botWerks

yesterday, i horked up something in my .emacs file which broke the manner in which my on-the-fly spell checker (flyspell) worked inside of emacs. if i’d been thinking i would have had the whole thing under the current version control system. but somehow, this portion of the home directory tree missed out on that.

setting aside that bit of silliness on my part, i noticed something. while i was grinding out real work and answering emails between the discovery of the breakage and repair, i discovered that my work flow had developed a dependency on having an automated “checker” come back and clean up after me.

now, i’ve had this realization in the world of MSFT Word and other packages with built-in spell checkers, but clean-up of typos was one of those things that i did in a batch manner, my fingers hadn’t actually adapted to the use of an integrated spell checking function like they had in my normal work tools. (read, emacs)

i’ve always had some level of pride in having relatively decent spelling skills. but the power of ctr-; and _knowing_ what your tool would do, has had an interesting impact on my productivity. one that i’m not entirely convinced is for the best in the long term.

this is definitely one of the more interesting slide decks i’ve run across in the past few months.  it’s been making the rounds as of late.  there are some refreshingly capitalist notions of how attract strong employees and to drive business direction.  however, i find their assertions re: scale of an organization interesting.  last i checked netflix was a relatively small company with ~400-500 employees.  a good chunk of their staff i suspect is associated with the packaging and handling of the DVD content and as they move online with more content they’re going to improve the efficiency (in terms of revenue / head).  but i find myself wondering how many of these principles apply to large organizations with lots of business units and departments within business units.

is there a practical limit to how well these principles scale? or do you simply look to subdivide the application of these principles to new and smaller contexts?  as corporations grow, a level of process emerges or you have chaos.  or at least that’s what i’ve been told. i’m quietly reserving judgment.