malvasia bianca

The original paper on boundary objects gives a partial taxonomy of boundary objects; given my earlier thought experiment, I thought I’d see if I could find programming analogues to any parts of their classification.
Star and Griesemer’s first type of boundary objects are Repositories:
These are ordered ‘piles’ of objects which are indexed in a standardized fashion. [...]

Some evidence for anybody curious how well being good at Rock Band drums transfers to real drums.

The neuroscience of illusion; I’ll embed one of the videos so you can see the kind of thing they’re discussing.

(Via Kelley Eskridge.)

A pleasant network logic puzzle game. (Via User Friendly, which makes it essentially impossible to cite them [...]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been finding enough unusual projects imposing on my time that I think I’m going to have to shuffle my priorities, albeit temporarily. I’ve been wanting to do more programming at home than normal recently: aside from improving the memory project, I want to spend a bit of time [...]

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce: the power of choices, of market segmentation.

Two on folded paper: pictures by Simon Schubert (via @KathySierra) and a TED talk by Robert Lang on the origami that modern math and computers allow us to produce.
An abandoned island city. (Via @japanesepod101.) Or, if you want a whole blog about [...]

I can’t say I’ve internalized (routinized? inscribed?) Latour’s Laboratory Life yet, but in the mean time I present you with three quotes on routinization, inscription, and facts:
To counter these catastrophic possibilities, efforts are made to routinise component actions either through technicians’ training or by automation. Once a string of operations has been routinised, one [...]

I was pleased to learn last week that the workshop that Brian Marick and I proposed for Agile 2009 has been accepted. It’s titled “Idea Factory”; since that link goes to a page behind a login barrier, I’ll just reproduce the description here.
Summary
Ever heard a programmer say “I think the code’s trying to tell [...]

About 10 minutes into a talk he gave at the Philadelphia library, David Allen says:
A lot of it was based upon my experience getting a black belt in karate. … One of the things you need to learn is the strategic value of clear space. Trust me, when four people jump you in a [...]

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here.

A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark.

Everything you’d want to [...]

At 4:00pm on the friday of GDC, I attended The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. I went because I loved Mass Effect and because I’m always happy to see the word “iterative” used, but the talk turned out to be an excellent final experience from the conference for a completely [...]

My notes from the talks that I went to on Friday at GDC:
9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight [...]

Notes from today:
9:00am: Iwata’s Keynote. The part I enjoyed the most was his discussion of Miyamoto’s development style. I wish I’d taken better notes on one slide in particular; a few things he talked about:

No design documents. Instead, they depend on personal communication among small teams.
They use very focused prototypes. These [...]

I’ve recently been reading Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature, and have been struck by how well various agile practices fit into his framework. So I want to try to explain his framework (again!), and to explore how agile practices might fit in.
His book begins as a reaction against the split between nature and society, [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion of clean code over the last few weeks in mailing lists and blogs that I read: see e.g. this post by Ron Jeffries. Which set up an interesting resonance with this paragraph that I ran across today in David Allen’s latest GTD book:
Can you be too organized? [...]

This probably deserves a full blog post, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it, so: Brian Marick on communities of practice, communities of interest, and boundary objects.
The examples just get funnier and funnier.
Very interesting take on GlaDOS.
I’d never heard of umami before, I’d always thought we only had four basic tastes.
The [...]

Another quote from Latour’s Politics of Nature (pp. 208–209, emphasis in original):
If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term “barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being assailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose collective is surrounded by enemies*. In one case we have contamination by barbarianism, [...]

I was amused by the synchronicity of my going straight from a discussion of YAGNI on the XP mailing list to reading the following in Politics of Nature (pp. 195–196; emphasis in original):
As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecology begins to [...]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan.
The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going.
Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here…
Interesting way to think about [...]

One more Christopher Alexander Nature of Order post, and then I’ll take a break. This is a counterpart to my earlier post about living code (I even repeat some of the examples): this time, I’m focusing on the agile processes that might produce that code. Again, thanks to the Agile Open California participants [...]

At Agile Open California this year, I didn’t spend all my time thinking about Christopher Alexander (and I owe y’all still more blog posts about that): I also convened a session on Refactoring Writ Large. I put my notes up on the AOC wiki, but here are the examples that motivated it:
Consider the following [...]

Today’s Nature of Order experiment: see what the characteristics of living structures might look like when applied to software. Many thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped me think through this; I’ll have a later blog post that talks about agile and living processes.
Levels of Scale
This is certainly present in the hierarchical [...]