Malignancy

Malignant Genius = Divergent Thinking

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Over a decade ago when I first created this blog, I was thinking of calling it Evil Genius. I knew I also wanted to register the domain to go along with the blog, and of course Evil Genius was long gone. Evil took me to Malign which tool me to Malignant which is where I landed. I liked the way it sounded, “Malignant Genius.” It also fit into my ethos of the time. I was railing against what I called the Super Hero Culture, which I felt was the antithesis of teamwork and collaboration. I wanted to be a disruptor. I wanted to be Lex Luthor. This may seem trivial now but at the time we were having fierce debates over working methodologies. Waterfall vs Agile. Controlling PMOs vs small autonomous teams. They were the empire. We — were the rebellion.

Looking back it seems silly, but that’s how Malignant Genius was born. And while there’s always been a bit of that disruption at play, there’s been another element as well. Call it otherness or alienation. A world view that comes from outside. The original site tagline (which I disliked), “When you think like a genius, think malignant thoughts,” was about encouraging others to look at the world through a different lens. What I was really saying was that I see the world through a different lens.

Not long ago I received a diagnosis of Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD-1). As I’ve been learning what that means, I’ve decided to re-frame Malignant Genius. I wont claim that picking the name was prophetic but it still fits. To make that fit I’m re-framing Malignant Genius to be inclusive of Divergent Thinking. I’ll still be keeping the element of disruption. But I’ll be using this space to chronicle my journey of self discovery and what it means to be neurodiverse. Sometimes it will be small things, like the fact that I still have trouble saying I’m autistic out loud. Other times it’ll be topics like neurodiversity in the workplace.

I’m sharing this for a few reasons. 1) I believe it will help me to write my observations and have a place to look back to as I progress and learn more. 2) I was diagnosed at the age of 53. While there’s a lot of resources for those diagnosed as children or earlier into adulthood, there are fewer references for those diagnosed later. The mask that got me this far is tight and heavy. Maybe sharing my journey might help, or at least entertain, someone else.

Working the Puzzle – Thoughts On Knowledge

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You’re sitting at a card table. There’s a puzzle box in front of you. You open the box and realize that there are not enough pieces to complete the puzzle. You look at the picture on the box and it depicts a vague image of swirling lines. The lines make a series of blurry shapes. An outline of what the puzzle depicts.

As you begin looking through the pieces you find some that go together nicely. You look at the pieces you’ve fit together. Then at the box. The picture on the box has changed. The section you’ve put together is clearer. You seem to have more pieces available then when you started, but you’re running.

Something on the floor catches your eye. Another puzzle piece. You look up and realize you’re in a room full of card tables. Each with a puzzle box. Some with partially put together puzzles. You go to the table by the piece on the floor. You see several pieces you need. You grab them and return to your table. Again the picture on the box has changed. You plug the new pieces in. The picture on the pieces has changed as well. You go back to the second table. The picture on that puzzle has changed as well. You sit down to work on that puzzle for a bit using pieces you’ve brought from the first table.

You walk the room. You sense there’s a pattern. The puzzles closest to each other seem to be related. You move from isle to isle, row to row. The differences become greater from your original puzzle.

You meet someone as you wonder through the tables. They present you a new puzzle piece. It’s one you need. You ask where she found it. “Over there,” as she points to a far away table. You head that way. As you get closer, the puzzle boxes have fewer and fewer pieces. The pictures become more vague, then have almost no image at all. You head back in a direction where the boxes are clearer. You begin building new puzzles. Now there are more pieces in the direction you want to go.

The years go by. You’ve explored many sections of the room. The endless room. You’ve met many others along the way. Worked on puzzles together. Argued about how pieces fit. What the pictures are of.

Recently you’ve begun to believe there’s more to all of it. That the tables themselves are arranged with some meaning. That you need another perspective. To see it all at once. Then you could understand that meaning. Then you could see that the tables themselves are pieces to a much larger puzzle. Perhaps that’s the real purpose to everything. The tables. The room. If you could just see enough of it. Everything would fall into place and make sense. But the room is too big, and you’re vision too limited.

You look down and realize that you need a piece from that very first puzzle you started. When you get to the table you see there are many more pieces than when you left. The picture is more distinct. More recognizable.

You sit down. You work the puzzle.

Personal Brand – Back to Basics

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When I went to work for my current employer I knew they had extreme views on brand protection. There was a line, fuzzy as it was. I thought I could still post about technology without crossing that line. As my job changed this became increasingly more difficult, and about four years ago my already anemic posts dropped to next to nothing.

Earlier this year I began writing and posting again. Even the long gap through Spring into Fall was because I was working on some longer projects. The issue is that none of it has anything to do with my professional life. That has always been the purpose of this site. While I’ve mixed creative and professional, the main thread was always related to my career in technology.

This has all lead me to re-evaluate my personal/professional brand, or lack there of. While I’m still struggling with whether to mix my creative efforts with professional, it’s time to get back to basics. I’m still at the same company, but my work has evolved over time, and I feel I can once again negotiate that fuzzy line.

