An interesting problem I've noticed in many software businesses is that you find this understanding barrier between software people and non-software people. A non-software person just can't understand what a software person is doing – at least, not without becoming a software person themselves. So they have to rely on indirect understanding: either measuring that person's eventual output, or being willing to trust that they are doing the things they say they are.
Of course, you can just hire a software person to tell you whether the other software person is doing what you expect. But then you've just moved the barrier. Now you need to trust the new person. I think it's for this reason, among a few others, that software businesses are generally considered to be best run by software people. That way the management doesn't have that kind of understanding barrier.
But software hasn't necessarily earned special unique snowflake status on this. I realised later on that, in fact, I have the same understanding barrier with sales. I know the general idea of sales: you convince people to buy things. I can tell if it's going well (people are buying things), or badly (people aren't buying things), but beyond that I don't really have the skills to evaluate. Beyond looking at those obvious measurements, I wouldn't be able to evaluate whether a head of sales was doing a good job.
I believe this is a general problem with work in any kind of expertise-driven field; either you need to have the expertise to evaluate it, or you have to trust someone else who does. It's concerning how many instances of this problem the average company must have and, of course, the obvious resulting failures like embezzling. But I also think it's worth considering how many companies you might never hear of because they try to swing for the fences in two expertise-driven fields, say, software and architecture, and run into the understanding barriers of both.
So is the answer just to find trustworthy people to act as your understanding barrier sherpas for every field you might need? Maybe, but that strikes me as an inherently fragile answer. Even if you can reliably and scalably find trustworthy sherpas, they still have to translate things into concepts that are meaningful to you, which creates limits in what you can understand and what you can contribute back.
If that's important, then I think it's better to just learn the things. Become a software person, become a sales person, become an architecture person; at least enough that you can understand and evaluate the work of others. If you aren't able to do that, you'll just end up interacting with them superficially, like a tourist who doesn't speak the language.
It seems to me that the most fragile part of any work is just before you get started. Once you get into a groove it's easy to keep going, but before you start you have a lot of options and no particular investment in any of them. At that point it always seems like there are other, more tempting things to pursue.
In fact, I think one of the main differences between work and play is that play is easy to get into – you just start playing. Sometimes play can be just as hard as work, but games almost always have a really easy entry point: you just click "continue game". Every time you're done with one thing, the game presents you with a new thing immediately afterwards. I'd call this the quality of having low resistance.
But there's no reason your work can't have low resistance, at least some of the time. If you specifically aim to have a clear "next thing" at each point, especially when you're stepping away from a project, or know you'll be finishing your current task soon. The goal is to never be at a point where there's something easier to do than the work you want to be doing.
And it probably doesn't hurt to increase the resistance of things you want to do less either.
Related to my previous work on brain visualisation and brain sculptures, I've been working on brain, uh... audialization? Whatever the word is, I'm trying to find interesting ways of representing the EEG data with sound.
This one's a fairly direct mapping from EEG frequencies to audio frequencies using a pentatonic scale. 32 synthesizers are playing sine waves with a volume in proportion to the relative power of each corresponding EEG frequency. I had a few other variants using different kinds of mappings (plain linear sounded discordant and weird, exponential sounded relatively normal but creepy), but I think this one is the most promising because it's the least confronting.
I think there are some other interesting areas to investigate by using fewer and more sophisticated measures, and sending those as inputs to a more general music generator function. That'd be less directly related to the EEG signal, but probably leave more room for interesting artistic license.
I re-watched Inception today for the first time since it came out. I think it's aged particularly well. I don't mean in terms of the visual effects or anything, more that the themes in some movies get kind of played out or dated by the particular era they come from. The Matrix's grungy 90s futurism seems kind of naive when we're actually living in the future and, if anything, it's not grungy enough.
Anyway, it seems as good a time as any to mention E-X-T-E-N-S-I-O-N, a Chrome extension which adds an inception button after every mention of the word inception on a webpage. I actually made it back in 2011 but, like its namesake, I think it's aged pretty well.
I was out for a walk today and I started thinking about how my neighbourhood has changed in the time I've been living here. Not drastically or anything, just that slow suburban development along with an increase in people. But it made me wish I had one of those great time-lapse videos that people make. Problem is, who's going to set up a static tripod for half a decade?
But maybe we could make assisted time lapse software, much like the recent generation of assisted panorama software. Instead of having to carefully line up the shot for each photo, you just move your camera around and a display shows you how close you are to replicating the previous shot. Once you've lined it up closely enough, the picture is taken automatically.
I know there are a lot of amazing personal transformation time-lapses that get made which could probably benefit from it too. I think it's really powerful being able to compress time like that, so instead of minutes or hours we can think on the scope of months or years. It'd be nice to have something to make that process a bit easier.
