Some personal growth pieces to read and re-read

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Just some recent links that have connected with me as of late:

Derek Sivers: If you think you haven’t found your passion…:

If you keep thinking about something like putting on a huge conference or being a Hollywood screenwriter and you find the idea terrifies but intrigues you, it’s probably a worthy endeavor for you.

You grow by doing what excites you and what scares you.

t3rmin4t0r: A Simple Survival Guide for your Inner Child:

There are only two basic rules of survival for the individual:

  • Work the system
  • Fuck with the system

It doesn’t get any more contradictory than that.

Howard Weaver – with echos of “Data Smog”, by David Shenk – : Infobesity: the result of poor information nutrition

Chris Dixon: What carries you up will also bring you down

Pace and Kyeli Smith: The Freak Manifesto

Institute for Artificial Intelligence: Michael A. Covington: How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily

Michael Montoure: Hack Yourself:

Stop assigning blame. This is the first step. Stop assigning blame and leave the past behind you.

You know whose fault it is that your life isn’t perfect. Your boss. Your teachers. Your ex-lovers. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is — you’ve been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.

Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn’t real. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” If we’re not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn’t matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don’t spend your energy dwelling on it — you have other things to do.

Lawrence Lessig shakes the faithful?

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TNR: Lawrence Lessig: Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government.

Yes – you read that title right.

Lessig connects the dots from newspapers to the music industry and the ripple effects taking place – everything having to do with the architecture of the Internet and the dynamics set forth.

You need to read the full piece because it is not ‘against transparency’ – far from it – but it does call for a sense of concern and realism to settle into conversations about transparency as means to an end. Ultimately, in regards to government, it is a call to reform, specifically election finance reform – and I agree with much of it.

Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else’s problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done had more responsibility been in the mix. The music industry was never going to like the Internet, but its war against the technology might well have been less hysterical and self-defeating if better and more balanced alternatives had been pressed from the beginning. No one can dislike Craigslist (or Craig), but we all would have benefited from a clearer recognition of what was about to be lost. Internet triumphalism is not a public good.

Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.

Related:

O’Reilly Radar: Carl Malamud: Larry Lessig and Naked Transparency

David Larry Lessig: Beyond Transparency, and Net Triumphalism

Aaron Swartz: Transparency Is Bunk

Dave Winer’s experience with InBerkeley recall those of Dan Gillmor with Bayosphere

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Dave Winer: What I’ve learned about Hyperlocal

OJR: Tom Grubisich: What are the lessons from Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere?

Mark Glasser: Dan Gillmor Finds His Center

Different situations, but lessons to learn from each are there. And in both cases, the founders shared those lessons with the wider Internet audience. Hopefully more do the same.

On Quality, Speed, Practice: Software Development links for October 18th, 2009

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Microsoft Research: Janie Chang: Exploding Software-Engineering Myths:

…there is one point that gives this software-engineering myth buster a great deal of satisfaction.

“I feel that we’ve closed the loop,” Nagappan says. “It started with Conway’s Law, which Brooks cited in The Mythical Man-Month; now, we can show that, yes, the design of the organization building the software system is as crucial as the system itself.”

Bruce Eckel: 5-2-03 Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing

Random Thoughts: TDD is not test-first. TDD is specify-first and test-last.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Uncle Bob: Speed Kills:

If you want to be a professional, if you want to be a craftsman, then you must not rush. You must keep your code clean. So clean it barely needs comments.

Coding Horror: The Xanadu Dream:

Consider the reality of what’s actually possible, what people can understand, and what us all too human programmers can practically implement. It might not be the Xanadu you dreamed of — heck, it might even suck — but it’ll at least have a fighting chance of existing in reality rather than fantasy.

Dare Obasanjo: Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects:

The urge the reduce the complexity of the tools used to solve software problems is one that every software developer should share. However even more important is reducing the complexity of the actual solutions that are delivered to your customers at the end of the day. End users can’t tell if you used complicated C++ techniques like template metaprogramming and mixins to build the application. They can tell when your application fails to solve their actual problems in a straightforward way or is so late to ship due to project delays that they lose interest in waiting for you to solve their problems.

On the future of CMS (is NPR actually there already?) – CMS Links for October 18th, 2009 –

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Justin Cormack recently completed a three part series on the future of CMS that I think nails it. I might be biased because it’s what we’ve been building towards at CIM for the past few years. Go read: “CMS technology choices”, “Content Enabled Vertical Applications and taking the CMS apart”, and “Content enabled vertical applications (composite content applications) – executive briefing” – quote from the second link:

At the application layer, as Stéphane says, everything is a mashup, content from different systems, content from other APIs, this is the we application layer. It needs to be content aware, very much so, but it needs to be an application development environment. This is where most people will see the value added in the content management business, although in fact the value here is in implementation, design and integration services, not the technology itself. Application development environments no longer make a lot of money, and again they are dominated by open source (think Java, Eclipse, JBoss, Django).

Once you take out content infrastructure and application development, and the other tools like search, workflow, there is a core of tools for working with content, to support reuse, refactoring, cleaning, import and export, that one might call a Content Workbench. There is a lot of potential value if these types of tools are the value added end of the business, as they can differentiate vendors and add value. Interfaces for merging changes and so on would be part of this type of toolkit. This is the stuff where good UX means timesaving for content workers, but it is difficult to build on a customized per-project basis, so this still offers value from a particular vendor.

Overall then we see a picture where the monolithic CMS starts to break apart into infrastructure, application and toolkit layers, that can perhaps gradually be mixed and matched together to build content applications. We are just seeing the beginnings of this now.

Peter Monks had a reply to his pieces here: The Future of CMS Technologies.

Meanwhile, NPR is live with a CMS solution that resembles this. Read NPR’s Daniel Jacobson’s guest post on Programmable Web: “COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere”.

Content Here’s Seth Gottlieb explains how this approach might be too much for those who need less capability still, he concludes:

…at the very least, every publisher needs to start thinking on this level: creating and storing content in presentation neutral way to keep options open.

This conversation was kicked off by Julian Wraith. Check there for more.

I plan on doing my own round-up, as there are many, many interesting posts worthy of sharing. In addition, I think I’ll share some of my own thoughts as well. Would be great to contribute to the discussion Julian Wraith started instead of staying meta for once 🙂

Who said conversation doesn’t happen across bloggers anymore ?

And on another note, the CMS Myth just had its second anniversary: Two Years On: Still Puncturing Myths & Taking Names