The Beginning

When I started this site it incubated from some writing I had been doing condemning the superhero culture I saw circa 2005. We celebrated the heroic win when all was lost, when we should have praised those who delivered without issue time and again. It was about the rise of “the villain” as an agent of change. You can see that sentiment reflected in this site, “Malignant Genius: When you think like a genius, think malignant thoughts.”

Fast forward, and some of those old concerns still exist. My company refers to it as the diving catch. Pitching a no hitter is lauded, but forgotten. The diving catch makes the highlight reel. However; we’ve also seen movements such as DevOps, and agile methodologies adapted from manufacturing that focus on fewer defects and better quality. Times have changed and so have I. So where’s a villain to turn?

Moving Forward

There’s a lot of talk about the disruption of technology to move industries forward. This is where I’ll be spending most of my time professionally in the future. While I can’t discuss the tangible work I’ll be doing, I’ll also be helping to define what this means for my team and how we approach the work. It’s this, “disrupt to advance” space that I’m planning on addressing here. Not what the disruptions are, but how do you approach disruption.

I hope folks will find the ideas and topics in this space interesting. Who knows, maybe it’ll lead to a new tag line, “Be the change, think malignant thoughts.”

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If you ask an Architect to shovel $h!7, they’ll build you a $h!7 shoveling machine that shovels 20 lbs of $h!7 a minute.
If you ask an intern to shovel $h!7, they’ll shovel $h!7.

Sometimes you need to move product in mass quantities, in a predictable way.
Sometimes you just need to shovel some $h!7.

Knowing the difference can be the key between success, and needing hip waders.

Communication Surrogates

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Could we use programs to help fill in the gaps of human interaction that take place on line? Communication Surrogates.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts human communication can be complex. It isn’t just the words used, but also body language, the inflection and tone of voice, and where someone focuses when they talk. When you tell someone to, “look me in the eye and say that,” you are searching for confirmation and reassurance. If you’re on the phone talking to someone and you hear them typing away on the computer, do you feel that you have their attention? What if they’re actually listening intently and taking copious notes? The point is that online and over distances there are certain limits on natural human interaction and communication. One way that we have tried to overcome this over the years is through the use of Communication Surrogates. Now I’m sure someone else has already come up with this term, but since I’ve never come across it before I’m going to take the opportunity to give it my own definition.

Communication Surrogate: Any technology or convention intended to communicate emotion or thought; whether intentional or otherwise.

So what are some existing or current Communication Surrogates?

As we work in more distributed environments and with other individuals across distances, human interaction and communication online seems to be traveling down a few interesting, yet different paths. One is focused on bringing personal interaction online. Whether it’s as simple as a video chat, or a more complex form of altered reality, this is about showing the non verbal communication and interaction that takes place in person. Hospitals have done experiments with robots that cary monitors displaying your doctors face, while he might be miles away, or otherwise engaged. The doctor has a control system that allows him to navigate the robot and even to perform some limited long distance interactions with patients and staff.

On the other end of the spectrum is the emoticon. what used to be a quick series of ascii characters that symbolized a smily dace or a wink in text have now become a long list actual graphics that can be embedded into email or online chats. In the movie “Moon” an artificial intelligence uses emoticons on a computer screen to indicate the emotion that the voical program cannot convey.

it can become very challenging to maintain effective communication with teams that are distributed geographically. Are Communication Surrogates a viable supplement to teams in order to help span distances?

Proposition: Can a Communication Surrogates be programmed to evaluate the content of emails (threads included), chats, tweets or other electronic communications, in order to assign a value to the conversation. The Surrogate would monitor the users trends, as well as being trainable. (I won’t get into forward and back propagation systems here.) When you popped into an email chain or chat room you would immediately see a personal indicator to help provide a frame of reference to you. It could be a simple color scale, and the metric might be based on anything from the projected interest level to you, to the emotional volatility of the content and participants involved. Perhaps the indicator might be more complex indicating multiples of these metrics.

Could these Surrogates eventually be intelligent enough to provide information to others in our stead? Imagine if you are writing an email to three people and as you type their Surrogates displayed an indication of how they might react. Honestly I think there’s a long way to go before I would personally trust such an indicator, but it is an intriguing idea.

I find the concept of Communication Surrogates fascinating. How doe we cut through the clutter of the day to day to get to what matters? How do we more effectively communicate to others our true intent and feelings in an electronic medium? Can we eventually reach a state where communicating remotely is truly as effective (or more so) than communicating in person?

The Death of AJAX

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Lately I’ve been working on a few side projects written in node js, and have been using socket.io quite heavily. In fact I made a conscious decision to use sockets exclusively rather than ajax. Now, truth be told, behind the scenes ajax will still be used on any browser that does not support html5 sockets, but the point is that there are no explicit ajax services in server code.

If you listen closely you can hear the death knoll of ajax ringing. The promise of html5 web sockets on the client in combination with server side technologies such as socket.io (node js) and signalR (asp.net), will eventually shift the paradigm of how web pages communicate with back-end servers.

Everyone talks about html5 as a flash and silverlight killer. I believe that we’ll soon start to hear more developers talk about it as an ajax killer as well. Of course this will never be as sensational as the flash/silverlight argument, but will be true all the same.