Minerva’s Owlet

[nkabrown]

[nkabrown]

[nkabrown]

Framing Questions

As a programmer, not knowing quite what to do is a common experience. Thankfully programmers love to talk about their problems and share their solutions on the web. But there is more to solving our problems than just querying Google and checking Stack Overflow. Sometimes, in our haste, we forget that there is an intermediate step between problems and solutions: questions!

Problems point to questions first, but it takes time to discover precisely which questions need to be asked. I think a great approach for those times when you don’t know how to precede is to first write out the problem. Writing is thinking and writing out the problem clarifies the limits of what you really know and sharpens the questions that you are seeking to answer. We have to remember that time spent framing the question is time well spent.

With specific questions identified and sharpened you can then intelligently query the internet armed with an understanding that can be used to quickly evaluate resources and generate a number of helpful re-phrasings of your search.

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newResolution(2);

Practice vital generosity — this resolution is based on a belief I have that life is gifted, therefore vital generosity is a fitting expression of what life really is at its core, a gift. The heart of vital generosity is to simply do something meaningful for someone else. I want to give without expectations in 2015, having confidence that meaning can be found in the relationship between what I do and how someone else receives it.

2015 Resolutions

Do good work

Practice effective learning

Write more

Do phenomenology

Practice vital generosity

[nkabrown]

“There are two sorts of reading. There is the sort we learned long ago, when we were five or six. The other sort is reading with understanding, receiving the text on the right wavelength.”

J. P. Fokkelman

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Lately I have experimented with two new work strategies; work sprints and email batching. They are smart and effective approaches where I can easily see my productivity and the quality of my work is rising. A work sprint is a concentrated but limited span of time devoted solely to work projects. I have been aiming for 90 minute sprints. Email batching is a work sprint’s perfect pair. While I’m working my email is turned off. At the end of a work sprint I can work through my batch of emails and then log off till my next scheduled email time. Batching emails helps me minimize distractions, attend and not anticipate, and promotes focused communications.

[nkabrown]

newResolution(1);

Write more — this resolution is rather self-explanatory, but to me it is the key resolution for the new year. This is the practice that will enable me to live out my other resolutions. Why? Because I’m convinced that writing is thinking. Putting pen to paper solves problems and generates fresh insights. One of my goals for 2015 is to write more, a lot more.

2015 Resolutions

Do good work

Practice effective learning

Write more

Do phenomenology

Practice vital generosity

[nkabrown]

Third week into a job search and I feel like this song is my anthem.

[nkabrown]

2015 Resolutions

Do good work

Practice effective learning

Write more

Do phenomenology

Practice vital generosity

...more to come in the days ahead about what I think these resolutions mean to me.

[nkabrown]

Music for Grownups who still love Mr. Rogers

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“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when it’s mighty Founder was a child Himself.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

[amandalanzone]

seasons greetings from nyc

[lars-mar]

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I tell you there are men on Earth who usually tell the truth I know because I am one of them, And know I'm not unique. And I have chosen who I will believe And what I will believe. I have chosen to believe in the ultimate, The lovliest thing I can imagine I have chosen to believe in you, Not as you are, but as you should be. I believe in your happiest wishes.

Milton Acorn

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“Learning requires both knowledge and the skills of thought. To have the former without the latter is to be a storage device, capable of being called upon for information but not for thought. That is not learning; it is at best recall and display, activities better performed by computers than human beings. To have the latter without the former is to be capable of distinction, argument, and synthesis, which are the paradigmatic intellectual skills; but to have nothing to which to apply them. That is also not learning; it tends toward sophistry. The learned, ideally, have initimate acquaintance with and love for a body of knowledge, coupled with the ability to think about it, view and present it from different angles, ornament and develop it, and in those and other ways return its embrace.”

Paul J. Griffiths

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