Kay Lack

My name is Kay Lack.

I help people get what they want,

& write about what I want.

K.log: A weekly newsletter of new work, links, and other bits and pieces.
Gary's Lament: An an RPG based on things that happen and people I meet.
Soft Wet: Live essays on arcane and ancient software.
@neoeno: My slightly weird twitter feed.
This blog: Scroll down…

How We Have Come to Think of Ourselves as Victims of Systems, by Douglas Griffin

This essay is the introductory chapter of Douglas Griffin’s book The Emergence of Leadership (2002), from a series of books about complexity theory as applied to leadership. I’m putting it up here so I have a consistent place to point people when I want to recommend it. A widely prevalent way of thinking about leadership and ethics in relation to today’s corporations is epitomized by a popular film genre. These films narrate the struggle of some heroic individual against a large organization.

Labelling Coding Videos Using Tesseract OCR

A proof of concept for extracting test suite passes and failures from a coding video.

Just Enough Structure to Pair Program

A short guide to pairing structure for beginners, describing its purpose and a suggested structure.

Illeris's Three Dimensions: A Tool for Analysing Learning, Motivation and Success

More reasons your curriculum might not be working even if your content is sound.

Illeris's Two Basic Processes of Learning (and why your students are bored and lonely)

You’ve written some great learning material, but people aren’t learning. Even worse, they seem to be getting bored and giving up. Why? Illeris’s framework can help explain the problem.

The Gears of My Childhood, by Seymour Papert

This essay is the foreword to Seymour Papert’s book Mindstorms (1980). There are a few copies kicking around the internet, some mangled, some inaccessible. I’m putting it up here so I have a consistent place to point people when I want to recommend it. Before I was two years old I had developed an intense involvement with automobiles. The names of car parts made up a very substantial portion of my vocabulary: I was particularly proud of knowing about the parts of the transmission system, the gearbox, and most especially the differential.

Learning: the hardest problem in computer science

“How do you know when you’ve learned something?", my senior colleague asks me. After a year in my job of helping people learn, I still haven’t thought enough about this question — and I know it. But I hate hate hate letting on about this fact, so I think for a minute or two (a feature of our company is that we always take as much thinking time as we need) and then I say:

Meat memory management: Why code is hard to read and how to fix it

Imagine your job is to find out what code does and how it does it. How do you go about it? You will undoubtedly draw on vast reserves of knowledge, experience, strategies and rules of thumb. Eventually, by an awe-inspiringly complex orchestration of activities, you will come to an explanation.