Sunday Explorers. Jack Park and Brian Marick present. Zoom text chat capture from Jeff Miller starts at one-half hour into the call. See Typescript 2025-04-27.
Topics included: bullying, understanding the bully's perspective (fragile self-worth) but also learning physical confidence by martial arts training.
Sixteen Sunsets (see Paul's link in the typescript) about the Space Shuttle program as a follow-on to the Apollo program; how those programs were differently structured for different purposes.
Resilience Engineering, requisite variety of hierarchical control systems, and what control points in the system are not already locked down with "compression" which forces accommodation elsewhere, or with perverse consequences to what was intended.
Metaphor, narrative, and terminology; "an argument is a container", "an argument is a building", "an argument is a journey"
FedWiki history in Cooper/Patton Personas of different sorts of users (anchored on Ward's development context when sponsored by Nike, for material and process sustainability activities); development of FedWiki based on interaction with frequent weblog writers and their needs; later return to FedWiki structure as a flexible container of data, amenable to easier querying and data capture/storage than SQL tables.
History of agile development methods, often with an evolving runtime a set of composed objects, and the persistence layer of an SQL database; the struggle with being able to keep the object model and the data model in sync; Ruby on Rails cutting the Gordian knot by choosing a simple prescriptive structure that fit many projects well enough, and supported it with data migration built in.
An extended example from Ward related to a software modernization effort for a global accounting system, the parts which needed to stay the same (daily cycle through mainframe), the parts which the new work would add, how to reconcile them, and how to carefully demonstrate the essence with working code made alongside the internal development lead; while leaving soluble but complex problems ("serialize the Money object to a database") to teams with internal expertise.
FedWiki mechs and survey probes, Eric's example of prefixing a paragraph with a tag which could be easily detected to extract structure from a FedWiki which had not been continuously edited using a method like Zettelkasten or like Thompson Morrison's WikiHaiku.
FedWiki mechs and accessibility to non-programmers, making the action of the mech visible, perhaps with a multi-pane view revealing how it was doing what it was told, in the context of the wiki content.
Mech IDE diagram discussed by Ward and Eric
Resilience Engineering and job role burnout, managing burnout, finding ways to do the job you want to do and get paid for it. Consultancy structure.