Tribal golB: Feb 2010

Thank you for sharing your methodology.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

I only know how to do things in the now. I don't know how to do things in the past or the future. When you are helping your friend, you are helping your friend right now.

Past and future are convenient places to park what you don't want to deal with now. In the Tribe, we help each other get clear on what we want to do--and what we don't.

Thank you for sharing.

I wonder about the juxtaposition of your feeling of responsibility for your children's financial well-being and resignation regarding their education.

Thank you for your feedback and encouragement.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

C and Java are very different languages, though they share a similar syntax and some formatting conventions. They are different in their philosophies and the problems they solve. Object orientation is orthogonal to most of these differences.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

C is a very small language, in the small-government sense of a Wild West frontier town. There is very little law enforcement, but what little there is is swift and unappealable. You're either fast or dead. Java is a metropolis with garbage collection and exception-handling hierarchies.

C is an adult language: it assumes you know what you're doing. You're on your own making sure that you stay within the bounds (of an array); you are responsible for your own safety. Java thrives in larger enterprises, where its positive intention is to enforce boundaries between developers of diverse experience and motivation.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

When I write C, I get the feeling like I'm living on the land, growing my own food and killing my own chickens. I have to bring corn to the chickens and take out their manure to the corn field. I have to deal with the blood and the feathers. Java is a supermarket economy, where can I get a ready-to-eat object that implements the CrabStick interface, but I have to look hard to find if the implementation is crab, fish or vegetable.

You may wish to bring your feelings around sizeof(abstraction) / sizeof(problem) to a Tribe meeting.

Thank you for sharing your insights.

I hold that you are perfect just the way you are. In the Tribe, we practice accepting and celebrating people without judging or "fixing" them. Good job accepting yourself!

You enumerate relationships you wish to engage or modify: work, companionship, friendship. You may wish to write down a "snapshot" of how you wish these relationships to turn out. As you clarify your intentions, you may notice uncomfortable feelings come up. You may wish to bring these feelings to the next Tribe meeting.

Thank you for your query.

The audience for the Tribe is the software development community. My experience is that we all have the same emotional issues regardless of vocation, but I focus my Tribe on the field where I'm most familiar with how these issues manifest themselves.

You may wish to bring your feelings around life beyond $JOB_SEARCH to a tribe meeting.

Thank you for doing the work.

"Imperfection" is a judgement. I hold that your struggle is with the judgement, not the imperfection. When you accept your (im)perfections and let go of the judgement, you give up the internal struggle.

Good job becoming aware of your fear. Ironically, by saying you are not willing to admit it, you are admitting it. You may wish to consider the positive intention of your fear.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

$FEAR
has a positive intention

Thank you for sharing your your methodology and inspiring others.

To help me put it in context, I wonder how old your children are now.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

Thank you for your feedback.

I believe that everyone gets exactly what he or she asks for. From this belief, I derive that the type of feedback you give me is exactly the type of feedback I ask for, and I thank you for it.

I wonder if you believe that the inverse of your statement is true: that the article is meaningless to anyone who isn't already a member of the group.

Thank you for the context.

Thank you for the notification.

I notice feeling $SADNESS and $DISAPPOINTMENT as I read your note.

Sadness associates with loss; the Tribe loses when members aren't there. Disappointment associates with breaking commitments.

Thank you for helping me experience these feelings.

Thank you for clarifying your priorities.

In the Tribe, we help each other clarify what we want to achieve. I have no judgement on the choices you make; indeed, I support you in pursuing the strategy you choose. I share with you the feelings that come up for me. I thank you for helping me experience these feelings.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

$SADNESS and $DISAPPOINTMENT
have positive intentions.

You may wish to bring your feelings around $AVOIDING_FEELINGS to a Tribe meeting.

Thank you for your encouragement and your invitation.

I am glad to share my experience with your associates. The Silicon Valley Computer Tribe is an outgrowth of my experience in Ed Seykota's Trading Tribe, and that experience may be particularly relevant to your group. An important lesson I learn from Ed is that everyone gets exactly the results they want, even if part of the result is complaining about the result.

