Tags / It Industry

Technical Debt and Entropy

I seem to find myself with a lot of unproductive time - time when I can’t be working on real problems - problems that need access to tools such as a coding environment, terminal, internet searching, and somewhere to capture notes. Situations such as walking the dog, driving, and getting simple chores done are examples of these times. Times like this though, are good for thinking, and recently i’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of technical debt.

Published Dec 31, 2017 7 min read philosophy · it industry

Engineering the Artefact not the Process

I am dissatisfied with the IT industry. From the outside people think it’s all moving so fast and is full of relentless innovation towards the future. From the inside it feels at least in part like a stagnating pool with innovation increasingly confined to narrow niches. Is this because we are focusing too much of our collective energy on the process rather than the artifacts we are creating? The first real practical computers were realised in the 1940’s though the theoretical foundations were established a decade earlier.

Published May 3, 2013 7 min read it industry · philosophy

Ending The Absurdity

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” - Albert Einstein Peter and I were talking the other day about how absurd the ROC (resource oriented computing) model can appear. This came about because I’d become re-acquainted with the inner workings of the NetKernel kernel whilst implementing a number of low-level changes for the upcoming version 5 release. How can something so convoluted that every atom of computation resolves to an endpoint through a set of arbitrary and dynamically interrelated address-spaces by an abstract identifier possibly work?

Published Oct 6, 2011 4 min read netkernel · it industry