Mostly Engineering

[eight minutes of unedited writing] Writing for the sake of others. Others forgotten in time. Others to come. The rebellion against time. The humanization of lives lived before now. The contextualization of our current condition. Giving voice to the expressive desire is an act of time travel and space exploration. Bending the fabric of spacetime to weave together echoes of stories past with those yet to be told. A self creating tradition handed down through centuries. The fight over the power to decide which points in the continuum are linked, which points will continue to be echoed. Writing is pouring ones heart into the burning chaos of humanity's struggle to continue. Hoping to be heard in a echo yet to be folded.

  Organizational Dynamics and the Game of Life “Teetering around the brim of organizational development” I remember one of the first big programming assignments we ever did in school was implementing the Game of Life . A grid of squares, randomly seeded with living cells, each of which started with an age of 1 , each aging with the tick of the arbitrary game clock. New cells would be created or killed depending on the number of cells surrounding them or their individual age. The result was a technicolor menagerie of patterns that spread across the grid like waves. A crude biological model dictated by the rules of the game and random seeding of the cells at the start. Having made a few job hops over the last few years, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about how different company cultures evolve and change over time. What makes the day-to-day easy at one place, but hard at another? What constraints might influence the development of individual team structures within an organization? 

Engineering Without a Measuring Tape “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Engineering (noun): the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures. Solutioneering (noun): Attempting to solve a problem with an incomplete understanding of the situation. One of the defining traits of a software engineer is to always have a solution; an escape from the claustrophobic confines of a problem. The more expedient the better. This behavior leads to engineering teams engaging in the questionable practice of solutioneering in echo chambers. As an engineer, solutioneering can be a hard pattern to recognize because we’re solvers at heart. We get praised and paid for solving problems quickly so taking a step back can be challenging, but sometimes it’s the best way to make progress. In developing a robust solution, taking the time to ask information gathering questions can pay big dividends by saving engineer