August marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first volume of the Fighting Fantasy series which combined elements of table-top roleplaying games and Choose Your Own Adventure style books.

Firetop Mountain is notorious for its maze. I spent many hours as a child trying to map that maze and somehow fluked my way out of it. I’ve also “played” Firetop Mountain with both of my children. My son gave up in the maze. My daughter and I got through it and even killed the Warlock, but didn’t get any treasure. I think I put them off RPGs for life.

What has this got to do with programming or continuous improvement or engineering management? Good question! I’ll get to the point.

I follow Rands’s advice in Bored People Quit: “don’t forget what it’s like to build a thing.” So I’ll try to spend some time building little things with different tools, either learning something new or improving and building on what I already know.

I’ve been curious about the Twine, a tool for making interactive fiction. How complex a gamecan you make? How hard is it to do something more than just Choose Your Own Adventure style games? I decided to have a crack at implementing the combat found in Firetop Mountain.

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Every Monday I’ll try and post links to articles or videos I’ve found interesting and useful. Today’s post is mostly about explaining things.

Dave Farley reviews Team Topologies.

Team Topologies is important, and adds a significant piece to the jigsaw puzzle of how to build great software.

Simon Willison asks GTP-3 to explain code and finds it to be “shockingly effective”. Willison’s examples include Python, Javascript, creating tables and querying them with SQL, a config file, and mathematical equations. If you’ve ever looked at your own code and wondered “what was I thinking?”, AI might be able to tell you.

That said, Willison notes that GPT-3 doesn’t actually “know” anything, it’s just really good at looking like it does, and we should keep that in mind before asking GPT-3 something like “which is better?”

Once again, I’m reminded that tools like GPT-3 should be classified in the “bicycles for the mind” category. You still have to know how to pedal!

They’re fantastic tools for thinking, but to actually use their output effectively requires VERY deep knowledge—both of the subject matter in question, and of the way that the AI tools themselves work.

Also Simon Willison in the b3ta newsletter:

Using these AIs feels more like spellcasting than programming: no-one, not even the creators, fully understands how they work or what they can do and you get better at them by accumulating weird new incantations that might lead to better results. Or unleash demons if you type something wrong.

And speaking of explaining things, Julia Evans has some excellent advice on how to avoid confusing folks when you’re trying to explain technical things.

[…]knowing that I’m likely to accidentally do these things makes it easier for me to avoid them, and it makes me more receptive to critique when people point out issues with my writing (“Julia, this is assuming a lot of knowledge that I don’t have!“).

Being aware of these patterns also helps me when reading a confusing explanation: “oh, I’m not confused by this explanation because I’m stupid, I’m confused because it’s introduced 6 new-to-me concepts and it hasn’t explained what any of them is yet!“.

Every Friday I post a video related to one of the themes of this site. This week it’s a talk by Daniel Na about pushing through organisational friction to get important work done.

What is organisational friction? Daniel’s description says it best:

As a senior-level engineering leader, experience tells you things could be better. You see the gaps. If only the company adopted policy A or dumped technology B, everyone would benefit. But there’s so much inertia. The company has always used B. You are frustrated. Can you actually make a difference? Yes. You are encountering organizational friction, and learning to identify, accept and push through friction is a key skill of engineering leaders.

The slides for the talk are on Daniel Na’s website.

This collection of books has helped me understand how to be a software engineering manager. They cover the complexity and nuance of middle management in the software development space. There are technical books, people management books, books on planning and strategy. I have found value in all of them and recommend them to anyone who is or wants to be an engineering manager.

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Every Friday I post a video related to one of the themes of this site. This week it’s a dive into the how the first edition of the legendary Civilization series of games was made.

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley talk about how they made Civilization, including design decisions, technical trade-offs, and why the game’s version of Ghandi had such a bad temper.