Erik Antonsson

A great template is the Heilmeier questions[1]. I will read and respond to any cold pitch that answers them. [1] http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Heilmeier_Questions.html

best part, this link: http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/design_quotes.html

I found overwork to be an issue when I began managing large (20+ engineer) teams. Unlike clients, it's not easy to set boundaries with employees. If something is preventing their forward progress, or a decision needs to be made, my not being there to intercede has a material impact on the company. I don't want to ask people to not leverage flextime. I don't want to create unnecessary hierarchy. I don't want to over-plan or enforce a less agile methodology. So I'm chained to slack and email. Less is written about large engineering team management, so it's not clear what options exist. The solution might be to better delineate interfaces and obligations between components and subdivide teams to match, in an inverse application of Conway's law [1], but those abstractions are inevitably leaky and we have thin tolerances. It's enough that I'm reconsidering doing a tour at Google/Amazon/etc as a way to pick up best practices from my peers at their director levels. 1: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Conway.html

From the same speech about how a citizen should be, a page down or so[1], a passage that gives a slightly different flavour to the above quote. "There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; [...] But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision." further down[2] the nuance is again changed: "The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things." [1] Page 5, http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republic.pdf [2] Page 8, ibid

It reminds me of this nice link on how to generate Gaussian from uniform, using Box-Muller transformation: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Gaussian.html

Very similar to Heielmeier questions: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Heilmeier_Questions.html Pretty universal set of things to check for in new ideas.

Reminds me of this old story (there are many variations): http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html

Sacks has opened the first envelope. [1] Let's see when the second one is opened. My guess is if Z2 doesn't hit their goals, sometime next spring. [1] http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html

http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html Why is Yahoo so politicized and who cares? I think Yahoo is no different from any other large corporation. It's just that the players are engaging and using the media a lot more for their stupid rich asshole power struggles that 99% of earth doesn't care about.

A lot of companies need scapegoats this quarter. I would imagine a lot of envelopes are being stuffed today - http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html

Somewhat related: the other day (this week even!) my wife was puzzled by the names of months and she asked me about the meaning of each. If you think about it for a moment you'll figure most of them out, but in any case this is a good summary: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/month_names.html

Actually, it was: http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/month_names.html .

I had to look up the 3-envelopes joke: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. -- Conway's Law ( http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Conway.html ) First reading this adage was a relevation. I realised I've never worked on a technical project that wasn't constrained by it. This post/discussion reminded me of it again.

Pssst...read it here: http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html

> Why is the normal distribution important here? There may be a terminological confusion at work here. A normal or uniform number shows no internal pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number Quote: "In mathematics, a normal number is a real number whose infinite sequence of digits in every base b[1] is distributed uniformly in the sense that each of the b digit values has the same natural density 1/b, also all possible b^2 pairs of digits are equally likely with density b^−2, all b^3 triplets of digits equally likely with density b^−3, etc." There are also pseudorandom generators whose purpose it is to generate results that agree with a normal or Gaussian distribution, for particular purposes. http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Gaussian.html Quote: "This note is about the topic of generating Gaussian pseudo-random numbers given a source of uniform pseudo-random numbers." The problem here is that a normal number shows a uniform distribution of its digits among the possible values, and the term normal distribution is sometimes used to describe this outcome. > In programming, people often start from the uniform distribution, don't they? Yes, and as set out above, this starting point may be described in a confusing way.