It’s been a few years now that Bar­bara and I have been lis­ten­ing to books on CD as we fall asleep. Usu­ally a chap­ter at a time, unless we, umm… you know, retire early. We’re lucky to have a well-​​stocked pub­lic library, with a lot of works by excel­lent and engag­ing lec­tur­ers who aren’t too whiny or hes­i­tant. And (thank good­ness) not all of them are about Greece and Rome.

I mean we haven’t avoided Greece and Rome; nobody can. We’ve had our share of Great Men, Great Philoso­phers, Emper­ors, Tyrants, the world accord­ing to Thucy­dides and Plutarch. Even the “periph­eral” [flag that word for a moment, please] his­to­ries we lis­ten to—the Celts, Asia Minor, Persia—and the off-​​brand facets his­to­ries like the Ara­bic Sci­en­tists and the Enlight­en­ment and stuff always touch on Greece and Rome, democ­racy and empire. Wind, fire, all that kind of thing.

Maybe it’s osmo­sis, or maybe it’s some­thing more akin to repeated slaps on the fore­head with a rolled-​​up scroll while broadly mouthing “LOOK AT THIS AGAIN”, but I’m start­ing to notice some­thing I never saw before. Like any nerd, I grew up learn­ing about Greece from brightly col­ored mythol­ogy books, and Rome out of Spar­ta­cus and such. Our Social Stud­ies classes were all about 1970s Patri­o­tism tinged by that 1950s Dewey-​​would-​​lose-​​against-​​Marx Cold War cit­i­zen­ship stew and ped­a­gog­i­cal style our teach­ers were raised up in. The Found­ing Fathers read about Greece and Rome, inspired by the democ­ra­cies of Athens and the repub­lic of Rome, blah blah. So maybe one needs to have been slapped on the fore­head a few dozen times with the actual his­tory before that patina of received wis­dom starts to crack.

Viz: it wasn’t that simple.

Now any actual his­to­rian will prob­a­bly be mak­ing the Wry Smile Eye-​​rolling Face now. But of course most of us well-​​educated liberal-​​thinking tech­ni­cal folks don’t bother too much, no mat­ter how earnestly and effi­ciently we pur­sue knowl­edge, to dive down the rat-​​hole of Nar­ra­tive Construction.

It all starts with Egypt, of course. I remem­ber as a Junior High stu­dent I would get up at 6am (for some rea­son) and watch a tele­vi­sion class about Egypt­ian art on some broad­cast Cleve­land TV sta­tion. And you know they men­tion this Ptolemy dude, either the Emperor (wait, Egypt didn’t have Emper­ors, it had Pharaohs) or the Astronomer Who Was Very Wrong (wait, were there Astronomers or just Astrologers before Coper­ni­cus?), and it grad­u­ally sinks in and it’s only decades later that some other tid­bit or two falls into place and Whoa whoa hang on, that was Greek no I mean Mace­don­ian I mean Hel­lenis­tic stuff, and Egypt was the south­west­ern Alexan­drine empire, and—hang on—so the Romans were deal­ing with the rem­nants of Alexander’s empire?! and so on. Strands con­geal, like DNA pre­cip­i­tat­ing in an Eppen­dorf tube (hey, that’s my heritage).

And then Whoa, hang on again—so all those let­ters from Bible dudes and Greek Philoso­phers and Geome­ters were from Turkey?! and then But but the “demo­c­ra­tic” Athe­ni­ans were total ass­holes and thank good­ness Alexan­der came along and… well, and so on. Call it “provin­cial­ism giv­ing way slightly to pay­ing atten­tion”, or maybe “nar­ra­tive recon­fig­u­ra­tion”, depend­ing on your background.

Clearly it isn’t that his­tory is writ­ten by the win­ners, but rather that they write and dis­trib­ute the Cliff’s Notes.

