GeePaw

Difficult Concepts #2: Simple Causality In Humans Is Non-Existent

This entry is in the series Difficult Concepts

Difficult Concept #2: Linear single-factor causality in shared human activity is so rare it can be safely assumed to be non-existent. "Because" is a word with astonishing power. Like most powerful things, it can lead us rapidly to joy and just as rapidly to grief. In the mechanical world, the "becauses" are primarily linear —

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Difficult Concepts #1: Doing, Knowing, Saying, Hearing, Learning

This entry is in the series Difficult Concepts

Difficult Concept #1: With most high-skill activities, the doing, the knowing, the saying, the hearing, and the learning are all dramatically different things. That’s pretty pithy, so I better unpack it a little. Let’s take one of my high-skill activities and break it out as suggested by the headline. I routinely, multiple times a day,

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GeePawing & Mentoring

I’ve spoken of thick vs thin culture. And my earlier muse was mostly for boss-types, and I promised to do the same for non-bosstypes. But I need to pause here, and do something different. I need to talk about mentoring/coaching to create proper context. (I should pre-announce, i’m semi-lit. I doubt I could pull this

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Thick And Thin Culture

What to do, what to do, around this larger topic i’ve been banging against recently: the extraordinary thinness of culture in geekery. I should say at the outset, I don’t have the answer. I don’t think there maybe even is a "the answer". And I don’t have an answer. I think there are several possible

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The Correlation Premise: Redux

This entry is in the series Underplayed Premises

My five TDD premises stuff has been well-received over the months since I put it out, but one of them seems still very underplayed, even by many died-in-the-wool TDD’ers: the correlation premise. The correlation premise says that the internal quality of our code correlates directly with our productivity. When the internal quality goes up, productivity

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