Day 9 of #AudioMo and I’ve been on air for @digitalplanet – and I’m reflecting on the importance of context and location, and how to make a space feel different when so many of us are spending so much time in one location.
June 8 – #AudioMo – On Reflection
StandardOn Day 8 of #AudioMo things are a bit pressured as it’s a long work day, but I have the Reflection app to keep me calm, with generative ambient music and imagery courtesy of Peter Chilvers and Brian Eno. Stay safe.
June 7 – #AudioMo – Working Through the Lockdown
StandardThe weft of our daily lives has been unwound for many of us since SARS-COV-2 found its human hosts. Do we take this opportunity to rethink the warp, too, or are we content to weave the fabric on the same pattern.
#AudioMo – June 6 – Reading Frank Ramsay
StandardFor today’s #AudioMo I’m reflecting on a new book I’m reading, Cheryl Misak’s life of the philosopher Frank Ramsay, and why deep reading matters in these turbulent times.
#AudioMo – June 5 – A Public Centric Internet
StandardDay Five of #AudioMo, back on the boat. Another day, another recording, this one is less good quality audio but I hope the ideas are sound as I reflect on the nature of the network we all rely on.
#AudioMo – June 4 – Coffee on Mill Road
StandardDay Four of #AudioMo and I’m outside Relevant Record Cafe on Mill Road with a coffee and a sandwich talking about masks and plugging the new book @GearsForQueers which you *should* read!
#AudioMo – June 3 – Building Social Capital
StandardDay three of #AudioMo and I’m reflecting on the difficulties facing people at the start of their careers in a ‘socially distanced’ world
#AudioMo – Remembering Pixel Palace
StandardToday’s #AudioMo recording finds me on the roof of a boat thinking about cinema and remembering the Pixel Palace at Tyneside Cinema in 2008. As I was recording this Mark Cosgrove (@msc45) was posting his excellent meditation on the same topic – so listen to me, read him, and rethink cinema
#AudioMo – Watering the Garden
StandardPaying off our ecological debt
It’s usually dangerous to draw analogies between computing and any other field except possibly mathematics, because the way we do things in computing is so bounded by technical constraints, business models, and naive modelling assumptions that trying to apply our approach in other domains is either laughably simplistic or clearly unhelpful.
However as I reflect on the state of the world as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to disrupt so much about the lives of so many, it seems that one idea from our profession offers a useful way of thinking about what we are going through.
That idea is ‘technical debt’: the cumulative impact of taking the easy path to delivering a solution instead of doing it properly that will one day be repaid, either by redoing the work as bug reports come through, or through lost data, lost effort and lost trust in the software.