Older blog entries for ade (starting at number 60)

12 Jan 2011 (updated 12 Jan 2011 at 18:11 UTC) »

Building my working library

If you've read my book, Apprenticeship Patterns, you'll know that I'm a big fan of both Twyla Tharp and Richard Sennett. Finding someone else who has read and liked works by both authors is a rare pleasure.

That's why I was so happy to find Mandy Brown's A Working Library. It's a blog plus an ongoing collection of notes on the books she's reading.

Brown's blog is structured in such a way that a book like Sennett's masterful The Craftsman becomes the spine for a series of posts: http://aworkinglibrary.com/library/book/craftsman/ She then takes the idea even further so that when a post is really about 2 books it creates a page which references both of them. For instance here's a post which references both Tharp's The Creative Habit and Sennets's The Craftsman. Notice the way it appears in both the section on The Craftsman and in the section on The Creative Habit.

That kind of faceted classification solves the navigational problem but it also removes one of the main obstacles preventing me from writing more book reviews. I'm most interested in a book whilst reading it but I don't write a review until afterwards. That's the point I most wish I'd kept ongoing notes but care the least about going back and creating the notes.

So based on Brown's example I'm going to start capturing notes about the books I'm currently reading using this blog. I don't have the structural flexibility that Brown's use of Expression Engine affords (nor the inclination to set it up) so I'm just going to start a post when a book captures my interest. I'll update it with photos and quotes as time passes.

Hopefully this will lead to more reviews of more books than I managed in 2010.





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Syndicated 2011-01-12 16:27:00 (Updated 2011-01-12 17:30:19) from Ade Oshineye

31 Dec 2010 (updated 5 Jan 2011 at 22:09 UTC) »

2010: So, that happened

What did I do in 2010? I barely remember.

I went to Edinburgh and climbed a mountain. Although Wikipedia claims it's just a big hill.


I moved out of Westminster
The Palace of Westminster

and back to Docklands.
45: Brand New Day

I wrote in the Wandering Book.


I got this cool new job which enabled me to host London's very first HackCamp. I'm still not sure I didn't imagine the spontaneous singing along to The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens.
52.0: HackCampers

I got to see what the 4th of July looks like in Boston.
Independence Day

Chris Chabot and I went to Stockholm where we ran a Buzz hackathon.


I gave a presentation about TDD on AppEngine at EuroPython.


I ran a Buzz hackathon in Lisbon.


A group of us entered a team in a photography contest held at the National Portrait Gallery. Improbably enough one of our photos (not the one below) won and we got to see it projected onto the walls of the gallery.
The Three D's

I attended OpenTech. I think I may be one of the few people who has managed to attend every single OpenTech. Even back when it wasn't called OpenTech.
Bits, atoms, photons & words

I went back to the US in the autumn and got to meet a lot of the ex-Thoughtworks crowd who are now at DRW Trading.
DRW Sunset

Straight after that the Google Developer Days took me across Europe including a walk through Red Square at night.


I got back from that just in time to help run the world's hardest raffle at XPDay.
The Google Raffle

This was followed by the chance to see GoogleGogol Bordello live at the Kentish Town Forum.
Gogol Bordello

This takes us till Christmas and the end of this year.
Memorial

Next year is another game and it's too early to predict the outcome.
Adversarial contrast


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Syndicated 2010-12-31 18:34:00 (Updated 2011-01-05 21:20:57) from Ade Oshineye

2 Aug 2010 (updated 18 Sep 2013 at 10:15 UTC) »

On translation

People are often surprised when they discover that Dave Hoover and I have only met twice. Yet, somehow, over the course of 4 and a half years we put together this book. People seem to like it.

Dave and I have never met Yoshiki Shibata but somehow we all put together this book. I hope people like it.

As part of the translation process I wrote a new foreword and last week I got to see it in print for the first time. Since I can't even guess at the meaning of Kanji symbols I had to infer the meaning from memory. Seeing my own words in a language I couldn't understand generates the strangest feeling of alienation.

I thought I'd share something of that feeling. You can read the English and Japanese versions of the foreword below. Hopefully those of you who can read both languages will better appreciate the craft of translation after seeing both versions.



The craft of translation
This book you're holding in your hand is about what it takes to do skilled work. In the months we've worked with Yoshiki Shibata I've come to appreciate the skill involved in translating a book and how lucky we are to have a translator who shares so many of our values. Translation is not a matter of mechanically converting words any more than a programmer's job consists of mindlessly converting requirements into code. In both disciplines we must add something of ourselves in order to transmute the raw materials into something that reflects our skill and our spirit.

One of the lessons I've learned in the five years since we started working on Apprenticeship Patterns is that it's really easy to assume that other people share a lot of your obscure and tacit knowledge. Our original version of the book is full of little bits of tacit knowledge that we've extracted from the experiences of our interviewees and Shibata-san has helped us make that material clearer. In some places he has gone beyond mere translation and helped us see our words in new ways.

As Dave has blogged: http://nuts.redsquirrel.com/post/245981182/second-nature this book "won’t teach you how to be a great programmer, it will teach you how to learn to be a great programmer." That phrase was directly inspired by our conversations with Shibata-san.

