author: @sleepyfox
title: On Shu-Ha-Ri
date: 25-Oct-2024
So, fairly regularly something turns up in my inbox relating to ShuHaRi (守破離) often quoted as a Japanese model of skills aquisition. These articles, blogs etc. are all problematic in some way or other, and inevitably as both an Aikido instructor and a career IT professional with deep experience of Software Development Methodologies, I will get asked what I think. Hmmm...
So, let's start with the Wikipedia article:
This gist https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/61d4375aa1fcfad8cb0338edb4151546 URL shortened to https://tinyurl.com/fox-sustainable-development
author: @sleepyfox
title: Taiji Tennis
date: 08-Nov-2024
So I read a bit about Tennis, and thought 'Hey, that sounds cool, I'd like to learn that', and looked around to see if there is a local Tennis club, and if there is a learners' group. Great news, I find a 'Learn Tennis' session run by a local instructor. They appear legit, are certified and insured by the Tennis Union of Great Britain, so I go down on Tuesday evening to the local sports centre and give it a go.
author: @sleepyfox
title: The corruption of critical thinking
date: 05-Apr-2014
preamble: An open letter to Mr. Binstock and Dr. Dobbs addressing their recent editorial entitled "The Corruption of Agile" and its follow-up article addressing feedback from the community.
EDITED: 2024-10-29 in order to fix broken links and to use the Internet Archive in order to make available material which commercial publishers have egregiously removed - see Fox's 8th Law[^7]. Sadly it appears that my closing hope was not upheld over the intervening decade by the recipients.
Dear Mr. Binstock,
author: @sleepyfox
title: ObFOSScation
date: 15-Oct-2024
The problem with #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is that everybody thinks they know what it means. I once spent a couple of years working on and off with Ross Gardler, a VP of the Apache Software Foundation and Manager of OSS-Watch in Oxford.
author: @sleepyfox
title: Microservices Day
date: 12-May-2016
On Tuesday NearForm put on their 'Microservices Day' free one-day single-track conference, which was actually better than many paid-for conferences that I've been to in the past. Not only was the quality of the presentations overall very good, but all of the (very professionally produced) videos are available on YouTube:
author: @sleepyfox
title: The rise of foxy thinking
date: 4-Jan-2013
Now that we've survived the Mayan Apocalypse I predict that 2013 will see the rise of the generalist over the specialist.
This article last year from Harvard Business Review by Vikram Mansharamani, lecturer at Yale and author of 'Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst' references Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" which contrasts hedgehogs that "relate everything to a single, central vision" i.e. specialists, with foxes who "pursue many ends connected...if at all, only in some de-facto way" i.e. generalists. Berlin's essay is itself based upon the Greek poet Archilochus who wrote that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
author: @sleepyfox
title: Software storytelling
date: 22-May-2008
Many cultures had, at their pre-industrial stages, a rich oral tradition of storytelling as a means of communicating knowledge, before literacy became widespread.
Bards would gather people around the fire and tell rousing tales, inspiring and edifying a new generation of citizens with their practiced craft of passing along knowledge, morals and cultural values using the medium of entertainment. It seems that now, certain sub-cultures have developed 'secondary orality' as Walter Ong[^1] calls it, the creation of an oral transmission that exists alongside and is enabled by modern media, radio, television and the Internet. I propose that professional software developers can use the ancient art of storytelling to enhance their daily working practices.