Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

  • Annotating Podcasts and Connecting Contextually

    I find stimulating to take voice notes while listening to podcasts. Not only do I highlight, paraphrase and summarize the most relevant parts but I connect immediately with whatever comes to my mind by association or contrast. I am walking, I cannot (or I find uneasy to) check my notes, so the connections are coming from my memory. But the kind of interpretation and connection that I do is particularly satisfying.

    I take notes directly in my real-time voice transcriber. Problem: I am outdoor so the transcription is only 90% good and, in the end, the notes are longer than the podcast duration. I will never find the time to listen back to what I captured, moreover, I should listen carefully to fix all the mistranscribed words.

    I would call that a partial success. I am looking to improve this knowledge capturing workflow because I like how it started, I don’t like how it ends.

    352/365

  • Write for your future, past, and present self

    You are, at the very least, three persons: yourself in the present, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future.

    Leverage on this multiplicity by identifying your three selves as real persons whom you can talk to.

    Yourself in the past

    What can you tell about your past behaviors? What were you thinking when something important happened to you? What can you learn from your past actions? And, what was your past self sending to your future self? That is you, now. What’s the message for you, today? How can you change your behaviors based on what your past self did in the past?

    Yourself in the future

    Your future self will look at you and ask you questions: “what should I do?”, “What are my options?”, “What happened when I did that?”.
    This is your chance, now to provide your thoughts in the hope of helping your future self. What are the things that could be useful in the future? What are the trends you see that could develop for yourself, tomorrow, in one year, in ten years? Write a letter, now, and address it to your future being.

    Yourself in the present

    That’s the person you have available to interact with. What do you need now? Who are you now? Use the present time to reflect, track your feelings, your fears, your desires, your happy moments. Spend some time to express your gratitude for what you have and who you are. Acknowledge your weaknesses, you’ll feel better. Recognize your strength, you’ll be more confident.
    This is the only real-time you can live. The right here and right now moment. There are no other times to live. It’s just imagination. Useful, yes, but only a projection of your mind.

    Multiple identities

    You are never the same, even your multiple past identities are different, you are definitely changing each moment you are alive, in the present, and, therefore, you cannot be but an infinite variability of selves in the future.

    351/365

  • Learning Expands Our Senses

    How can we keep the curiosity active? Playing a musical instrument for the first time can be an exhilarating experience. Discovering the capability of producing the notes of those songs that we love is an unforgettable memory. The nature of those songs change ad well. It’s not anymore just a tune to hum indistinguishably but a precise sequence of dots and lines flying at set heights and with defined depth. It’s an entire new world of senses an sensations. You listen to music with new ears a new sensibility. It’s like being born again.

    Something similar happens when you make an effort to write, draw, paint or build something.

    Learning a new art or craft give us extra dimensions to our lives and makes us deeper, broader and richer.

    Of we could go through the joy of learning while having fun there could be no limit to our happiness.

  • Reflecting on voids and missed opportunities (draft)

    Filling voids.

    Catching up with missed opportunities.

    Superficial impression of order.

    Going to the root causes: why did voids create?

    It’s in the behavior: a sequence of actions leading to order or disorder according to different points of view.

    Side note: using WordPress editor as an outliner. Paragraphs can be easily reorganized by drag-and-drop.

  • Approaching the horizon

    I am trying to imagine myself, about two weeks from now, when I won’t have the daily commitment to write posts like this. I will reflect on how much I struggled to write and publish every day and how I slowly go from super excitement to dull, flat and boring chore. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted a clear and solid trend of growth. More content, more quality, more interactions, more ideas and more willingness to write. The exact opposite happens. That is the underlining message I am trying to decode. If I had to speak with the language of facts, I can only say one thing: I wrote every single day. What about the rest? What did I learn? What did I build? These are the kind of questions it will interesting to ask myself.

