Aaron Longwell, Scott Graves and Judah McAuley are back for the final installment of this two-part episode of the 7CTO Studio Podcast. Aaron is the Software Development Manager at Serverless, Scott is the CTO at Reps and Co, as well as a Founding Partner at Scale Tech Consulting, and Judah is the Associate Director at Tinuiti. This week, they continue their conversation about degeneracy and its relationship to redundancy.

Here are some ideas you’ll hear them explore:

It usually takes a lot of waste to get to the optimal setup.

The smaller the piece of the system, the more precise you need to be. As you zoom out, you can be more tolerant of inefficiency.

Dial in the parts of the system that are stable; focus your adaptability on the areas that are subject to change.

How is the energy in your team best applied? “The thing I've learned the most in managing teams the last couple of years, is to leave lots of slack… leave room for having the energy to think about and try different things.”

Darwin originally theorized evolution as descent with modification and differential survival. They discuss what is similar in software development, and what might be missing. 

How Deming’s generative organizational principles apply to building software development teams: “In a good generative culture the complexity will naturally evolve.”

Is it wrong to piggyback off other systems to solve degeneracy?

“Human engineers make progress all the time by looking at the solutions that evolution has come up with.” But is that an effective model to follow? They discuss the possibilities and implications. 

“Unless we allow for those emergent phenomena we're never going to get true complexity.”


Resources
Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn | Twitter
Serverless

Scott Graves | LinkedIn
Scale Tech Consulting 

Judah McAuley | LinkedIn 
Tinuiti 

Gang of Four Design Patterns