The Vaults

Is programming a skill unique to itself or can we learn some fundamental lessons from other fields. Cooking perhaps. In this episode, the podcast goes to one of its favorite restaurants – Washington DC’s Green Rice and Natto – to create an episode that looks at the different kinds of skills you need as a programmer.

We also learn about the Pepperoni Bento Box, which seems to be a unique blend of cuisines.

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So what’s so bad about Knowledge Engineering? You’re just systematizing what your company knows. Just trying to bring some order to the chaos of the corporate world. However, it always requires a compromise. Squeezing a 7 and a half foot into a 6 and a half Louboutin, as Anna would say. In no situation are the problems of the knowledge engineered boyfriend. To ask the question of the ages, it is better to be a 70% with a 20% probability or a 20% boyfriend with a 70% probability.

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HWMS began as conventional podcast. More or less. (Probably less but we wouldn’t admit it.) It followed in the footsteps of three successful podcasts: “Known World” (2007-2009); “Crowdpod” (2010-2012), and “Errant Hashtag” (2013-2015). All three had become books: Too Soon To Tell (Wiley 2009), Crowdsourcing for Dummies (Wiley 2012), and The Company We Keep (IEEE Computer Society 2015).

As was common to podcasts that started in the mid-teens, the founders believed that they could recreate the conversations that they had in private. They were probably right but they hadn’t been entirely honest with themselves about the nature of those conversations. They were always a little dramatic.

HWMS did not long remain a conventional podcast, if it ever was conventional.  In the summer of 2015, we interrupted an interview by parading a French Army band through the studio.

By the fall of 2015, we knew that we wanted to move another direction.  We went looking for dramatic talent, hired actor Sarah Corbyn Woolf, and put her on stage as Anna-the-Intern.

Anna believed that technical information was transient, that it could be easily purchased on the open market and that the real guarantors of success were the ability to read a room and to express yourself with confidence.

Sadly, she is probably right on all points.

The HWMS Drama begins.

What kinds of qualities do you want on your team? We start discussing skills and the qualities of our personnel with guest George Dyson while our intern and our IT guy go in search of John Von Neumann’s early computer. Dyson identifies some useful lessons from Julian Bigelow, who served as the engineer on von Neumann’s computer.

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This episode deals with personnel lessons learned from an important early computer, the one built by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study.  Unlike some of its antecedents, this machine followed a basic pattern that has been replicated in modern processors.  That pattern is called the “von Neumann architecture.”

The von Neumann architecture was first described,  in an incomplete way, in a paper called “The Draft Report on the EDVAC.”  Most scholars accept that this paper was conceived and organized by von Neumann, though it was probably drafted by von Neumann’s assistant and contains contributions, perhaps substantial contributions, from others. Beyond dispute is the claim, as Anna notes, that it was written in Courier Font.

Agility begins at home. Or more to the point, it begins with the board. Too often, companies are organized conventionally and then the CEO tries to make the Agile by applying various tricks and procedures. As Vinny argues in today’s episode, you really need to start at the top, think of the company as a whole, and start by understanding the claims and obligations of all parties.

It is a little crazy, we do admit, to build a company for an 8-year-old Entrepreneur. But it is not crazy to ask how your CEO will grow into the leadership demands of the organization.

Big Data. It gives you facts. It tells you what is really happening. It has Volume, Varity, Velocity, Veracity and, of course, Vexation of Spirit. Vexation can come with the data, no matter how much you have of it, tells you more about the structure that gathered it than the truth of any matter. When you have that, you have a problem called Simpson’s Paradox – the bane of Big Data.

We think about the future in terms of the past. Star Wars, after all, takes place a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. When we think about cyberdefense, we find that we are still think in terms of the static defense of physical infrastructure. We try to defend mobile data with references to earth and stone works from the 8th century.

Our Intern, Anna, attempts to explain the basic model of cyber
defense as a metaphor of castle defense.  Her description, though completely accurate in argument, has a few errors of fact, errors which should make us rethink how we use metaphor to describe cyberspace.

Ok. Maddie is a bit unusual in the world of CEOs but she still needs to be ready for the politics of her Board. They’re not going to agree with her just because she has a clever tech idea and good presentation. You have to be ready. You have to think.