Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I originally read of this from Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, a book I highly recommend. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is on my soon-to-read list.
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.
I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.
I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”
That’s Woody Guthrie on songwriting. You can hear Will Greer reading those words, plus a great set of original recordings from Guthrie and Lead Belly, on the Smithsonian Folkways collection, “Folkways: The Original Vision”.
Zen and the Art of Programming: Antonio Cangiano, Software Engineer & Technical Evangelist at IBM: “The Pursuit of Excellence in Programming”
Related:
rc3.org: “Becoming a better programmer takes exercise”
Derek Silves: “After 15 years of practice…”
Peter Norvig: “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”
The fact that stories like this one about ToyStory 3 are still being published – and still need to be published – is frustrating.
It’s okay for men to be emotional. If anyone tells you otherwise, give ’em a head butt (I kid, I kid!).
Michael J. Fox’s latest book is ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future’ and yes, he is the high school drop out in question. In the book Michael J. Fox certainly does not promote quitting High School! Far from it. What the book focuses on, by sharing his story, and the challenges he faced and took on along the way, what you can learn as a student of life, being open what the people around you (especially your children) can teach you, and to be present in the moment. The only book I can think of to compare it to, and this is high praise considering my love of it, is Randy Pauch’s “The Last Lecture” (another must read). It’s a fantastic book, a great story, with lessons all of us can learn from.
Thank you Richelle for buying me this for Father’s Day. It came at a good time.
YouTube: “Good Morning America: Michael J. Fox’s Life Lessons “
NPR.org: A Lesson In Life From Michael J. Fox (with excerpt)
Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research
He signs the book off with “Live to learn.”.
Derek Sivers: “After 15 years of practice…”.
Derek, you do the same as you did for singing, and you will become a great programmer in 10.
Related: A great thread at Hacker News.
Our perspective of time drives how we perceive the now we live in and the decisions we make.
Watch (it’s only 10 minutes) YouTube: “RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time by Professor Philip Zimbardo”:
I can actually trace where, in different parts of my history, from living day to day sleeping on the train, to going to Chubb Technical Institute, to meeting Richelle, to becoming a Dad, my perspective has changed.
It reminds me of a short video I posted to my Facebook account I tripped upon earlier that is worth posting here again (2 minutes – watch it): YouTube: “The Unsettling Truth About Life”:
You can tell what orientation Alan Watts thinks we are all being distracted from.
Both of these are worthy of your time – thought provoking stuff.
Read Zed A. Shaw in his latest post, “The Wrong Aesthetic”, on a common coding craft error.
37signals: Bad call, great apology. It should be something we all learn as children, that our culture should encourage, but somehow, that’s not the case, and so this speaks to us a special lesson.
YouTube: “Jim Joyce Tearfully Accepts Lineup Card From Galaraga”:
If you make a mistake, admit it. It doesn’t make you a mistake. By admitting it you can learn from it. Others can learn from it. And hopefully, there is growth.
E.W. Dijkstra ACM Turing Lecture 1972: “The Humble Programmer”:
Automatic computers have now been with us for a quarter of a century. They have had a great impact on our society in their capacity of tools, but in that capacity their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind. Hierarchical systems seem to have the property that something considered as an undivided entity on one level, is considered as a composite object on the next lower level of greater detail; as a result the natural grain of space or time that is applicable at each level decreases by an order of magnitude when we shift our attention from one level to the next lower one. We understand walls in terms of bricks, bricks in terms of crystals, crystals in terms of molecules etc. As a result the number of levels that can be distinguished meaningfully in a hierarchical system is kind of proportional to the logarithm of the ratio between the largest and the smallest grain, and therefore, unless this ratio is very large, we cannot expect many levels. In computer programming our basic building block has an associated time grain of less than a microsecond, but our program may take hours of computation time. I do not know of any other technology covering a ratio of 1010 or more: the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with an environment where highly hierarchical artefacts are both possible and necessary. This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should not deserve the computer at all!
It has already taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.