Dream.In.Code -> ...considered harmful

Posted by jon.kiparsky

Readers here may have noticed that I like the rosalind.info problem set - it's got interesting problems, it's well structured, and the submission process is pretty clean.

However, it's not QUITE as clean as I'd like, so I found myself writing a little solution template to make it more convenient to solve and submit problems....

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Quotes

07 January 2018

Posted by jon.kiparsky

In her recent collection of essays (drawn, I believe from pieces published online in the last decade) the eternally wonderful Ursula K. LeGuin discusses a quote mistakenly attributed to her. This essay got me thinking about quotes, and attributions, and the appalling illiteracy of the internet-savvy. Some of those thoughts:

As is well known, most...

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Kaizen Diary: Automate Rather Than Repeat

20 December 2016

Posted by jon.kiparsky Draft

For our third kaizen, we came up with the following:

The motivation: when we signed on to work on this platform, there were a lot of loose ends hanging off of it. It had been built, mostly, by one person who was serving in both a dev role and as an officer of the company. He was comfortable with using the shell to perform certain tasks - mostly...

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Kaizen Diary: More Demonstrative Sprint Review

20 December 2016

Posted by jon.kiparsky Draft

The second kaizen our team came up with was this:

The motivation: A development team is a massive expense for most organizations, particularly if the organization does not see itself as a software business. It is critical, then, that the business see the results of their investment, and that they see this in concrete forms, and that they see...

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A thought about "white nationalism"

23 November 2016

Posted by jon.kiparsky

Here we go again. I read in the Times that people are asking themselves "What, exactly, is white nationalism?"

Really? People have to ask this question? I thought it was pretty simple: "white nationalism" is when a Klansman takes off his robe and hood and puts on a suit and tie. White nationalism is a racist with a college...

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On "accusations"

22 November 2016

Posted by jon.kiparsky

In a recent story in the Times, we find the following sentence:

This is a strange usage of the word "accused" - this is not an accusation, it is an observation. A man who devotes years of his life to running an organization whose output consists largely of white supremacist and anti-semitic views and conspiracy theories is a person who...

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A stray thought on our short-fingered leader

18 November 2016

Posted by jon.kiparsky

What's depressing about this is that my country is now run by a man who clearly does not want the job, and never did want it, never did anything to prepare against the possibility that he might accidentally wind up in the job, and is now doing his best to try to ensure that he can get out of having to do it before he actually has to do it, but...

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The Shopping Bag as Issues List (A Fable)

27 January 2016

Posted by jon.kiparsky

Recently, e_i_pi discussed working for an organization that maintained issues list as a set of Sharepoint lists.

I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but it's all too common. An organization starts out thinking, well, we don't really need all that stuff, we can get away with writing them down on this old shopping bag, and...

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Kaizen Diary: Introduction

14 October 2015

4 Comments

Posted by jon.kiparsky

I work on a small team - three people - mostly focused on maintaining and improving the user portal for a large non-profit startup accelerator. It's an interesting codebase, with some interesting ~~problems~~ ~~issues~~...

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Kaizen Diary: Tickets For All Work

15 September 2015

Posted by jon.kiparsky

Kaizen: Tickets For All Work (Sprint 6)
(an entry in the Kaizen Diary)

This was the first kaizen for our team that I have a record for. Right away, you can see that this is a team with some issues: the most important improvement we could come up with was that we follow one of the most standard pieces of developmental rigor, and require...

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