Lookery.com

Followed a rec from Steve Vinoski (whose blog is truly excellent), and picked up “Release It!”, by Michael Nygaard.  Just started it, but, man, it looks like he wrote it for someone in exactly the situation we’re in.  He’s got over a decade’s worth of experience in releasing/monitoring/maintaining/extending big, critically-up systems, and has stories to tell, recommendations to make, etc. Very excited to burn through that and see what he has to say.

(side note: I have a career-long distrust of the title “architect” in the software biz, since it all too often seems to mean someone who believes what vendors say about their byzantinely complex systems, and doesn’t hesitate to put together one of those unspeakably terrible “best-practices” amalgamations of XML files, Java get/set methods, and hundreds of hours of junior programmer busywork.  That said, I get the sense that Michael Nygaard may be the other kind of software architect, one who really deserves the title.  Which would be great).

Also got O’Reilly’s Programming Collective Intelligence, which has lots of math and ideas for finding information in huge sets of data.  Which, y’know, we’ve so totally got.  A bit slow to get going, because, though I love me some math, I also happen to intensely dislike wildly overstatated claims of the utility of collaborative filtering and/or machine learning.   Both of which have value, but which are often conflated, by an innocuous-seeming rhetorical trick, with the kinds of intelligence humans evidence when given a big mass of unstructured data.  Which is so absurd and irritating I can’t write about it right now (it sums up everything I find disappointing about AI, which, instead of seeking to fully understand the astonishing depth and richness of actual intelligence, seems to be satisfied in making systems which appear to be intelligent—but those appearances are hugely deceptive, because humans are overdetermined to see things as intelligent.  In other words, AI is all hugely cheaty, and they don’t admit that.  See Douglas Hofstadter’s writing on this in, e.g. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, or Pinker’s discussions of common sense in How the Mind Works.  Okay, maybe I did have time to write about it.)

Anyways, I think there will be valuable stuff within there, and I’ll just have to hear little diatribes in my head while I read it.

Will report back once I’ve made more progress.

-Dan M