Oddly Influenced

Discover the essential roles in collaborative circles, from gatekeepers to tyrants, and their impact on problem-solving. Explore parallels between design patterns in architecture and software, and the significance of forces in design choices. Delve into the engineering and symbolism of arches, and how seating arrangements shape inviting spaces. Uncover the role of gatekeepers in fostering connections and driving progress within collaborative circles. Reflect on historical anecdotes and proactive problem-solving approaches in circle dynamics.

Exploring the stages of a circle's development, from safe consensus to risky disagreement, and how trust impacts its trajectory. The value of individual contributions in creative circles. Extracting trigger words from narratives for growth. Evolution of trust, disagreements, and shared vision in collaborative circles. Importance of trust, friendship, and honest criticism in creative team dynamics.

An interview with Lorin Hochstein, resilience engineer and author. Our discussion was about how to handle a complex system that falls down hard and – especially – how to then prepare for the next incident. The discussion is anchored by David D. Woods' 2018 paper, “The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic Rules that Govern Adaptive Systems”, which (in keeping with the theme of the podcast) focuses on a general topic, drawing more from emergency medicine than from software.Lorin HochsteinResilience engineering: Where do I start?WebsitePublicationsBlogTalksMentionedBrendan Green, "The Utilization, Saturation, and Errors (USE) method", 2012?How Knight Capital lost $500 million very quickly. Link and link.Lucy Tu for Scientific American, "Why Maternal Mortality Rates Are Getting Worse across the U.S.", 2023David Turner, A Passion for Tango: A thoughtful, Provocative and Useful Guide to that Universal Body Language, Argentine Tango, 2004 Fixation over fomites as the transmission mechanism for COVID: Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?, Zeynep Tufekci (may be paywalled)The safety podcast about a shipping company flying a spare empty airplane: PAPod 227 – What-A-Burger, Fedex, and Capacity, Todd Conklin, podcastCorrectionOn pushing, pulling, and balance, A Passion for Tango says on pp. 34-5: "The leader begins the couple's movement by transmitting to his follower his intention to move with his upper body; he begins to shift his axis. The follower, sensing the intention, first moves her free leg and keeps the presence of her upper body still with the leader. [...] The good leader gives a clear, unambiguous and thoughtfully-timed indication of what he wants the follower to do. The good follower listens to the music and chooses the time to move. The leader, having given the suggestion, waits for the follower to initiate her movement and then follows her." He further says (p. 34), "As a leader acting as a follower, you really learn quickly how nasty it feels if your leader pulls you about, pushes you in the back or fails to indicate clearly enough what he wants."Apologies. I was long ago entranced by the idea that walking is a sequence of "controlled falls". Which is true, but doesn't capture how walking is a sequence of artfully and smoothly controlled falls. Tango is that, raised to a higher power.CreditsThe episode image is from the cover of A Passion for Tango. The text describes the cover image as an example of a follower's "rapt concentration" that, in the episode, I called "the tango look". 

Exploring the origins and principles of context-driven testing, including collaborative circles and the development of a shared vision. The challenges of the context-driven circle in the mid-1990s and its association with black box testing of retail software. The evolution of the shared vision and the role of email in facilitating detailed conversations among core members. Reflections on past papers and writing styles in software testing analysis. The concept of feral shared vision and its relation to context-driven testing. Different meeting styles and the importance of 'going public' with a vision. The context-driven approach to software testing, key resources, and the formation of formal organizations.

Explore the parallel between the development of lightweight methodologies in software and the first-wave feminist movement, the history and structure of software development, the influence of dominance and morality on software engineering, the importance of specifications, and the rejection of assumptions towards agile.

The podcast explores how groups of people form revolutionary circles through collaboration and discussion, leading to creative breakthroughs. It compares the dynamics of artists, first-wave feminists, and software teams, highlighting the challenges in adapting Farrell's model. The episode ends with a teaser on reasons to continue listening, touching on the influence of diversity on collaborative circles.

Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their tools.) @jessitron is another of those people who apply ideas from outside software to software, including in her role as a developer advocate at Honeycomb, a company that aims to make the workings of software visible to its developers. Were she not engaging, personable, and enthusiastic, she'd be scarily like me. This conversation is about C. Thi Nguyen's book Games: Agency as Art, whose blurb starts, "Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency."Jessitron linksjessitron.com (symmathesy)MastodonTwitterHer calendar for observability office hoursReferencesC. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 2020Pandemic (cooperative board game), 2008Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010The "Farm to Tabor" podcast episode: "Donut science, cars, & grassfed beef", 2018James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998In the podcast, I mentioned classic English country gardens. I riffed a bit on Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia". It "explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from 'one of the most significant contemporary playwrights' in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written." I cut the riff out because – embarrassingly – I couldn't remember the names of either the play or its author. From personal experience, I can recommend this full cast performance for a road trip. On that trip, we also listened to the Alzabo Soup podcast's multi-episode commentary. Photo credit: me

The final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improvement via exhibitionism. Final reflections on Foucault.SourcesMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975.C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000.Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 1999.Other sourcesMississippi State University Extension, "Dairy Cattle Judging".Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings (PDF), Miran Božović (ed.), 1995.The Koepelgevangenis panopticon is described in "The Panopticon Effect" podcast episode. (There is no transcript, but there is a longish narrative.)Ron Jeffries, "Big Visible Charts", 2004."Brainless slime mold grows in pattern like Tokyo’s subway system", 2022 (video).Contact links (if you want the bonus episode on "Edgelord Foucault")Email: marick@exampler.comMastodon: @marick@social.oddly-influenced.devPicture creditBigVisibleCharts.com (archived), Marty Andrews.

An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a disturbing theory for the problem-solvers among us, so I make it more palatable by comparing it to a cult horror movie from 1997.SourcesMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 Vincenzo Natali, script for the movie "Cube", 6th draftPeter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. The chapter I cite is “Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage”Other mentionsOn large language models and "a judicious amount of randomness", Stephen Wolfram's "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?" is good. Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, 1987Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002The Eastern State Penitentiary was a model prison that featured solitary confinement, a Bible as the only possession, and piecework in the cell. It was the founding institution of what came to be called "The Pennsylvania System." See also  "Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison With a Past".I mention an idea I got from Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. I don't exactly remember the sources. For Rorty, it was probably Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Fish, it might have been Is There a Text in This Class?Image creditThe image is the Albion flour mill, completed in 1786, which was possibly the referent of Blake's "dark satanic mills" in his poem Jerusalem: And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the mid-1700s: from punishment as vengeance, to punishment as persuading the minds of many, to punishment as correcting the personality of one. BooksMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 Random other stuffBrian Marick, "Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism" (text and video), 2009The environment of evolutionary adaptednessThomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962N.W. Mogensen, "Crimes and Punishments in Eighteenth-Century France", 1977Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776Kieran Healy, "Escaping the Malthusian Trap", an animated graph showing the relationship between the population of Britain and its GDP over time, illustrating the discontinuity caused by the industrial revolution.Wikipedia article about the cult horror movie "Cube"CreditsThe image is of Adam Smith's pin factory, possibly from Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1780). D. Diderot & J. d’Alembert.