Anthony Panozzo's Blog

There are numerous attributes that contribute to effective continuous learning and meta-learning, among them:

• where I found something
• how I found it
• who recommended it
• how long ago the information was published
• the context of techniques
• how surprising the information was to me

I contend that this meta-information is actually more valuable than the information itself.

It's helpful to think about these attributes to get higher signal streams of information. When I find that a particular blog or person has interesting content, I listen much more closely to what they have to say. While I don't turn critical thinking off, I don't need to spend as much time considering the source. Links and ideas presented from a trustworthy source tend to be of higher quality. Finding a good source of information makes it much easier to get good information in the future.

Conversely, remembering meta-information allows me to debug and debunk things that I have come in contact with. When I start to disagree with someone whose opinion I previously agreed with, I also think critically about other things that they said or thought. Perhaps there are other views that they held that are also incorrect, and I'm basing my thoughts on this incorrect information. This helps me realize when my mental models need to shift. Everyone has a bias, and I want to make sure that I understand their bias and that is it not harmful to me. If I realize that a much-read software pundit just started selling bug-tracking software, I might start to examine the quality of his articles because of a potential conflict of interest. Similarly, if I understand that the last time I read about something was five years ago and believe my information be out of date, I might preemptively decide to brush up.

Old people are consistently surprised when they hear someone's age ("I can't believe you are ten already! I can still remember when you were born!".) They also express surprise when they realize how long ago it's been since they have done something ("Hmm, now that I think about it, I haven't bowled in fifteen years!") One of my realizations came in the middle of the last decade when I realized that 1997 was not really all that recent. I needed to envision my whole mental timeline.

Had an idea for a for-fun app that regularly informs users of time-based facts. The problem that the app solves is the inability of the mind to consistently simulate the age of things. The app would take salient world events, people's ages and significant personal events (you bought your couch 4 years ago) and periodically remind users of how long it's been since those events occurred. This would allow users to continually shape their awareness of and reflect on the passage of time. It is an established phenomenon that time appears to speed up as one ages so this app could be helpful for dealing with this. Users could even state how surprised they were by certain facts to quantify the normally subjective passage of time.

When I heard GeoCities pages were being squashed, I breathed a sigh of relief. Thankfully, no more terrible banner ads, outdated content, and similar tripe.

But then I thought to myself that there was one page that I looked at recently that was actually pretty good. It was a page detailing the Myers-Briggs type ENTP, which I think most closely resembles my personality type. So I searched for it and pulled the remains from Google cache, and decided to repost it. I corrected some spelling and wording choices, added punctuation, and formatted a bit differently.

The first portion is especially good. No other descriptions on the internet got me nodding my head and laughing in agreement quite as much as this one did. While I don't think that this personality type defines me, it is a useful model to help understand what natural biases and unaware blind spots that I might have, as well as what my natural strengths and talents are. I would recommend doing this if you haven't already.

Enjoy!

ENTP - The Innovator

Profile by Sandra Krebs Hirsch and Jean Kummerow

ENTPs are known for their quest of the novel and complex. They have faith in their ability to improvise and to overcome any challenges that they face. They are highly independent, and value adaptability and innovation. They may be several steps ahead of others in encouraging and valuing change. They hate uninspired routine and resist hierarchical and bureaucratic structures that are not functional. They need freedom for action.

Living

ENTPs are lively children who question established truths and norms, dream and scheme, and develop unusual ways of doing traditional childhood things. The ENTP child is oriented toward doing the unique, which may mean taking risks and outwitting parental, school, and societal authority. They enjoy creating projects and following interests that are unusual and different.

ENTP children enjoy inventing new toys, dances, and languages. Because they are outgoing in their personality style, they often engage other children in their projects and assign them particular roles to play. ENTPs rarely accept things just as they are. They like to test or explore to see new meanings and relationships. When things do not go as they want, they use their ingenuity and cleverness to bring people and situations around to their point of view.

As young adults, when ENTPs choose a career for themselves, they tend to set flexible goals that allow them to incorporate new information and accommodate to new circumstances when they come along. It is hard for ENTPs not to be able to explore the road not taken. Their byword is "keep your options open." Sometimes this flexibility can look like indecision to outsiders.

As adults, ENTPs take advantage of opportunities. Because of their ability to see relationships and connections between seemingly unrelated things, they are able to realize the potential in many things. When they see and opportunity that others have missed, they set action-oriented strategies that allow them the greatest flexibility to achieve the results they want. The worst job for them is working for someone who demands considerable rule following or tries too often to tell or order, rather than make suggestions to the ENTP. Throughout their careers, ENTPs want their work to be enjoyable, with interesting possibilities for applications. Additionally, having their work widely acclaimed and accepted as a unique contribution would be highly gratifying for ENTPs. They also weave in vacations whenever possible and want a flexible work schedule.

I have been interested in seeing how well my blog would do under heavy load. In the back of my mind I was worried about an article getting really popular and taking my blog down, so I decided to see how much load my server could take before it happened. Obviously being too popular is a good problem to have. This experiment was partly just to give myself fewer excuses to create awesome posts. In case you were interested in the same thing, here is what I did.

But please, use your own blog or website to experiment.:)

Select a load-testing tool

I wanted to survive a fairly heavy load, so I was looking for around three responses per second from the server (which amounts to about 10k requests served per hour.) Anything more and I guess I'll have to turn people away. ;)

I looked at some load-testing tools that were available for Ubuntu (my home machine), and siege seemed to be the easiest to install and use. Installing was as simple as:

sudo apt-get install siege

Siege comes with a man page and some basic examples. There are a lot of neat options, but I didn't want to spend too much time on load-testing. One of the best things about this tool is that it tells you that it's "preparing users for battle" and laying siege to the server, which is just fun.

Here are some threads that I've been reading or interested in from the last year or so. I typically find links tweet-worthy, not blog-worthy unless I have significant original thoughts to contribute. If you don't think one link is valuable, the next one will likely be better. Many of these won't be safe for work (although what does that really mean?) I'm not saying that I agree with them. Just think that they are interesting or resounded with me when I read them. This is more than you can probably consume in a day, so feel free to Control-D. I considered breaking it up, but whatever. Consider it your Google Reader for a week. Here goes.

A ton of resources on lean software engineering (I have not specifically investigated these sublinks, but seems like a recent, solid, quality page. I'm pretty sure every other article on this post I've read fully.)

Of course, my favorite article since college: How to Create Wealth

One of my favorite blogs with an interesting topic and high signal post here. Perhaps a bit verbose.

From the same blog, this article parallels some thoughts that I have had recently on children and creating products. Perhaps more about this another time or in person.

And one more for good measure: how to train yourself to spot opportunities