OK. That’s the setup. Here’s one point: Seems as though the writ­ers’ guide­lines for Cliff’s Notes demand Clear Sep­a­rat­ing Bound­aries. Starts and End­ings. First there was Egypt where they had mum­mies, then there was Greece where peo­ple were Demo­c­ra­tic, then there was Rome with fuzzy hel­mets and brass skirts, then there was (in advanced classes) Byzan­tium [sic] which was pretty for­eign and dis­si­pated like Paris or some­thing, then after a bit over there you get your King Arthur, and then after a while some­body turns on the lights and we get tele­scopes and gun­pow­der, and here we are. Nice clean starts and fin­ishes, all along the way, like dinosaurs being wiped out so lit­tle furry mam­mals can turn into Balu­chith­erium [sic] and stuff.

Surely there’s a name for this fal­lacy. “Con­sec­u­tivism” maybe? “Dis­cretism”? It is a fal­lacy, clearly; I’ve been hang­ing around a half-​​hour a day with actual his­to­ri­ans, the sort who sound as if they fling their arms around as they read, and they’ve man­aged to get choco­late in my peanut but­ter all over the place: Greeks in my Egypt, and [Greek!] Asia Minor in my Rome, and Celts in the Bible, and Per­sians in my Sparta, and cats and dogs liv­ing together.

And thence: Self-​​definition is all about the bound­aries. Insert a cunningly-​​crafted keen insight about bound­aries here, one that touches on all the expected things about brain­wash­ing, self-​​definition, provin­cial­ism, cul­tural pride, homo­gene­ity and diver­sity, ingroups and out­groups, wind, fire, all that kind of thing. Shorter ver­sion: “Hey, you know those are just Cliff’s Notes you’re read­ing, right?”

All this? All this was crys­tal­lized into an anas­ta­mos­ing tis­sue of rant because I just read Alexis Madri­gal talk­ing about the awful awful things that have hap­pened in our Amer­i­can cul­ture and the grow­ing dichotomy and the wor­ries every­body in pub­lic pol­icy expresses all the time about jobs and decline and inequal­ity.

It makes me sad, every time I see this sort of thing. Sad because of the box it grows within. It’s the provin­cial Star­tups Will Restore Us box, the Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment box, the one dec­o­rated with fine print that counts how many jobs (asses in office chairs!) and Press Releases From Tech Spin­offs (young peo­ple are the only ones who ever do any­thing inter­est­ing!) and with a star-​​shaped brass sticker that reads “Now with 25% more EARNEST HOPE!”

This box is a spe­cial kind of con­ser­vatism. Burke would rec­og­nize it, because it’s all about not break­ing things. Fun­da­men­tally it’s a ubiq­ui­tous habit of want­ing to restore—and more insid­i­ously, to expect change to hap­pen the same way it hap­pened last time—and it relies on the Cliff’s Notes ver­sion of eco­nom­ics and his­tory. As though the only peo­ple in an econ­omy were a few charis­matic megafauna, a corps of earnest and essen­tially non-​​profit bureau­crats, and the undif­fer­en­ti­ated Classes: upper, mid­dle, poor, from which those oth­ers arise now and then by spon­ta­neous gen­er­a­tion. All tidily pro­jected into the future by extrap­o­la­tion: The big charis­matic megafauna of the future must be like the ones of the past, tech­ni­cal not artis­tic, lead­ing not inte­grat­ing, rebuild­ing not repur­pos­ing. The insti­tu­tions of the future will be like our recently lost ones (com­pa­nies, states, all that), the best Mankind has found in the March For­ward. And the Classes, well, they are out of bal­ance.

Now see in your Dark Age, which after all is merely a lacuna between a cou­ple of those ex post facto dis­crete vol­umes of Cliff’s Notes, change hap­pens. The diver­sity of what hap­pens, the details of who’s doing what for whom and under what name, that car­ries on as before. Per­haps moreso. When­ever Empire stum­bles, nov­elty seems more promis­ing out at the unre­marked periph­ery, in the lost provinces and the places where exotic weirdos start try­ing new stuff out. Not in the core.

