It's been a while since I've posted anything related to Health IT Standards here. I have three New Years Resolutions for 2022:
- Don't schedule or accept any meetings on Friday afternoon.
- Focus attention on Patient Administrative Burden (a phrase I read in a response to this recent
rantthread from @HITPolicyWonk). - Do more Deep work and report on it here.
I've been doing a bit of reading (of the non-fiction philosophical variety) lately.
- Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
This is an awesome collection essays about the application of computer algorithms to various aspects of life, and what they have to teach us about the tasks we don't always involve computers in. I think what I enjoyed most about this book was the creative links the authors made between algorithsm (most of which I know well), and everyday tasks and processes. - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
This book endeavors to explain how decisions get made and are influenced by the conscious and unconscious processes in our brains, and the various tendencies that are influenced by our intuitions, the biases that they introduce, and to some degree, methods by which one can eliminate some of those biases from our thinking. - The Most Human Human by Brian Christian
I picked this one up because I've been interested in Artificial Intelligence since early college years, and the Turing test always amused me, and because I enjoyed an earlier book by the same author. There are some interesting musings here that again cross between computing and everyday life. Compared to Algorithms to Live By, this one wasn't quite AS interesting, but a fun read none-the-less. - Deep Work by Cal Newport
I'm still ploughing through this one, but after 3 chapters, I'd heartily recommend it. That's saying something because it's VERY hard to find a book I cannot finish over a weekend, but this one involves that kind of reading. It's deep work to understand deep work. I haven't been doing enough deep work lately, and it makes me sad. Hopefully, I'll learn enough to fix that. - Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
A classic, and one that I recently re-read, a decade + later. I don't fully agree with everything said in this book b/c Robert misses a key point. There's concepts and nuance and a whole language associated with so many programming frameworks, and in many of these, the frameworks are so large that even the best engineer can't keep them all available to them. As part of a team that has a common approach, following the guidelines in this book are valuable. But what the book won't do for teams is enable a new person to join the team without prior experience in the framework and be able to understand the code as written. I recently read through several thousand lines of an application built by a very skilled engineer following the principles in this book, and because I know where to find the right stuff, was eventually able to understand it, but having never used one aspect of that framework in a production environment, found myself lost until I could go do some useful reading. A simple comment describing the design pattern or framework in use would have made the code much easier to understand. Do NOT underestimate the longevity of your code. All too many times in my life I've encountered code where the person who wrote is no longer living, the person who took it over is retired, and basically, there's some grunt who can compile, build and occasionally fix bugs in the code, and the ideas, frameworks, thoughts and standards of two decades ago are completely unknown to the originators. As developers, we live on internet time. What is obvious to us today is forgotten 5 years from now because someone figured out a better way. Be kind to them who have forgotten everything that is in the front of you mind and obvious (to you). Still useful reading, but do so with a critical eye. Like any other concept that is at least a decade old, there's some new thinking that has replaced some of these ideas.