I had an interesting exchange last week. We had someone in the chatroom asking for help, morgan was doing his part, and I chimed in and proceeded to get attacked.
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Category Archives: Philosophy
Leadership in Software Development Part 4
Principle #10 – Build A Team
Principle #11 – Employ Your Team In Accordance With Its Capabilities
Leadership in Software Development Part 3
Principle #7 – Keep Your Team Informed
Communication is the key to any operation. In the Army, they taught that an Infantry Soldier needs to do three things in order to succeed: Shoot, move, and communicate. Well, there should be very little gun fire in open source development, so shooting is less essential. Movement to, since most things happen via network. But communication is paramount. Tell people what you are going to do. A great decision left not communicated is no decision. In the absence of information, people will make assumptions. It is easier to correct mistakes early, and to identify them requires review and correction.
Leadership in Software Development Part 2
Principle #6 – Know Your Personnel and Look Out for Their Well Being
In an Open Source software project, who are “your people?” Your people are your community. Whether they are a fellow developer from your own company, the guy that pops in once every couple of months to make a typo fix, or someone that just reports bugs, they are all the people that lead to the success (or lack thereof) of your project.
More about Jason Amerine
A mutual friend of mine and Jason’s questioned the use of the word “Whistleblower” in the Survey. We are fairly certain it is the accurate term. Here was the response from Bill Ruhling, Lawyer for Jason.
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Which takes more courage: to lead a 11 person team deep into enemy territory, or to stand up to your own dysfunctional organization to try and fix it? I know someone that has done both.
Continue readingAuthentication versus Authorization
Authentication is only the start of the Authorization process. A centralized user registry, enforced by strong cryptography must be enhanced by data local to the application in order to properly allow or deny access to specific operations on resources. Here is a real world example that should make things clearer: getting into a location in the USA that serves alcoholic beverages over the counter.
Line to get into the Club
Why I work at Red Hat
West Point’s motto is “Duty, Honor, Country.” I graduated in 1993. Why did a former Army Officer end up at Red Hat?
Corresponding Spirit
My friend and Classmate Mike Figliouo (so proud I managed to spell that correctly without looking it up) writes a blog on leadership. When ever he asked for a suggestion on what to write on, I always suggest the same thing: Schofield’s Definition of Discipline: He got tired of me suggesting it, and decided the best way to shut me up was to finally write it.  Go read it. It is more important than what I have to write here.
On Hierarchy
The book “On Intelligence.” is one of the most intriguing I’ve read in a long time. I read it as context to understand Dilpeet George’s thesis which is based around the concept of “Hierarchical temporal memory.” or HTM for short. HTM is a mathematical model of a learning machine based on the organization of the neocortex of the mammalian brain. HTM is a tree, with a complex interface between the nodes. At the bottom of the tree are the sensors: touch, light, sound, smell. At the top it the hippocampus, which seems to have its own rules. The focus in HTM is the nodes between root and leaf.