David Knott 29/10/2020 David Knott 29/10/2020

Teaching is the killer app

When listening recently to the great BBC Radio 4 science show, The Infinite Money Cage, I learnt that, while chimpanzees and baboons learn from other members of their species (for example, tool using behaviour such as fishing for termites with twigs), there is much less evidence of active teaching.

We could congratulate ourselves on finding a way in which humans appear to be more advanced than our primate cousins. Teaching allows us to transmit knowledge, skills and wisdom across time and distance. It helps us to adapt to new environments and new circumstances. And its power and importance have only been reinforced by the current global pandemic.

David Knott 09/04/2020 David Knott 09/04/2020

Should we teach the green field or the space capsule?

How do we help people become technology architects?

I think that we should start by asking ourselves what it’s like to be a new technology architect. Which of these best describes your first day as a solution architect?

This . . ?

You step into your new realm. The grass is lush and green. Crystal waterfalls sparkle in the background. Hills, forests and valleys stretch away into the distance. You know that the landscape is beautiful: you just need to find a vantage point from which to see it all. You need to build a tower high enough to gain perspective, but what should you build it from? Ivory?

Or this . . ?

You wake up with a start. Your surroundings are lurching and spinning around you. You seem to be in some sort of spacecraft. Looks something like Apollo 13. Gas is venting and there is smoke in the air. You spot your crew mates: they are frantically flipping switches, pressing buttons and turning dials. They turn to you in relief when they see that you are awake: ‘Help!’ they say. ’Tell us how this thing works!’

David Knott 13/02/2020 David Knott 13/02/2020

Architecture as education: share your superpowers

Learning new technology skills is like getting x-ray vision.

I don’t know how you learn coding skills, but for me it goes something like this (I should stress that nobody pays me to write code any more, so this is all for my own education or for non-profits):

Realise that I need to do <something> that I don’t know how to do.
Search the Internet and find the frameworks or libraries that everybody else seems to use to do <something>.
Scan the documentation and panic. Experience the usual feeling that I have no idea what I’m doing.
Try to figure out how to do <something> on my own, before realising once again that I’m trying to recreate something the community has already done much better.