How should programmers share ideas?
Jun. 2nd, 2015 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flowerhackA couple weeks ago, I was reading a pretty excellent paper on internet password research. As I read, found myself becoming vexed. Here was an eminently practical paper, giving very practical suggestions that any web developer could act upon right away... and yet I never would have read the thing at all if I hadn't had a friend in academia who happened to give me a link to it.
What other useful stuff has academia been doing without my noticing, and how can I find out about it?
Like (I suspect) most software engineers, I get my industry news/trends/updates/etc from a smattering of populist-ish sources such as: blogs of programmers I admire, blogs of friends, Hacker News (with reluctance), sometimes Slashdot, that sort of thing. If the password security paper had wanted to spread its ideas via one of those channels, it seems like it'd be pretty doable. Simply extracting the "take-away points" section of that paper into a blog post would make for solid reading, and a link to the full paper could be included for the curious.
I know that I would love it if more academics shared casually-worded summaries of their papers. Even when I'm planning to read the full paper, I'll try to ask someone else "so what's this actually about" before I do. Usually, the on-the-spot, casually-worded summary is more transparent than the abstract, and helps me direct my reading better.
There's also an argument to be made that perhaps software engineers as a whole should really have a source for industry news that doesn't involve upvotes or Randos On The Internet. I would be tremendously curious to hear from engineers in other fields about this—has some other group found a tidy compromise between social news sites and impenetrable academic journals? I suspect this sort of compromise is what the ACM Queue is trying to accomplish, but I only know about the Queue because of, well, another friend in academia. Maybe the Queue just needs a better PR department?
In any case, while not every field seems to be affected by social-industry-news-sharing the same way software is (medicine, for instance, requires that doctors complete X hours of professional development, done via formal exams, classes, and so on), this isn't a problem solely afflicting software engineering, either. I was prompted to write this post after stumbling onto an article about the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog by a handful of legal scholars that apparently has become just as influential as major law journals in shaping US legal thought—arguably moreso, since they can offer faster feedback than the journals can. And as far as I can tell, arXiv has become the "open beta test" for papers in fields like math and astrophysics as well as CS—and I'll sometimes see arXiv posts linked on Facebook or whatnot.
I'd love comments from folks who understand how other fields handle this dilemma, or who have cool ideas I haven't thought of yet!
What other useful stuff has academia been doing without my noticing, and how can I find out about it?
Like (I suspect) most software engineers, I get my industry news/trends/updates/etc from a smattering of populist-ish sources such as: blogs of programmers I admire, blogs of friends, Hacker News (with reluctance), sometimes Slashdot, that sort of thing. If the password security paper had wanted to spread its ideas via one of those channels, it seems like it'd be pretty doable. Simply extracting the "take-away points" section of that paper into a blog post would make for solid reading, and a link to the full paper could be included for the curious.
I know that I would love it if more academics shared casually-worded summaries of their papers. Even when I'm planning to read the full paper, I'll try to ask someone else "so what's this actually about" before I do. Usually, the on-the-spot, casually-worded summary is more transparent than the abstract, and helps me direct my reading better.
There's also an argument to be made that perhaps software engineers as a whole should really have a source for industry news that doesn't involve upvotes or Randos On The Internet. I would be tremendously curious to hear from engineers in other fields about this—has some other group found a tidy compromise between social news sites and impenetrable academic journals? I suspect this sort of compromise is what the ACM Queue is trying to accomplish, but I only know about the Queue because of, well, another friend in academia. Maybe the Queue just needs a better PR department?
In any case, while not every field seems to be affected by social-industry-news-sharing the same way software is (medicine, for instance, requires that doctors complete X hours of professional development, done via formal exams, classes, and so on), this isn't a problem solely afflicting software engineering, either. I was prompted to write this post after stumbling onto an article about the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog by a handful of legal scholars that apparently has become just as influential as major law journals in shaping US legal thought—arguably moreso, since they can offer faster feedback than the journals can. And as far as I can tell, arXiv has become the "open beta test" for papers in fields like math and astrophysics as well as CS—and I'll sometimes see arXiv posts linked on Facebook or whatnot.
I'd love comments from folks who understand how other fields handle this dilemma, or who have cool ideas I haven't thought of yet!
no subject
Date: 2015-06-03 02:08 pm (UTC)http://neverworkintheory.org/ (a blog pointing to recent software engineering research you can use) and Greg Wilson's research curation work in general strike me as good -- you might be interested in his and Jorge Aranda's "reasons people in industry and academia don't talk to each other as much as they should", his "It's Not Theory vs. Practice, It's Two Solitudes" and his talk "Two Solitudes" with a proposal for fixing the problem.
Sarah Mei's list of factors why "Academic research on software engineering has been a decade behind current practice since I've been practicing" may also interest you.
I think other fields that recognize continuing professional development as a need also tend to have guild/licensing requirements (lawyers have the bar, doctors have their boards, electricians and plumbers and mechanical and civil engineers have government-run licensing requirements), and so the same bodies that handle the original certification to practice also serve as leaders for the communities of practice and for continuing-education knowledge dissemination. It seems to me like The Volokh Conspiracy coexists in a kind of symbiosis with the formal legal scholarship and Continuing Legal Education practices, and arXiv coexists in a symbiosis with formal academic publishing, research, and teaching. Since (at least in the US) there is no licensing/certification requirement to work as a software engineer, and so there's no continuing ed requirement, I think that reduces the hunger for thorough and systematic "here's new research stuff you need to know" infrastructure, which means we get our information from gossip and fashion mags and so on. And of course there are other factors, as Greg Wilson discusses.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-22 10:49 am (UTC)Also, re: credentialing: have you seen Michael O. Church's thoughts on why programmers need a profession? I don't really agree with all the ideas in his essay, but the ideas are presented in a really interesting/lively way, and he speculates on "how to handle credentialing without limiting/shutting out self-taught folks" and such.