As a kid, I had a friend who spoke with a New York accent.  He didn't pronounce the "H" in his "Hu"s.  We can hear this when Trump speaks, "Huge" become "Yuge."  Among our friends was a boy named "Hugh."  At one point my friend was reminiscing and asked me,  "You remember when Hugh XYZ'ed? That was so crazy." To which I responded, "I never did that." "No Hugh did." "No I don't remember ever doing that.  Seriously." "No Hugh did, Hugh." "Not me man, you're crazy."   At last, he added Hugh's last name, I caught on, and we had a good laugh.   I see this same pattern frequently in software and it goes like this: Observing the data, an engineer notes that two concepts behave uniformly Not being a subject matter expert, they make the decision to represent both concepts as one and the same.  After all, the parsimonious solution reduces space and complexity Some ti...

We're in a period of collective imagination.  The phenomenon is periodic in nature and at the heart of our economy.  A new idea comes in fashion, promising to stimulate innovation.  Capital chases it.  Markets expand in anticipation.  The idea may be little more than a fantasy at this point, "let's put people on the moon." Where there's a will there's a way.  Engineers race to realize the vision and capture the business for their owners before the competition does.  Some time later, some black and white version of the dream is realized.  Maybe the vision is still colorful to the layman, but the engineer's broken it down and rendered it mundane. It takes time to realize a vision.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  Innovation is problem solving.  Problem solving is a matter of fully exploring a problem space and understanding it.  This is primarily what engineers do, explore and define the boundaries of a problem space....

  You know how kids start asking "WHY?" to everything to try to annoy their parents? Pro-tip: Find a series of answers that loop and just keep repeating them until the kid gets annoyed. ... Why? So the tree can grow. Why? So they can get bigger. Why? So they can get more sun. Why? So they can get bigger. Why? So they can get more sun. etc... The kids get bored and give up.

Rhetoric can be split into three pillars, Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.  When communicating, it's useful to know what your audience responds to and customize the delivery to them. As the audience, we can feel the emotion in the Braveheart "Freedom" speech and can relate to how it may have helped inspire warriors into battle.  Imagine a speech of similar delivery given to a team of software engineers.  They'd probably have to hold back the laughter and/or yawns. Each profession or specialty generally carries with it a certain disposition.  Some respond better to logic.  Others to heart.  Others still to a more subtle combination.  When framing your communication, it's worth considering this to more effectively reach your audience.      

  In The Simpson's episode Homer's Enemy ,  Frank Grimes is a unlucky man who's worked hard his life but failed to reap any of the benefit.  When confronted with the inequity of his circumstances compared to Homer's he breaks down into a self destructive fit of jealousy that eventually ends his life prematurely.   The episode is a 1990s comedic expression of the general observation that life is not fair.  Several decades later, as income inequality has increased it's become a popular talking point that, "Hard work alone doesn't make you successful."  In Gen A slang a, "Try Hard" is someone like Frank Grimes who does himself discredit by giving it too much effort. For us conscientious types, this is not only counter intuitive but also elicits an emotional reaction.  Folk heroes like Rocky show us that while God may not have blessed us with any particularly useful talent, we can make up for it for it with heart.  Hercules taught us that even wi...

We tend to think of flexibility as a good thing.  When it comes to interpersonal relationships, the ability to compromise is considered a sign of maturity.  Shouldn't this be the case for software?  After all, software is just a human solution to a human problem. Well, it turns out that it depends on what exactly we mean by "flexibility."   Flexibility as software extensibility is generally positive.  It's unlikely that we perfectly capture the problem space in an optimal fashion in the first go.  We should strive to make our future selves' lives easier.  Extensibility means, holding all else equal, building a version of the solution that is easier to expand upon in the future.  This kind of flexibility is good.  It means spending a little extra time now to save time in an ongoing fashion in the future.  We'll return to this idea later.   When by "flexibility" we mean producing a solution to an ambiguously defined problem, that's wh...

In finance, the process of retrospectively evaluating the efficacy of investment decisions is referred to as attribution.  It's used to ask, "How'd we do?" and offer a granular, objective answer.  Using the risk/reward framework, widely accepted risk factors are used to explain a position's performance. As a cartoon example, let's say you own a share of IBM.  For equities, we'll perform attribution using Beta , roughly speaking a measure of correlation to the underlying market.  If IBM has a Beta of 0.75 and the SnP5000 moved by 2% then Beta predicts that IBM would move by 0.02 * 0.75 = 1.5%.  If instead we observed a measure of 1.7% then we may say that 1.7 - 1.5 = 20bps (basis point = 1/100 of 1%) is due to expert skill aka " alpha ."  Alpha is often used as a remuneration metric for professional portfolio managers. There's actually a whole lot more to attribution but hopefully this example communicates the general intuition.  Interesting...