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Richard Audette's Projects, Problems, Solutions, Articles on Computing and Security

Antifragile - Hidden Benefit of Chaotic Systems

Although not related to IT, there are ideas worth considering as we think about our systems in the following book:
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.”

Hiring for Potential and Building The Amiga Team

I spent a good portion of my childhood in front of a Commodore Amiga 500, an amazing home computer for the late 1980s. I purchased mine used, after having saved months of hard-earned income delivering newspapers.

When author Brian Bagnall created a Kickstarter campaign to fund Commodore: The Amiga Years, a book about the history of the Amiga in 2015, I backed it. As Kickstarter projects go, 2 years later, I received it (now you can buy it on Amazon).

Security: Not a new problem

Here’s an OLD story about famous scientist Richard Feynman, who had fun cracking the safes of all his fellow scientists working on the Manhattan project in WW2:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs588/safecracker.pdf (this is a long read best left for an evening at home).

What’s interesting is how easily you can draw parallels to the security issues we face today.  You could almost swap the word “safe” with “web application”, and “atom bomb design” with “financial data”, and the story almost carries over to today. These safes/filing cabinets contained documents relating to the atomic bomb (ie: something worth protecting).

People, Process, and the Sausage Factory

In Product Development, we sometimes speak of “hiding the Sausage Factory”, meaning “hiding the complexities of software development and release” from our users. We want our users to enjoy using our products - they don’t need to know all the trials and tribulations it takes to get there.

In our Product Development Factory, we define standard processes and workflows, to bring some efficiency, consistency, and predictability to our work. However, we’re human - we’re not interchangeable cogs. Someone goes on vacation, people change roles, people move on - the successor may not do the same things in exactly the same way. There is an unwritten first step in every process: “Think”.

Fish Feeder Project - Part 2 - Completed!

After seeing the simple Automatic Fish Feeder on Thingiverse, I immediately ordered the required parts and set about modifying the design for my purposes.

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Fish Feeder - Original Model

I liked this particular design, as we only have a 2 bettas in 2 bowls, and we need to ensure only a couple of very tiny pellets drop with each feeding.  I did want to make a few changes.  It was not clear how the motor was controlled in the original design - I wanted to use an optical slot sensor to detect when to start and stop the rotating disc.

IT Process and Models over Time

I recently came across this article:
My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies

The author discusses the methodologies he’s followed on various projects through the years, discusses the issues with each, and, presents that these are “collective fictions” that allow development teams to collaborate, an idea presented in the book Sapiens to describe how societies function in larger groups.

It’s an interesting read, and also interesting to reflect, on the changing processes and models used since I started working in software development. In 2006, the organization I worked for talked about reaching CMMI Level 3, and following a waterfall development model. By 2013, we were attending sessions on Six Sigma. In recent years, the interest has been in Agile/SCRUM.