I just finished reading the paper entitled Out of the Tarpit and I wanted to share some critiques I have of it.
I recently finished The Goal and I am also in the middle of The Lean Startup and Out of the Crisis. This has me thinking about several issues with regards the relationship between workers and the companies who employ them. A recent article ends with the lukewarm assertion that “Unfortunately, there’s no universal answer for what always constitutes Over-Engineering and what doesn’t.”
So it occurred to me today, as I was explaining an example of how to use Ramda Lenses that the value that lenses provide is something that is simple, but not so immediately obvious. A lot of people do not understand why you would use lenses in a business application, and I have had trouble explaining why you might want to in my own dealings with other coworkers, over something like plain addressing or encapsulation in an object.
Intentionality. Intention. Intent.
I originally wanted to be dramatic and write this post on some sort of logical interval (i.e. a year). However, recent internal events compel me to write this in the present. For those of you who know me at all, you know that a close friend of mine decided to end our friendship in June of last year (2015), in wildly dramatic fashion. This post is not a history of that occurrence, but a chronology of my personal transformation under what has been one of the most internally trying times of my life.
When the LambdaConf decision first came to light, I followed a number of very lively, vitriolic, passionate responses on twitter denouncing the decision to permit Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug) to speak at the conference. The conference took the viewpoint that his contribution outweighed his beliefs, and furthermore, that his beliefs were irrelevant to the conference. Many people who are opposed to his attendance and speaking argued that you cannot separate a person’s contributions from his political beliefs, just because he is only talking about one at a specific time.
I once was a zealot of object oriented programming. Then I was born anew into the fascinating mathematical world of functional programming. It has been my journey in the past six or so months to reconcile the two. I had the pleasure of conversing over email with Dr. Alan Kay to get his opinion on the matter, because as far as I can tell, he is still one of the most vociferous proponents of message passing and late binding (and why wouldn’t he be?) The following treatise will be my attempt to contextualize the two modalities so that they can be thought of as a single paradigm, and not two paradigms.
I basically started this on twitter, but I want to write something that I think everyone can take something away from. You charge your employer for your time. Maybe not as much as you like, so lets assume you charge your employer what you feel like your time with them is worth.