Hello!
Lovely to welcome you to the first issue of Nerdful Mind. You will receive a weekly curation of articles around mindfulness, neuroscience, and software engineering principles.
For me, all three areas are closely tied together. Mindfulness leads to us being in the present moment, more compassionate, and ultimately more content. Software engineering is a social activity. Code is the algorithmic description of a problem, and we communicate our mental model of this problem with our coworkers via this code. Therefore, if we understand better how our brains work, we can improve the way others understand our algorithmic model. Finally, some general software engineering principles emerged over the past years and decades. In this newsletter, I want to take a closer look at what these principles are and how we can practically apply them to our projects.
Reading Recommendations
Rethinking Visual Programming with Go · divan's blog
Why code might not be the best way to share our mental problem models with our peers, and how visualising Go programs might help us with this.
Differences between deep neural networks and human perception | MIT NewsMIT researchers have discovered that invariances in image and speech learned by neural networks are different from the invariances learned by human perceptual systems. Stimuli that sound or look like gibberish to humans are indistinguishable from naturalistic stimuli to deep networks.
Where is the complexity? - Coding the Architecture
Advnaced software is always an abstraction of our more complex world. And to achieve certain things, there always must be complexity somewhere in the program. As programmers we often move complexity from one part of the program to another, but to produce understandable and maintainable software we need to be aware where to put the complexity.
End note
When this was interesting to you, there might be someone you know who will also like this. Please consider forwarding this mail to that person.
Have a great week
Simon
P.S.: If you found an article you think others might like and that fits this newsletter, I'd love it if you write me an email.