Social Glue: Everything I learned about coding from Diego, a Harris's Hawk

Social Glue

Rachel ChalmersIgnition Partners

Harris’s hawk has changed falconry

• Highly intelligent, social raptors• Traditional falconry methods don’t apply• Pack hunters, like wolves, humans,

chimpanzees, dolphins, orcas, lions, dwarf and banded mongooses, hyenas, butcherbirds and three out of four kookaburras– Cooperative breeding– Allomaternal behavior– Inclusive fitness

Collective intelligence

“A female-male cast of Harris's hawks gives the best of both worlds. It is a pleasure to watch the two hawks simultaneously compete to get to the quarry first, then cooperate in catching it. The flying skills of the female and male are complementary -- the aerobatic male frequently forces the quarry to leave cover just as the female closes in at maximum speed to deliver the final powerful stroke.” – Toby Bradshaw, falconer

The Mythical Man-Month

• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

• Complex programming projects cannot be perfectly partitioned into discrete tasks

Edsger Dijkstra

• On the teaching of programming, i.e. on the teaching of thinking

• “Unless the interfaces are indeed sufficiently thin, communications problems become prohibitively severe.”

Breaking up the problem

“Here, however, we see in all its clarity a quite different and more fundamental purpose of modularization, viz. to reduce the total reasoning (irrespective of whether thereafter it will be done by different groups in parallel, or by a single one in succession.)”

Breaking up the problem

• Solving large problems is very hard• Breaking down the problem is itself a problem• But it can be done• Good interfaces make good solutions• Interfaces are cultural as well as technical

Waterfall

Agile

Disaster recovery

Disaster indifference

Proprietary

Open source

On-premise

SaaS

Private IT

Public cloud

Desktop

Mobile

Silos

APIs, services

Collective intelligence

“This “c factor” (the group’s collective intelligence) is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn- taking, and the proportion of females in the group.” – Woolley, Science, October 2010

Social glue

• Code is stored wisdom• Culture allows wisdom to surface from groups• Clean interfaces allow groups to speak with

one voice, reducing communications overheads

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."Jon Postel

Thanks!rachel@ignitionpartners.com