Laughing Squid on Scientific Brewing
¶ by not another Rob?It’s Okay To Be Smart Explores the Scientific Processes Behind Brewing Beer
A dumping ground for miscellany; the amusing, the thought-provoking, the otherwise memorable.
It’s Okay To Be Smart Explores the Scientific Processes Behind Brewing Beer
(Or Common Markdown, whatever.)
Mixed feelings about this.
As I always understood it, “the point” of Markdown was to have a (very) simple “plain text” format that you could scan/read easily without putting it through a parser. Because it was plain text. Right?
A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. [source]
And in that respect, there should be no need to standardize.
On the other hand, Markdown is so widely used that it’d be nice if there were some consensus around how to “do” certain things with/in it. That being said, aren’t most of the “problems” just a result of trying to do complicated things?
Reading this book, I am reminded first of my friend Mike. Of an evening in Baltimore at a mutual friend’s home. Of vodka consumed and books given conversational chase and perhaps not a small amount of hero-worship on my part as he accelerated into his chosen field and I languished behind a copy machine at […]
Manufacturing the Talent Shortage:
By Dimas Guardado, writing for Model View Culture. (Which, if you’re not making it a regular habit of reading the posts at Model View Culture, then you should get into that habit.)
This piece, combined with Carlos Bueno’s Refactoring the Mirrortocracy (which Guardado cites) should be required reading for anyone doing recruiting, interviewing, and/or hiring these days.
These two posts have been sitting as pinned tabs in my Chrome for a couple weeks while I figured out what to do or say about them. Ultimately I decided that there was no single pull-quote to lean on. But they’ve both got a good underlying thesis about the misuse of privilege among people (yes, mostly men) in engineering organizations and especially in start-ups. For what it’s worth, the conclusion that it led me to? That phrases like “we value passion and aptitude” are code for “we have no idea how to mentor people”.
Improve Your Tests by Breaking the Rules: Mike Pennisi, writing for the Bocoup blog.
Intentionally provocative? Simple pragmatism? The insane ramblings of a desperate developer? Regardless of your read of this read, we should all aspire to put this ki…
“There is an idea prevalent in our culture that if we just find the right system, we can ride it out in perpetuity. We can gamify social interaction. This idea is manifested most prominently in the departments of psychology, sociology, law, political science, and economics. Moreover, there are now actual game designers who have expressed an interest in tinkering with public policy. I want to suggest that the very idea of trying to define an all-encompassing system, no matter how fair you try to make it, will always produce systems whose rules benefit the makers, and whose externalities they can at best benefit from, and at worst ignore.”
– Dorian Taylor, Toward a Theory of Design as Computation
“That’s why the search for a root cause is usually a witch-hunt in disguise, trying to find someone or something to blame. If you think there is really a single cause, you eventually must identify a single person. If you stop short of that, everyone knows the process was a farce. But blaming a person is also a farce. Everyone knows that someone’s being thrown under the bus and that wasn’t the real problem.”
–
Baron Schwartz, The Root Cause Fallacy
“Fallacy” might be a little strong, but yes, a dysfunctional post-mortem will descend into a witch-hunt and someone can wind up on the horns without any real solutions being proposed. Not that no one ever deserves to get strummed out, but it can’t be your first reaction.
“I suspect that even the designers of Unix shells are often surprised at the inventive uses developers have wrought with their simple but powerfully composable abstractions.”
–
Neal Ford, Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven
A post on composable systems (vs. contextual ones). It’s a thoughtful post, and worth a slow and careful read.
Real quick before I dash out on a hard-earned vacation. PhantomJS Cookbook — it’s a thing. A real thing. After 6+ months of hard work, I got to hold the book in my own two hands. And you can, too!
brucesterling:
UFO typologies, 1967