Lessons From The Trickster

Tricksters are found in the mythology and stories of almost every culture. From Coyote to Prometheus to Loki, today is April 1st or April Fools Day a day we as a culture celebrate tricksters and pranksters. In cultural stories, or myths tricksters play tricks to teach or create changes that leads to growth. In Norse mythology which has been in the movies lately Thor would not have his hammer without Loki, nor Asgard it’s walls. This episode will be a little different from most as the guys discuss nine lessons a trickster would teach programmers. Episode Breakdown * Numbers aren’t things, they represent things. “The square root of negative one says to pi ‘be rational’ to which pi responds, ‘get real.'” The ability to express numbers is incomplete. Try to express 1/3 or pi as a decimal. You can’t do it with exact accuracy. Numbers represent a concept. Words are the same way. What does ‘fast’ actually mean? What does ‘stable’ mean? What does ‘Complete Developer’ mean? These are all terms we define fluidly or situationally. What is fast to the turtle is slow to the rabbit. What is stable to Facebook API developers is chaotic to anyone else. We chose the name Complete Developer so that we could leave ourselves open to discuss many topics affecting developers. Also, there are a limited number of good domain names available in the .com space. * There is complexity all the way down. “It’s turtles all the way down.” What happens when you pull down a page from the web? It appears simple and quick but those words are fluid and belie the complexity of what is taking place in a relatively short amount of time. HTTP handshakes underly the page and all it’s assets TCP handshakes underly HTTP IP handshakes underly TCP Ethernet underlies IP IEEE 802.3u underlies Ethernet Hardware Interpretation of signals underlies IEEE 802.3u Manufacturing complexity underlies the hardware interpretation We deal with this complexity through abstraction. * Your are not one Person. You are a collection of interfaces. “I don’t hide behind masks, I bring out the part of me most appropriate to the situation.” Think about how you act toward your spouse, your kids, your boss. Each of these you treat differently. You do not use the same tone when disagreeing with your spouse as with your children. Now compare this to object interfaces. Several years ago the concept of the masks we wear was popular in pop psychology. For many of us it is less about putting on a mask than it is about interfacing with different people in our lives. * It is impossible to directly perceive anything. “What the joke displays is a switch in perception. This is important in changing the way we think.” ~ Edward de Bono Look around the room, do you see things that appear solid? They are mostly empty space. Perception is heavily dependent on pattern matching, and pattern matching misses. Perceptually everything you experience has already happened by the time you receive the inputs and process them in your brain. It takes time for your sensory organs to convert data into a neuronal transmission and more time for that to reach your brain. * It is impossible to put anything out in a way it can’t be misinterpreted. Rule 13 of the Internet: Anything you say can be turned into something else.” This derives from facts that there is complexity all the way down and you cannot directly perceive anything. Communication is a protocol where sometimes the sender is bad, other times the receiver. You’ll see this in everything you in computing at some point. The entire genres of romantic comedies and sitcoms have been built on this princi...