Some day, hope­fully in a few decades, some­body will real­ize sus­tain­abil­ity is a thing that hap­pens only in places where cen­tral plan­ners look away. I won­der whether we ought to stage a “Dark Age” of our own, rather than wait­ing for all these rebuild­ing rework­ing reboot­ing eco­nomic “devel­op­ment” efforts to fail in turn.

Devel­op­ment is exploita­tion, in Holland’s sense. Let us explore for a while. It’s not merely that the keys aren’t under that light pole, it’s that there are no doors out here in the lovely dark. Let us be bet­ter now to one another, and not worry so much about hon­or­ing the beloved dead: the fac­to­ries, the jobs, the state lines, and the habits of empire.

This is not about “rev­o­lu­tion”, by the way. This is sim­ply a request. Let us please have a King Cnut of Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment: Richard Florida might do fine, if only he was pay­ing atten­tion, because he has con­quered our mind­set for sure. Let him set him­self up on a throne at the shores of our “eco­nomic col­lapse”, and make what­ever ges­tures are called for by his audi­ence to stem the tide of fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tive change, and let him then turn wisely to the fans and lack­eys and point out the moral of this les­son: that Emer­gence is not what you expect and foster.

Sorry. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud there.Richard Florida would never say any­thing of the sort.

Nonethe­less, let us emerge into the dark­ness, in other words. Every­thing that has hap­pened here under the lamp has already come and gone. We should totally leave this lone light here, burn­ing, if noth­ing else to draw the moths and bats it’s always drawn and act out its role as sym­bol of many sorts. Me, I’m headed over there towards those noises….

I real­ize I’ve turned quiet as far as the blogs are con­cerned. I’ve been work­ing on trans­lat­ing the draft con­tent for the Answer Fac­to­ries book into pub­lished man­u­script. Mark­down is lovely, but talk­ing in detail about the process of soft­ware devel­op­ment still requires an awful lot of cutting-​​and-​​pasting, it turns out….

I recently updated the pub­lished draft; if you’re behind, feel free to go update your copy now. New con­tent includes a descrip­tion of the iPad game Cargo-​​bot, and a detailed test-​​driven re-​​implementation of the game logic in an emu­la­tor we’ll use for GP in forth­com­ing chap­ters. I spent a lot of time on the test-​​driven devel­op­ment, so I’d like some feed­back if you’re willing.

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• pry/​pry

  Pry is a pow­er­ful alter­na­tive to the stan­dard IRB shell for Ruby. It is writ­ten from scratch to pro­vide a num­ber of advanced fea­tures, including:
  
  irb ruby software-​​development inter­preter

• Daniel Fischer’s Blog — A Start­ing Guide to VIM from Textmate

  For about four years I’ve been using Text­mate almost every day. I’m very fast with it. I’ve always thought about switch­ing over to VIM or Emacs but I have been scared of los­ing my speed. In fact, I’ve actu­ally tried Emacs in the past and also wrote a blog post on my expe­ri­ence. I liked it in gen­eral, but I ended up com­ing back to Text­mate after a week. Why? I didn’t really feel like I was gain­ing anything.
  
  text­mate vim tuto­r­ial habit

• A Ques­tion Answered — Credit Slips

  “Over cof­fee this morn­ing with a friend, I threw out the same ques­tion from my orig­i­nal post. How does an orga­ni­za­tion get itself to the place where it col­lec­tively comes to think such strong-​​arm col­lec­tion tac­tics on hos­pi­tal patients are a good idea, let alone morally defen­si­ble? A pro­file of Accretive’s CEO, Mary Tolan, in Crain’s Chicago Busi­ness con­tains this gem: “My objec­tive is just to be a happy, con­fi­dent cap­i­tal­ist,” says the devo­tee of Ayn Rand’s and Mil­ton Friedman’s free-​​market gospel, which she applies with a com­bat­ive, survival-​​of-​​the fittest man­age­ment style.”
  
  ran­dism buh-​​bye-​​john-​​galt

• The Hum­ble Ori­gins of the NEXT Global Econ­omy. Don’t Miss Out.

