July 9, 2022

Book Review: Turn The Ship Around

My notes from Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders.

Early in the book, Marquet tells a story of having failed to empower officers under his command. The story of being unable to “empower” stuck with me. It reminded me of experiences, earlier in my career, of failing to empower people reporting into me.
On empowerment, Marquet said “Empowerment is not how I want to be managed.” and “Empowering others feel manipulative. I believe people are empowered by nature.” This is often how I felt about empowerment.
- If not empowerment, then what? While he doesn’t mention this specifically, the way I interpreted his leadership style throughout the book is that he applied the Situational Leadership style.
Marquet tells a story of being reprimanded after coming up with a brilliant ruse to sink an enemy submarine (during practice). The moral of that story is that a great plan which is too complex for others to execute is, in fact, a bad plan.
- tldr; KISS
His story of being assigned to Santa Fe, of feeling dejected and finding the motivation to carry through is very inspiring. It is also a good example of how to be a good leader – his commander applied great leadership skills to help Marquet through it.
- On being told he’d have the full support of his command officer to succeed, then being told… “But, I don’t think it’s a good idea if you ask for A, B, and C” gave me a new perspective on “support.”
- One view of support is that “I trust you to do this” and “I think you are the best person for this job.”
- There are good ways (better than I have been doing) to communicate “these are the limitations to what we can provide to you.”
Watch out for signs of low morale! People avoiding mistakes, meeting the minimum requirements, and “do whatever they tell me to do.”
In chapter 13, Marquet tells a story of giving more responsibility to department heads too soon. In chapter 17, he talks about the importance of training in order for delegation to succeed. It feels like these two points should’ve been tied together more closely. Though I’m really just nitpicking now.

I suspect, if you are in the tech industry where there is already a lot of talk about autonomy and ownership, you like already understand the theme of this book. If you believe that people need to be led or that a great personality is needed to inspire others, then you should check this out; It will offer you a useful counter perspective.

June 19, 2022

Book review - Bitch: On the Female of the Species

Bitch is a book from zoologist Lucy Cooke on correcting misunderstandings and cultural biases in our biological science. She explains, via animal studies, how existing notions of sex, male/female roles, and “what is natural” have been incomplete, if not incorrect.

In Bitch, Lucy goes through the behaviors of lemurs, meerkats, hyenas, moles, orcas, elephants, bonobos, termites, birds and fish to challenge conventional wisdom on nature and the roles of male and females. This alone makes for an engrossing read. I cannot help but to be delighted by learning brand new things about nature and animals. It brings me back to being a child again. What makes things better is her amusing way with words. (I am jealous.) Some choice phrases from the book:

May 17, 2022

Optimisim

This is a story from Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast. He talked about being on Brian Cox’s show and discussing the futures of space travel. Neil was saying that chemical rocket engines are not going to cut it and we need to look into things like wormholes and warp drives. Then Brian cuts in and explains that wormholes are fundamentally unstable and they won’t work.

Brian was absolutely correct, but that was not the point. The point was about what the audience said. Cox’s audience said to them, “That’s why the Americans discover everything! They are always so optimistic!” (Cox is a British phycisit and Neil is an American physicist).

October 17, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 4

In Chapter 1.3 of [Ball’s Writing an Interpreter in Go][1], we encounter one design decision of his Monkey programming language. Here, the lexer has a NextToken() method that looks like this:

func (l *Lexer) NextToken() token.Token {
    var tok token.Token

    switch l.ch {
// [...]
    default:
        if isLetter(l.ch) {
            tok.Literal = l.readIdentifier()
            return tok
        } else {
            tok = newToken(token.ILLEGAL, l.ch)
        }
    }
// [...]
}

This means the lexer itself does not do backtracking. The meaning of a character at any point cannot be ambiguous. You cannot say, for example, that ‘+’ is the ‘plus’ token unless it is in the middle of a variable name. I don’t know many programming languages that support such behavior – so it is probably an acceptable design decision. You know what they say, “Keep it Simple, Smartypants”. I’m not sure if there are other notable constraints introduced by the design at this point, but it is something that tickles my overly analytical brain.

September 14, 2021

Staff Plus Live 2021

Staff Plus Live 2021 was a virtual conference held by LeadDev.com on Sept 14, 2021. I believe this is their first conference aimed at Staff+ Engineers. Loosely defined, Staff+ are high-impacting engineers whose success is felt across the company. In other words, these are engineers who creates high leverage. I was able to attend this year’s conference and learned a lot from it. I started this post to write down what resonated with me before I forget about them.

August 29, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-08-29

Just the act of measuring something can change outcomes. I love the reference to Jespen.

https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/

August 22, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 3

A lexer takes the source code, a sequence of characters, and group them into tokens. e.g., it makes the first decision on how to process the strings 100-10, -100-10, and -100--100 into groups. I’m going to call this grouping “tokenization” even though I may be misusing the term.

Tokenizing source code is hard. How should -100--100 be tokenized? Should it be a literal -100 followed by the minus token, followed by another -100?

July 29, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 2

Writing an Interpreter In Go by Thorsten Ball will be my personal introduction to writing an interpreter. I’ve never taken a comp sci class before, so I know nothing about compilers. On a lark, I decided to explore this area now, nearly 20 years after I started to learn computer programming.

If you are interested in this book as well, you might might the AST Explorer a useful companion.

I was told as some point in the past, that compilation can be broken down into four stages:

July 27, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 1

It happened. At the recommendation of https://twitter.com/dgryski, I bought Writing an Interpreter In Go. This will be my next hobby project. It’ll be interesting to see if I ever finish it.

July 25, 2021

Post of the Week 2021-07-25

Back from a long vacation. This week, we have folk wisdom on visual programming

https://drossbucket.com/2021/06/30/hacker-news-folk-wisdom-on-visual-programming/