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Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

I got a forward from one of my peers a month ago. Even though the video is just an hour long I was putting this away for a weekend. After watching this video I realized that I made a mistake of putting this away for a long time. This talk definitely made me think every problem differently. Bret Victor has also come up with reactive documents, he believes that most of what we do with computers were designed to be done on paper and we are not using the power of electronics.

Some of the quotes I captured from the talk in my own words.

When you have to compile, run and see what you have built chances are high that you won’t discover that a shimmering effect can be provided by just changing the radius of a circle. 

If the feedback loop is longer; thinking something and seeing it much later does not bring any connection.

If creater needs to know about time, then need to know how to control time.

When we write program for the computer to do, why are we simulating in the head what a computer should do; instead ask the computer to do.

The languages were designed when there was batching through punched cards. No one wrote a program and was able to immediately see the output.

Ideas are precious, seeing an idea die hurts

One of my peers sent the following to my team as his take away from the talk.

Injustice, responsibility, moral wrong.. these are not the words we normally hear in technical field. We hear these in association with social causes. So things like censorship, gender discrimination, environmental destruction.. we all recognize these things as moral wrong. Most of us won’t see a civil rights violation and think that it is an opportunity. I hope not. Instead, we have been fortunate to have people throughout history who recognize these social wrongs and sought as their responsibility to address them. So this activist lifestyle where a person dedicates themselves to fighting for a cause they believe in. And the purpose of this talk is to tell you that activist lifestyle is not just for social issues. As a technologist, you can recognize wrong in the world. You can have a vision of a better world to be. You can dedicate yourself to fight for that principle. Social activist fight typically by organizing, you can fight by inventing.

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Ever wondered that some of the live wires at the office or school were not those kind when they just joined the place. It was something like they were waiting for a tipping point and their activities became live. I randomly selected a ted talk, How bacteria talk. Bonnie Bassler a biochemist, has observed that bacteria cannot turn on their behaviour until there is enough of them. But how does all the single cell animals know how many of them are around? The answer was that each type of bacteria releases a certain signature chemical molecule into their environment, based on the amount of that specific molecule a bacterium receives, they can determine the population density. This is called Quorum sensing which is also evident for insects where we think they could be intelligent but may be that they just rely on the density of their peers around to do certain tasks.

How can this apply to human behaviour? I have been lucky to move to different places and teams almost every year, which has made me observe teams get started and get going. In one of the teams I have been, we did not know that we had good number of musicians to form a band until we had some event coming in the office. The event allowed the release of signaling molecules from individuals searching for people with similar interests.

This is also true to interests in technologies and pursuing hobbies. As the workplace gets bigger it is more difficult to network and find the right group to be in unless there is enough quorum sensing. Just by someone in the team holding a regular weekly get together for a random topic can spark interests and get people to come together and switch to top gear. I observed that a group’s knowledge and skill level gets amplified if there is effective sharing, effective sharing happens only when people come together, people come together only if something is happening and something happens only if someone takes an initiative. We must make sure our workplace is conducive for quorum sensing to make the best use of everyone’s strengths and skills.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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I was reading Presentation Zen last week which coincided with a conference invite for the weekend. The conference exposed lots of different styles of presenters and the memories of the book still fresh in mind, I made few observations. I observed that the most common one was the bulleted list presentations. Since this was a developer conference the other style which was prevalent was the demo style presentation where the presenters either coded or executed something for the demo. Few of the aspects which I felt did not work well were

  • Bulleted lists and crowded slides, people at the back (just 10-12 rows) were able see only blurred lines and the presenter just kept reading and elaborating on each points. This reduced the involvement from the audience.
  • Time overruns, the organizers have spent some time and effort to line up the sessions in the conference. Some presenters went way beyond the given 30 minutes were sent notes to remind them to finish their talk. This spoiled the presenter’s flow to finish on a high note and I was not sure about the attention span of the audience.
  •  Monitor and Lectern placement was in the corner that many presenters had to walk back from the center of the stage to be sure of the content or to turn around and look at the screen after every slide change. This would have halted the train of thoughts for few presenters.

The ones which worked well were

  • The presenter doing a demo, since it was technical it kept everyone glued on to the presentation.
  • Key messages, one presenter mentioned that “make use of open source software for 80% of your needs; for the remaining 20% needs, innovate and give it back to the society”. This message stayed with people and I noticed many people mention this till the end of the day.

Image: ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net