Thoughts on Learning

I have collected these quotes while at Maersk learning software development. Perhaps they are of little use, but many have helped me apreciate learning.

Troy asked me to think about the process which leads to successful problem solving. Certainly a difficult concept to define, but maybe summed up by the phrase I enjoy saying, “be creative, be innovative.”

Being creative and innovative is certainly easier said than done; however, the best path I’ve found to this is having a wiliness to learn, and be willing to learn from the most unexpected places.

• Regarding Buckminster Fuller -- The first prerequisite for continued education is a receptiveness to one's environment. Calluses worn through a faulty environment dull the learning senses. We must educate ourselves to do more with less in creating a suitable environment. Vicious circle? Nonsense: Fuller tells us that no curve can overlap with itself! This is an upward spiral into which Fuller propels us. There is no alternative.

• "To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy." Jim Valvano

• Demonstrate an attitude that leads to competence -- be an active partner in developing a solution.

• "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." Rich Cook

• It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.
  Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990)

• Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
  Putt's Law

• The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
  Nathaniel Borenstein (1957 - )

• A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor. Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)

• A supervisor must be willing to look their employee in the eye for a successful relationship.

• Moore's Law -- Another, sometimes misunderstood, point is that exponentially improved hardware does not necessarily imply exponentially improved software to go with it. The productivity of software developers most assuredly does not increase exponentially with the improvement in hardware, but by most measures has increased only slowly and fitfully over the decades.

• To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
  Farmers' Almanac, 1978

• "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…" Jack Kerouac

• One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

• So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. Brenda Ueland