I hope that this book will inspire you to become part of the Software Craftsmanship community. I hope that it will inspire you to improve your skills and I hope that it will guide [you] on to the path of apprenticeship. After all that's the long road we're all walking.


The new foreword


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Syndicated 2010-08-02 12:27:00 (Updated 2013-09-18 09:55:55) from Ade Oshineye

29 Jun 2010 (updated 18 Sep 2013 at 10:15 UTC) »

The spectrum of networks

In August I'm going to be on a panel at the BlogTalk conference where we shall be discussing the differences between social and conversational networks. This blog post is an attempt to clarify my thinking and get some definitions out there.

We all have a rough idea of what makes a social network. For me the important elements are:
  • Symmetric relationships
  • Expressing connections with people you already know
  • Messages default to private
  • A strong sense of who can see your data and in what context
On the other hand a conversational network is primarily based upon:
  • Asymmetric relationships
  • Following people you find interesting even if you don't know them
  • Messages default to public
  • Your data ends up in various different contexts and may be aggregated/remixed/reused all over the web.
This isn't a dichotomy but a spectrum. Services occupy points along this spectrum and often move across it as they add or remove features over time.

Neither extreme is better than the other and individual users may need to use a service in ways that defy the expectations of the service's creators. This leads to the situation where a conversational network like Twitter has protected accounts and a social network like Facebook lets you publish status updates that the whole world can see.

This is just a model, a way of looking at the world, but it has interesting implications.

For example the model shows me that I use Flickr more than PicasaWeb or Facebook photos because I mostly desire a conversational photo-sharing experience. I want people to aggregate/reuse/remix my photos so I use a Creative Commons license and join interesting groups that juxtapose my photos with other people's work or encourage blogs (like Global Nerdy or Londonist or martinfowler.com) to embed them.

Another interesting implication is that whilst most of the interesting people and most of the web's creativity is at the conversational end of the spectrum, most of the people are at the social end of the spectrum. This intriguing contrast was first raised by my colleague Paul Adams. He pointed out that the vast majority of people don't want to be on public display and this 1% rule leads to services where only a few create content which a lot more share/curate and the vast majority consume.
In fact this isn't a weakness of the model but a strength because that's the world we live in.


References and inspirations:

  • The phrase "conversational network" comes from this Jaiku thread.
  • A Buzz thread where Jonas Nockert points out that, given time, conversational networks drift towards the social side of the spectrum.
  • Fambit is an example of a service that occupies the social end of the spectrum.
  • A Buzz comment wherein Brian Cronmiller independently discovers the same phenomenon
  • Results from a South Korean study which point out that the Twitter network isn't structured like a conventional social network


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Syndicated 2010-06-29 22:01:00 (Updated 2013-09-18 09:56:40) from Ade Oshineye

The Wandering Book



A while ago, Enrique, set up the Wandering Book as a means of capturing the zeitgeist of the software craftsmanship movement. The idea is that a moleskine notebook wanders between people who think of themselves as members of this community. These people then have a week to contribute some useful insight before passing it on.

I'm guilty of taking significantly longer than a week before passing it on. My contribution is below.


What have you made recently?

Whenever software craftspeople gather that's one of the questions I'd like us to ask each other. I'd also like us to ask:
  • what are you making?
  • what do you want to make next?
  • what have you learned from the things you made?

These are some of the questions that get to the heart of what we do.

We make software: code, databases, user interfaces, etc. We do it all. We may not be able to match the experts in each domain but we can make complete software all on our own.

I'm not talking about the artefacts of your day job or the things your team built. I'm talking about things that matter enough to you, that you created them in your own time and for your own reasons. These things you choose to make define the borders of your craft.

Even though I firmly believe that deliberate practice builds skill I don't think it's sufficient unless you also make things. In the same way I think that our current idea of software craftsmanship is insufficient if we're going to create a healthy community rather than another hollow buzzword.

Recently I've been thinking about the idea of a "generative community." This is a group of people united by overlapping values that lead them to create things that affect the real world (this may be software, devices, conferences, websites, etc) rather than just talk and think about making things.

I'd like our little community to be generative in the same way that Christopher Alexander wanted patterns to be generative. And I'd like you, the reader, to help make this happen.


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Syndicated 2010-05-30 11:24:00 (Updated 2010-05-30 11:26:27) from Ade Oshineye

30 May 2010 (updated 19 Sep 2010 at 01:16 UTC) »

Joining the Social Web team

What has two thumbs and is joining the Social Web team at Google? Me.

I'm going to be one of the Developer Advocates based in the London office. I'll be looking after all things related to 'social' and the social web in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

I plan on spending a lot of my time listening to and learning from people outside the company. In fact when I try to describe all the facets of this job I tend to point people to Christian Heilman's book or Dion Almaer's blog post or Simone Brunozzi's blog post.

The social web is bigger than any one product or company. That's why my job is going to be as much about helping to grow the social web as it will be about helping developers to use Google APIs. So if you're doing something interesting with the social web in EMEA and you think Google can help then send me an email. I'm ade at google.com.

I'm also, to quote John Panzer, "a cluster of heterogeneous identifiers." You can follow most of them on Buzz: http://www.google.com/profiles/adewale#buzz


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Syndicated 2010-05-24 16:23:00 (Updated 2010-05-24 16:26:44) from Ade Oshineye

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