The metaphors you use to describe your methodology can say a lot about your goals. In the Tribe, we help each other clarify our intentions and become aware of the lifestyles we seek, without judging them.

Lifestyle metaphor IMG SRC | CONTEXT	Lifestyle metaphor IMG SRC | CONTEXT
Lifestyle metaphor IMG SRC | CONTEXT	Lifestyle metaphor IMG SRC | CONTEXT
Lifestyle metaphor IMG SRC | CONTEXT	Lifestyle metaphor IMG SRC | CONTEXT

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

Thank you for the offer.

You may wish to bring your feelings around $MISSING_OPPORTUNITIES to a Tribe meeting.

As a side note, "miss bargain" appears to be an imperative. In the Tribe, we don't tell people what to do. Instead, we practice sharing our feelings and accepting feelings others wish to share with us.

It's a little like asking if I miss JATO boosters on a sailboat. I'm not sure where to fit them, and in any case they contradict the nature of the craft.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

The nature of sailing craft is to rely on aerodynamic pressures for propulsion on the surface of the water. The nature of aircraft is to take off the surface of the earth and rely on aerodynamic pressures for flight. The particular capacity of aircraft-nature for light lends itself to augmentation with solid-fuel boosters.

And if you'd shown people Ruby in 1975 and described it as a dialect of Lisp with syntax, no one would have argued with you.

--Paul Graham, Revenge of the Nerds

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

The nature of Ruby is to build abstractions around objects that send messages to each other at runtime. The surface syntax lets you omit most punctuation and defines literal notations for more classes than some languages ship with. The combination of permissive syntax and runtime-message-passing model lets you emulate many different syntactic conventions, from infix arithmetic to key-value pairs. Ruby mixes syntax, calling semantics, object model and namespaces in a most magical way, and most of the time, the combination produces surprisingly little surprise.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

The nature of Lisp is to build abstractions out of explicit parse trees. Lisp separates reading textual source code from compiling syntactic forms. Syntactic forms, rather than syntactic sugar, are a first-class datatype in Lisp. Macros are functions that operate on them. The particular capacity of Lisp-nature to manipulate syntactic forms lends itself to augmentation with common-lisp:defmacros.

In the Tribe, we celebrate people, vehicles and languages just the way they are. You may wish to bring your feelings around $FAVORITE_LANGUAGE to a Tribe meeting.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

Thank you for sharing your plan.

The metaphors you use
to describe your associates
can say a lot
about the type of relationships
you seek.

Thank you for the link.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

One of the symptoms the page describes is Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

The positive intention of $ANGER is boundary management. If you are willing to experience anger and set boundaries, you are less likely to display temper of physical fights. Ironically, most Borderline Personality descriptions note poor boundary-management skills.

A blurb at the bottom of your page says, "75% [of those diagnosed with BPD] have been physically or sexually abused." I wonder if that is your family's experience.

Thank you for the link and image.

With enough thrust, even sailboats fly.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

Thank you for cancelling this morning's meeting.

You may wish to bring your feelings about $CONFLICT and $LAST_MINUTE_SCHEDULING to a Tribe meeting.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and inspiring others.

Thank you for your note. I wonder what purpose the action which you request might serve, especially for me.

"When I was very young and trying hard to impress people, I wrote a foolish letter to Richard Harding Davis, an author who once loomed large on the literary horizon of America. I was preparing a magazine article about authors; and I asked Davis to tell me about his method of work. A few weeks earlier, I had received a letter from someone with this notation at the bottom: 'Dictated but not read.' I was quite impressed. I felt the writer must be very big and busy and important. I wasn't the slightest bit busy; but I was eager to make an impression on Richard Harding Davis so I ended my short note with the words: 'Dictated but not read.'

"He never troubled to answer the letter. He simply returned it to me with this scribbled across the bottom: 'Your bad manners are exceeded only by your bad manners.'"

--Dale Carnegie, 1936

You may wish to bring your feelings around how to $MAKE_FRIENDS && $INFLUENCE_PEOPLE to a Tribe meeting.

