Category: Education
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Trust and Team Dysfunction
I’m taking a leadership course at work at the moment, and this week we spent time discussing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon). I’d recently read Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Amazon) so it was interesting to hear what other people thought of the concepts. There’s a pyramid of things – Inattention to Results,…
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Strengthsfinder 2.0
I’m taking a leadership course at work just now, and one of the exercises was to take the StrengthsFinder (Amazon) test. At first I took the test and thought it was a bit rubbish. I didn’t really have strong preferences for a lot of things (much of which came from me being very ambivert) and so…
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On Having Adventures
There are a zillion things to do in New York City, but my favorite thing to do is walk across it. Every kind of person, demographic. See people out shopping, walking home after a marathon, out with their kids. Overhear people speaking Spanish, Italian, Farsi, French, Chinese, Japanese, and, yes, English – American, and English-English,…
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Encouragement Beats Re-tweeting
I read an article today about why there aren’t enough women in tech. It says, women doubt themselves. This hurts their chances of ending up in Science or Engineering. They think they can’t do it. It bored me. I am so tired of reading this. We know it. I must read an article a month…
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From Hard Focus, to Flow, to Stop
Interesting project the past few weeks. Basically I was swapping out a large and central component to what my team is building. It was really tough, to do that and keep everything functional. Normally I ask – what is the least amount I can do to make an improvement? This time, I had to ask,…
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Sim Family Demonstrates Personal Failings
Back in high school, my friends and I went through a phase of being into The Sims. I remember one conversation, when my friend said her sim-child had been taken off to military school. I hadn’t known that could happen. She, perceptively, said that she bet my sim-children are all straight-A students. They were. And…
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Come the Revolution
I was talking to a – male – programmer the other day, and he was telling me how much his high school CS teacher sucked. This is not an uncommon story. I know some good high school teachers. I’ve heard about a lot of bad ones. This particular bad one taught Visual Basic, and gave…
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Not a Good Use of My Time?
Every so often I do something that is such a waste of time it makes me pause. Reading a non-fiction book I’m not into, it drags and I don’t retain much of it. Horse-riding with my friend at the weekend, we booked the trail option and it was over an hour of… walking, didn’t even make…
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Engineering an Interesting Life
Abstract: In a world where computing power doubles roughly every two years, the goal is no longer efficiency, but effectiveness. The education system prepares students for efficiency, but to be successful when we go out into the world (or before!) we need rather to learn to be effective. In this workshop, we’ll discuss more useful things…