Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
This is a slippery slope, IMHO. It can easily get you to be the next "tactical tornado" of your team (cf. John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design).
Comment · 3 years ago
Entanglement in the life of physics giant Chien-Shiung Wu
Comment · 4 years ago
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Comment · 4 years ago
Has anything changed significantly since 2014 that would make today's cellphones more efficient at detecting gammas? IIRC the tiny size of the cmos camera was the limiting factor...
Comment · 4 years ago
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Comment · 5 years ago
Your reply is fun to read and I really enjoyed it. Of course the descriptions of the "typical day" in the original blog post is idealized. I suppose this idealization is there to make the contrast between the highly-effective day and the low-effective day. That is just the blog post.

Leaving aside this funny idealization and its comic interpretation of the blog post, in real life there are good habits and bad habits that can make a team work more efficiently and less efficiently. I have had first-hand experience with developers from ThoughtWorks, the consulting company behind that blog, and I can tell that they are indeed trying to apply those principles and strategies in their projects.

The fact that they are a consulting company gives them an advantage when trying to apply these principles. They only need to worry about the "small picture" of the project they're consulting on. They don't have to deal with all the "big picture" issues that might affect the employees working within the company they're consulting for (e.g. company politics, technical legacies, etc.) So IMHO perhaps some of these techniques and strategies to become a more effective development team are less applicable if you're working in $BIG_CO rather than in $CONSULTING_CO.

Comment · 6 years ago
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Comment · 6 years ago
Fun story. In the Princeton Physics dept. corridors (ca. 2010) there were posters and papers talking about current research and results. One of them, not far from Anderson's office, was about broken symmetries and the Higgs boson. In it, a sentence described how "the mechanism of spontaneus symmetry breaking, proposed by Peter Higgs, explained the non-zero mass of the boson" (I don't remember the exact sentence...but it was something along these lines).

Someone had crossed out that sentence with a red pen, and corrected it by writing that the mechanism had been proposed by Anderson in 1962. I always wondered who had done that :-)

RIP

Comment · 7 years ago

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