    348/365

  • How to decide if to rebuild or adapt a new system

    Before considering rebuilding a solution because old, it’s wise to evaluate the differences between the existing system and the new version to be designed. Even if there are many components with several interdependencies it might be convenient to evaluate a piece-by-piece update rather than scratching everything and starting back from zero.

    How shall we decide if we should redo it from scratch or adapt the existing one?

    Plan to invest a limited amount of time to map the most connected and relevant part of the system to the one to be and see if it is relatively straightforward to translate between the old and the new or if there are too many differences or new pieces or a lot of old pieces to be completely removed.

    If you discover that there is a high ratio of unchanged parts or slightly adapted components versus the novelties you might consider updating and upgrading the old rather than starting from scratch.

    In very complicated systems, if you discover that the update is more convenient than the rebuild you might save a lot of time and resources.

    This is my daily post no. 347.

  • Discovering complexity by writing

    By reflecting on how to do things and how things are done you realize how things are made by many components. And you realize how to do things you need to pass through several steps. Sometimes the path is linear. Some others it is not.

    Writing about a process allows you to understand better how it flows, and why you need to go through step B if you want to reach C, starting from A.

  • Ultimate Testing

    When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

    –Sherlock Holmes

    Testing it, is the last thing you have to do just to confirm the deductions.

  • How to prepare and run a software demo: prompts

    In this post no. 344 I am publishing my notes on Software Presentation.

    Presenting a piece of software is a [[presentation]] so anything applicable to the art and craft of presenting can be applied to software as well.

    [[Presentation]] is a [[communication]] activity so the basics are to be found in this wider field.

    What are the most important things to do and to know to create and deliver an effective and efficient software presentation?

    1. Define who your audience is

    2. Define your audience’s background and their goal. What’s the most important thing they need to get from your presentation?

    3. Define the delivery context: where, when and how is your presentation going to be delivered?

    4. Define the presenters: is it you or a group of presenters? What’s their relationship? How are they sharing tasks and responsibilities?

    5. How much time do you have available for the presentation? Is there going to be a Q&A session?

    6. What media are suitable, accepted, required, requested for the presentation?

    7. What’s the presentation outline?

    8. What’s your final goal you want to achieve with this presentation?

    The software to be presented

    1. What’s the nature of the software to be presented?

    2. What’s the design and development level?

    3. If there are data-based features to demonstrate, what’s the nature of the data? What’s the data model? Is there a database involved? What about the data: is it fake, real or custom made for this presentation?

    Real data vs fake data.

    1. If the data is real, do you have permission to show it outside the scope of the inner workings of the software?

    2. Is there any sensitive information included in the data?

    3. What’s the best data configuration to support the storytelling in the presentation?

    4. Do you have a local backup of the data in case the live server is not working?

    Simulating a user flow vs doing it for real in the software.

    1. Do you have a clearly defined set of stories to show?

    2. Are you using real or test users?

    3. Can you show a prototype, a mockup or a simulation instead of the real software? What are the implications of choosing a development version versus a live one?

    4. Is it required to give access to the software for the attendees? Is there a dedicated and set-up environment for this controlled audience? Is there a developer following the operations and able to intervene in case of urgent needs?

    Covering for features not yet implemented.

    1. Can you show a mocked up user story instead of a prototype?

    2. Do you have clearly identified the prerequisites, the running context, and the outcome of the stories related to the feature you are presenting?

    3. Are you ready to collect feedback by accurately recording all suggestions and critiques?

    4. Do you need to show multiple versions to pick one? How have you organized the sequence and the comparison? Do you need to give handouts or material illustrating complex scenarios or minute details?

  • Macro and Micro

    I’ve found two extremes in my reflections: big moments to think about big things and little moments to think about small things.

    In the top-down approach of big moments, I can face more high-level and philosophical questions concerning mainly the Why and the What.

    In bottom-up moments, when I am focusing on a specific thing I am devoting my attention to the execution of tasks or their thorough explanation.

    Those two extremes create fertile creative tensions between them. By going back and forth between the micro and the macro I have more occasions to make connections and to have a deeper and broader view of things.