summarize every business model you're considering in a one-pager Lean Canvas, to force you to be clear about your plans/assumptions. (more)

A remix is an alternative version of a song, made from an original version. This term is also used for any alterations of media other than song (film, literature etc.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix (more)

taking a piece of.... see music, graphics, statistics, quality assurance, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample, see also remix

Brandon Gardner talks to Jon Grover about How Red Seagulls, White Elephants and Golden Geese can show you your ideal customer. Inspired by Richard Tripp? (more)

Past and present reads. Bolded-titles were faves. See esp. Greatest Books (more)

I saw a toot from someone saying they suddenly couldn't read their Kindle ebooks that they bought more than 5 years ago - they had to re-buy them, then contact customer service for refunds! (more)

Daniel Schmidt: OKRs are not Strategy. It’s easy to be sloppy in our thinking when conceiving product initiatives. We often prioritize doing things that we “know” must be done (more)

Summary: create multiple short consistent documents of your current business strategy/product strategy, to help people throughout the organization make decisions, generate ideas, etc. (more)

Alistair Cockburn idea of recognizing that different Projects have different constraints, and therefore each needs it own methodology/process. (more)

an Agile Software Development methodology (more)

cf pattern matching

Tracking is separating students by what is assessed as academic ability into groups for all subjects[1] or certain classes and curriculum[2] within a school.[1][2] (The theory being that track assignment is based on academic ability, other factors often influence placement.) It may be referred to as streaming or phasing in some schools. In a tracking system, the entire school population is assigned to classes according to whether the students' overall achievement is above average, normal, or below average. Students attend academic classes only with students whose overall academic achievement is the same as their own... Many secondary schools now base track levels on course difficulty, with tracks such as basic, honors, or college-prep.[6] Public schools might track in terms of high, average, or lower ability. As noted by Oakes and Martin, "school policies determine three structural qualities of the tracking system: extensiveness (the number of subjects tracked and the type of distinct curricula offered); specificity (the number of track levels offered); and flexibility (whether students move from one track to another)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) (schooling)

Dan Shipper: Is NotebookLM - Google’s Research Assistant - the Ultimate Tool for Thought? I sat down with bestselling author Steven Johnson to see if we could come up with a concept for his next project—using AI. We loaded 200,000 words of interview transcripts that NASA conducted and all of Steven’s reading notes since 1999 into NotebookLM, Google Labs’s personalized research assistant. (podcast notes) (more)

Rob Horning: Enough about me. The thing to write about in the “tech commentary” space this week is Google’s NotebookLM, a tool that lets users explore a set of documents through an LLM interface instead of reading them. It was just one AI summarizing tool among many until Google recently added the ability to make it generate a podcast with AI voices bantering their way through the material it’s been given to capsulize (more)