I’ve been reading a lot of Taleb recently, and one of the concepts which is repeated over and over again and that is proposed as a rule is of “skin in the game”. For those that haven’t heard of this before, the idea is that: we should not be protected from the downsides of natural volatility if others would be exposed to them otherwise - e.g. a cook should taste their own food as a preventive measure to giving others food poisoning (doing so makes them more careful than they would be otherwise.)

While this concept is a good heuristic for trustworthiness it’s unlikely to survive evolution.

Small transactional costs stop things from existing at the fetal/growth stage. Evolution destroys them long before the long-term benefits demonstrate themselves as it supports short-term...

Modern smartphones still use 90s-era vibration technology.

Looking back mobile technology has improved a lot: the screen, the keypad, the internet connectivity, the OS; but do you remember the days when you felt your pocket vibrate and you knew somebody rung you or texted you?

Nowadays a vibration in your pocket could be an email, a tweet, a follow, a like, a new friend on facebook, etc. Your iPhone and Android are in a way even less user-friendly than your old Nokia. Often you need to take your phone out of your pocket to find out whether it’s a spam email in your inbox or a text from your significant other. You might check the settings and see that there is an option to choose different vibration patterns but is that really it?

In order to reduce unwanted distractions and to increase...

As I traveled back from Belarus last week I glimpsed a photo of a gorilla in a magazine.

I recognised the gorilla’s facial expression as one of anger, and noticed that we share a great deal of similarity with other primates in how we signal emotions through facial expressions. This got me thinking:

1. Why do we share facial expressions with other primates?
2. How and why do emotions get communicated in facial expressions?

Evolution

The universality of facial expressions [1] was noted by Charles Darwin in his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”. Darwin believed that expressions were innate in human nature, and as an anecdote he pointed out that the congenitally blind have similar facial expressions to other individuals. This was later supported by studies in...

To new readers of my blog. This article was written many years ago, and is no longer the entirety or core of what I believe. It remains here as a historical stepping stone to newer ideas.

1. Understand the overall functional behaviour of the system you must implement. It’s sensible to understand this from the perspective of why (e.g. a customer’s need fulfilment). These behaviours are often represented as user stories or business requirements and are the result of business-driven planning.
2. Distinguish different behavioural domains as components and then define the scope of each of these. The scope of each component should describe the behaviour it must implement in a standardized format or ubiquitous language that is well-understood by everybody involved in the project (BDD). This is the...

1. “The map is not the territory.” Be mindful of what is.
2. Concentrate without distraction.
3. Hold opinions without gripping them.
4. “Invert, always invert.” Impose faces on reality and then ask them contentious questions. Interrogate topics from perspectives of distinct cultures, and reframe in diverse contexts.
5. Use metaphor to sense patterns and generalisations in nature.
6. Normalize knowledge. Define boundaries and interdependencies, formulate opposites, show interactions. Finally form simple principles out of these patterns and generalisations.
7. Compose principles into novel ideas.
8. “Creativity takes courage.”
9. “Show, don’t tell.” Visualisation and narrativisation > verbalisation.
10. Test new ground by lightly stepping on it.

To new readers of my blog. This article was written many years ago, and is no longer the entirety or core of what I believe. It remains here as a historical stepping stone to newer ideas.

There’s been a lot of buzz on RESTful Web Services [1] and yet there are still far too many developers that believe they may implement it by simply using a Rest class provided by their favourite framework.

I wonder if this has been helped by the obtuse or long-winded articles that are out there on the web and so here is my attempt at explaining the concept as concisely as possible:

Building a RESTful web service requires that you stop building the same concepts that already exist in HTTP as part of your API and instead build a uniform API [2] that inherits the HTTP Interface [3] by (a.) treating URLs...

To new readers of my blog. This article was written many years ago, and is no longer the entirety or core of what I believe. It remains here as a historical stepping stone to newer ideas.

In order to motivate groups to take ownership, be creative and produce their best work, we must align individuals into a team vision [1].

In concrete actions

1. In a stand-up meeting every morning [2]:
   1. What did you do yesterday?
   2. What will you do today?
   3. Are there any impediments in your way?
2. In an email every few days:
   1. What tasks currently exist? Who is doing what?
   2. Show the fundamental directions the group is moving and give everybody a chance for input on this.
   3. Encouragement and celebration of group effort.
3. Make it easy for developers to brainstorm easily (for example, an IRC server). Whatever...

Take a look at the hundreds of emails you received today: how many of them are helpful? Have you ever been to a meeting without an agenda or in which 80% of the discussion wasn’t relevant to you? Emails and disturbances make people less productive than if they were smoking pot [1]. At any opportunity you have, take yourself and others out of this.

In concrete actions

1. Keep the number of stakeholders against each project to the minimum. Print the list of stakeholders out and pass it onto everybody on a project.
2. Face-to-face communication is more fruitful when communication is complex or one-off and needs to be actioned immediately.
3. Don’t write an email unless you are passing on new information.
4. Avoid To/CC’ing people into your emails unless the conversation you are creating is...