  “It’s sim­ple.  If you want to build a thriv­ing local econ­omy.  A local econ­omy that makes your com­mu­nity resilient to eco­nomic fail­ure and shocks, you need to find ways to help the inno­va­tors in your com­mu­nity make things.”
  
  resilience sus­tain­abil­ity communities-​​of-​​practice mak­ers

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• How to add Noti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter sup­port to your web­site or app

  “Orig­i­nally intro­duced last year in iOS 5, Noti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter is one of the more use­ful new fea­tures in OS X Moun­tain Lion. What’s really nice is that the abil­ity to show noti­fi­ca­tion ban­ners isn’t lim­ited to native appli­ca­tions; both Safari and Chrome allow web­sites to show alerts in Noti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter as well. This is a quick and straight­for­ward guide to adding Noti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter sup­port to your web­site or web app.”
  
  noti­fi­ca­tions MacOS javascript tuto­r­ial inter­ac­tiv­ity web-​​applications

• OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell « hueniverse

  “This is a sad con­clu­sion to a once promis­ing com­mu­nity. OAuth was the poster child of small, quick, and use­ful stan­dards, pro­duced out­side stan­dards bod­ies with­out all the process and legal over­head. Our stan­dards mak­ing process is bro­ken beyond repair. This out­come is the direct result of the nature of the IETF, and the par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­i­ties over­see­ing this work. To be clear, these are not bad or incom­pe­tent indi­vid­u­als. On the con­trary – they are all very capa­ble, bright, and oth­er­wise pleas­ant. But most of them show up to serve their cor­po­rate over­lords, and it’s prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble for the rest of us to compete.”
  
  ope­nauth standard-​​setting-​​play com­mit­tees speak-​​with-​​one-​​voice antipat­terns via:vielmetti

• “Must read” papers in numer­i­cal analy­sis — MathOverflow

  
  nudge-​​targets

Sev­eral foun­da­tional aspects of agile project man­age­ment focus on the role of the Cus­tomer. The role is of course best-​​defined in the con­text of work-​​for-​​hire, or con­sult­ing, or even in places where the team is doing vol­un­teer work in an Open Source set­ting for a spec­i­fied Main­tainer. And his­tor­i­cally this makes sense.

In the early days, I remem­ber a lot of peo­ple in soft­ware projects would con­flate the Cus­tomer with the User, even when they weren’t the same per­son. And then of course there’s the (risky?) con­fla­tion of Cus­tomer with Bill-​​payer, or (maybe more dan­ger­ous?) Cus­tomer with Project Owner (in a Scrum sense). But those are known prob­lems, and the agile coach­ing com­mu­nity seems to have han­dled them rea­son­ably well—in the con­text of tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional settings—if noth­ing else by repet­i­tive correction.

The trou­ble I’ve found recently is how often the term puts off explor­ers, those who are tempted or solicited to try an “agile for one” (or “agile for us”) approach to their inves­ti­ga­tory work—the just-​​try-​​it-​​and-​​see-​​what-​​happens projects that fill our days as engi­neers, sci­en­tists, artists and Mak­ers more gen­er­ally. To some extent the prob­lem is the word and the freight it car­ries, and the diverse lan­guages and cul­tures of from which those folks come, and the cul­tural antipa­thy preva­lent between com­mu­ni­tar­ian life-​​of-​​the-​​mind folks and doing-​​it-​​for-​​the-​​money folks.

I know, hav­ing spent so much time among the uppity agile rebels, that this “Cus­tomer” can be you, or all of you together (as long as you can arrange to Speak with One Voice), or nobody in par­tic­u­lar. I under­stand that the point of the role is some com­bi­na­tion of (1) iden­ti­fy­ing the most valu­able thing to deliver next so you can focus on that and deliver it next, and (2) avoid­ing the Mis­sion Creep and Babbage’s Dis­ease that keeps projects from ever deliv­er­ing any­thing of use at all, and (3) learn­ing the (sur­pris­ingly rare) skill of Not Pro­duc­ing Unin­tel­li­gi­ble Crap.

