Part of the Process

The Future Soon by K Rupp on flickr Last Friday was the last dConstruct (at least in it's current form). For the past ten years this has been an interesting design conference held in Brighton looking at the culture/technology intersection. As a Artificial Intelligence graduate the subject matter was right up my street and changed the way I look at things just a little. While at University I had a certain nostalgia for the golden age of AI in the late 50s to early 70s, to have been around while Winograd , Weizenbaum , Schank , Newell and Simon were writing the papers that founded approaches and I was studying all those years later. What changed after dConstruct was that I now almost wanted to have been born later , with advances like 3D printing, robot kits that retail for around $1,600, and 10 companies with self-driving permits in California it feels like an exciting time to be studying, creating and entering the job market.  Looking at my Twitter timeline, this doe...

I am currently lucky enough to be working on a project where the developers are looking into what they can learn from academic computer science and spiking various options to explore the solution space. This got me thinking to how relatively rarely you see this, in my experience programmers tend not to read industrial journals in the same way that say civil or electrical engineers might.  One thing that I would expect to see more in agile literature are Grice's conversational maxims (Grice 1975) Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. For me the...