“Code, as a medium, is unlike anything humans have worked with before. You can almost design right into it.”
me, in my Camerata keynote
But not totally, because we always find surprises. Complex systems are always full of surprises. That is their frustration and their beauty.
We live in complex systems. From biology up through cultures and nations and economies, we breathe complexity. And yet in school we learned science as reductive.’
In software, we now have seriously complex systems that we can play with on a time scale that helps us learn. We have incidents we can learn from, with many clues to the real events, to the rich causalities, and sometimes we can trace those back to social pressures in the human half of our software systems. What is more, we can introduce new clues. We can add tracing, and we can make better tools that help the humans (and also provide a trail of what we did). So we have access to complex systems that are (1) malleable and (2) observable.
My work in automating delivery increases that malleability. My speaking about collaborative automation aims to increase observability.
My quest is: as people, let’s create software systems that are complex and malleable and observable enough that we learn how to work with and within complex systems. That we develop instincts and sciences to change systems from the inside, in ways that benefit the whole system as well as ourselves. And that we apply that learning to the systems we live and breathe in: biology, ecology, economy, culture.
That’s my mission as a symmathecist.