Thank you for sharing what you don't know. Maybe abuse is more common than we are willing to accept.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

"In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud was getting so many reports of incest from daughters of respected, middle-class Viennese families that he groundlessly decided they couldn't all be true. To explain their frequency, he concluded that the events occurred mostly in his patients' imaginations."

--Susan Forward, Toxic Parents

You may wish to bring to a Tribe meeting the feelings that stand between you and talking to your wife about childhood memories.

Thank you for the booklet offer--I am emailing you my address.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

Thank you for your feedback. The essay is for anyone who wishes to profit by Tribe work, including engineers and family members.

In the Tribe, we encourage each other to experience our emotions in whatever form they come. For instance, if we notice a member tapping his foot, or biting her fingernails, or making a fist, we encourage them to go deeper into that physical form. My experience is that if you allow yourself to develop a form that you typically block, you release a blockage around an emotion that associates with that form. You may or may not have a name for that emotion.

Engineers, as a rule, are very much in touch with their conscious minds. Most of the Tribe's work is in supporting engineers who venture into unfamiliar emotional territory. Verbalization involves conscious thought and as such can interfere with an emotional experience.

You may wish to bring your feelings around $FORMAL_PROCESS to a Tribe meeting.

I once ask a wise man for advice on acquiring a trait I lack. He tells me, "You find someone who has what you want, and do what he tells you." I am grateful for this opportunity to learn from you.

Thank you for challenging me to clarify the attributes I seek in a job.

• I like solving real problems for real people.
• I like to show people ways of working outside the box.
• I like to put my technical expertise to use.
• I like to support people and receive support from them.
• I like being there for my family.

Thank you for your continuing support and probing.

Your questions are taking me far longer to respond to than I imagine when I first read them. As I consider the options you list, I notice some pretty strong feelings come up. Thank you for helping me get closer to these emotions.

IMG SRC | CONTEXT

Thank you for your interest in my transmitter. You can see this thread for my source of information on the serial protocol LP4DSM and LP5DSM transmitters use internally to communicate to their RF decks. They use 0-3.3V, 125000bps, 8N1. Different revisions of the firmware have different packet sequences for entering receiver binding mode. You may wish to monitor your transmitter's startup sequence before you take it apart to salvage the RF deck.

I make the C source for my transmitter available under GPL. The schematic is in hardware.h as an ASCII art diagram. I use an ATmega644 uC. This thread has more information about my transmitter.

Thank you for your continuing support. Thank you for your offer to talk through the issues--I very much like to do that. Here's what I have so far:

I like to solve software and relationship problems. Most of my experience is in solving nominally software problems. My observation is that most of them boil down to clarifying intentions. It's easy to write software when you are clear on what you want it to do--getting this clarity is the hard part. Most software involves multiple people, customers, library vendors, etc. Clarifying how you want these relationships to turn out is often key to getting clarity on the software goals. I like to help people get this clarity.

I admire consultants like C. N. Parkinson. I also notice that I have a strong judgement on being a "consultant" or "boss." I seem to have a notion that anyone who doesn't till soil or shovel coal is a parasite. I want to take this notion to the next Tribe meeting.

Image from Parkinson's Big Business. Caption reads: "The employer needs you, you don't need him." A French communist poster which appeared during the Paris riots of May 1968.

My specific technical expertise is in mapping abstractions. I have a knack for building mental models or different people's realities. I have a knack for describing, without judgement, the attributes of a system in a way that another system can understand. Earlier in my career, when I focus on designing SQL tables or Java class hierarchies, I call this knack "data modelling."

I like to associate with people who want supportive relationships with me. I want all my associations to be supportive, regardless of the formal configuration of the relationship. I recall building supportive relationships with peers, subordinates, customers, vendors. I recall a harder time building supportive relationships with bosses--thank you for helping me notice an area I can work on.

I want to make sure I provide financial stability for my family. I want my daughter to know she can rely on me for support--this entails a predictable travel schedule. I prefer personal meetings to phone and email with colleagues--and even more so with my wife and daughter.