But the word itself, and the freight it car­ries, seems to put off people—not least stu­dents and other academics—who I have to say are among the most “at risk” for fail­ing to ship any use­ful work at all, ever. The deep use­ful­ness of the Cus­tomer con­cept, as far as I’m con­cerned, is that some­body ought to be able to dynam­i­cally and adap­tively sort the many things you might do next into an ordered list that reflects cur­rent per­cep­tion of value.

To me, “being Cus­tomer” in my projects—whether I’m doing open-​​ended research or tar­geted soft­ware development—is a vis­ceral change I make in my beliefs, desires and inten­tions. If I’m sort­ing sto­ries or plan­ning the next day or week, I try to look not at the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences I’ll have when mak­ing progress and doing work, but instead at the value I expect (right then) to obtain from the state­ment of pur­pose each story rep­re­sents. It doesn’t mat­ter than I’m the Cus­tomer and the “Devel­op­ment Team” on cer­tain projects, as long as I can dif­fer­en­ti­ate the stance I take when mak­ing deci­sions in those two roles. It doesn’t mat­ter that the “story” is “make one and see what hap­pens”; as a Cus­tomer I see that as a time-​​boxed deliv­er­able, and demand it change to “spend one day mak­ing one, and pub­lish a result at the end of that day”.

(What I try never to do as “Cus­tomer” is assign expec­ta­tions of how long some­thing will take. I am there, at that moment, only to see the value in var­i­ous sto­ries as they’re pre­sented, and add new ones, and rearrange their order. If I need to decide how much might be done before the end of the iter­a­tion, or even whether one sin­gle “story” won’t or can’t fit in the allot­ted time, I’ve got to con­sciously switch over to “Maker” role. Oh, and also I try to avoid ever say­ing, “Go away, and never come back!” to myself….)

That’s how I try to run my research, and what I want to see in oth­ers. It’s safer explo­ration. It’s the oppo­site (as far as I can tell) of how aca­d­e­mics and STEM folks think most often, and absolutely the oppo­site of how school­work and most tech­ni­cal pro­fes­sional work is planned, because those are sim­ply given lists of com­pre­hen­sive require­ments. Bit three-​​ring binders full of “it must do all these things”.

Maybe the prob­lem is that these folks, start­ing off as they do with such deep antipa­thy to the cul­ture that led to the term, think the “Cus­tomer” role is some sort of per­mit for pre­ma­ture assess­ment, some kind of master:slave rela­tion­ship, a debt and an oner­ous promise to ful­fill that debt. But in prac­tice, sort­ing tasks by value does not entail pun­ish­ing fail­ures to deliver on those tasks (and this is the deep­est rea­son why mea­sur­ing “veloc­ity” is so fraught). “Let’s spend a day get­ting this bet­ter!” is not the same as “Get this done by Fri­day!” The for­mer implies that no mat­ter what happens—we get dis­tracted, we had an emer­gency, we couldn’t think of a way to make it bet­ter, we make it bet­ter enough that it goes away entirely—there’s always another round of plan­ning in which we can do the same thing again, another day some­where down the line where there is per­cep­ti­ble value in work­ing on that thing a bit more. And by the same argu­ment, it means that progress on other fronts is (for the moment) more valu­able than work­ing on that thing until it’s “done”!

It saves huge amounts of time to use the Cus­tomer role explic­itly. That saves my life, some days. It lets me have some­thing to show for my work every day. Me, the “Cus­tomer”. Oth­er­wise me, the “Devel­oper” would wan­der off some­where doing what­ever ran­dom crap caught his atten­tion, and end up rush­ing the use­ful work at the end.

I don’t know a bet­ter word than “Cus­tomer”. But I don’t know a bet­ter word than “agile” yet, and it’s get­ting close to the day when that also will need to change. I don’t think I can use the word in print any more, so I’m look­ing for a replace­ment soon. Spend a day think­ing about it and send me what­ever you find by the end of that day, OK?