Transcriber Notes 2023-11-12

Maybe an extracted links section would be useful, given a number of thoughtful papers and resources. (Pulled this paragraph to the top, so it would be less likely lost).

A busy discussion, including Chris talking about Superior, Arizona's community work, and Jan Dittrich (wikimedia UX developer, academic with interests in the history of patterns and agile software development).

Brian reflected on how useful it can be for crystallizing priorities in user interface design, for developers to do the job which they're writing software for.

Eric returned to a related topic, which added the insights into your actual software system in its working context, gained through studying failure scenarios and unusual incidents; that development teams often want to put the incident behind them before they've realized the value of the insights available from reflecting on an incident.

(I recall a tactic described for senior technical managers at Amazon / Amazon Web Services: don't focus on the mean and variance of a system metric, look at unusual excursions and make close, sharp investigations of "what happened at this time, for this system?")

I ended up talking a little more than usual toward the end about my experiences working at Google and at Microsoft, and what those large organizations did well and not so well.

Jan reflected on the prestige of various work roles and academic subjects; in user experience research, about "surprising insights" being valued highly, versus well-grounded insights about good practice.

A line of influence in the philosophy of practice from Alfred North Whitehead to Christopher Alexander to Ward Cunningham to Eric Evans; Eric Evans' work at OOCL (Orient Offshore Container Lines) on container ship planning systems.

Elixir, Erlang, and the BEAM - a lot of stability in the core BEAM, versus the JVM which has had a lot of innovation in the core over time. Yet the stable core of the Erlang BEAM has become the underlying platform for reliable networked services like WhatsApp.

As was common, I thought I was too tired to take notes, but here they are.