Posts on Ben Scofield

Questions There are a few questions I’m particularly invested in right now: How should we treat “domains” when investigating expertise?

If you’re not reading Cedric Chin’s Commoncog essays, you’re missing out.

Another brick in the usefulness of the graph model of knowledge: back in the 80s, I played various Infocom games – essentially, interactive …

Students struggle more in classes where they have less background knowledge of the subject.

Some time ago, I was reading a book about the history of jazz in China, and something about it put me off.

I have a vision of a wonderful future.

One of the reasons researchers focus on experts instead of expertise is that it seems easier to find the one than the other — you can look …

Ragtag partners with Insightus to protect North Carolina voters

One of the guiding principles of the Perl programming language is TMTOWTDI — there’s more than one way to do it (where “it” is “pretty much …

The Winter Olympics are on!

I had so much fun doing my Reading and Podcast years in review for 2017 that I’ve decided to do more frequent look-backs this year.

One of the (many) things that makes research on the highest levels of expertise challenging is that — by definition — there aren’t that many …

So, my last few posts started to describe a theory of expertise as something like: the set of factors acquired over time that help someone …

I had a lot of fun doing my post about my reading for the past year , so I figured I’d take a shot at doing something similar for my podcast …

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts — three years, to be exact — but I had a few goals going into this year that I wanted …

So, in my last post I defined expertise as the set of acquired factors that contribute to success in a domain, and waved my hands at …

If we’re talking about “expertise” instead of “experts,” it’s only natural to wonder what “expertise” actually is.

I’m doing a deep dive into the research on expertise (or, maybe more accurately, continuing to dive into that research — it’s been something …

I’m flying back from Nordic Ruby (my first conference talk in three years; my last one was at Nordic Ruby, too, which made for a lovely …

I had a lot of fun writing up my year in reading last year, so I thought I’d do it again for 2014.

It’s about a month and a half until my 10th wedding anniversary, and I’ve been reflecting on how I was feeling before I got married.

Note: I don’t have any special insight into the business arrangements here; I haven’t been paying as much attention to the comics industry …

I am a strong believer in the value of a good postmortem after a customer-affecting incident — and after internal incidents, and after …

I’m no fan of Nassim Taleb (of black swan, antifragility, and needing-an-editor fame), but I forced myself to finish his last book …

I’ve been using Goodreads reliably this year to track my reading (well, the book and graphic novel portions of my reading).

I just listened to the November 21st episode of the Freakonomics podcast , on what economists call “spontaneous order .”

Ernie and I are going through many of the same experiences right now, so his post on how interviews are broken resonated with me.

I have a problem: every time I open up an application that has a contact list, I find something confusing or frustrating.

Oh hey, I’m unemployed again (this time was, sadly, involuntary – my company shut down).

In my post on flexible infrastructures, I mentioned in passing that I was managing my ops work with Ansible rather than the more traditional …

I’ve been having a lot of fun over the past couple of weeks shading into the ops side of things – I’ve been experimenting with an …

When GitHub goes down, you can almost hear the wailing in the streets.

Imagine, if you will, a database table with your average, everyday foreign key.

I’m in Sweden at the moment, taking part in an amazing Nordic Ruby conference.

We just wrapped the 2013 edition of RailsConf, and I’m both exhausted and excited.

I’m taking advantage of being funemployed by taking a few online courses, including Dan Ariely’s A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior …

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my upcoming funemployment (which has since begun).

I’m at Monitorama this week; it’s been a great conference, but a weird one for me.

First off: thank you to everyone who sent their thoughts and well-wishes.

I’ve gotten into a really bad habit when it comes to my work: every job in software development I’ve ever had has essentially been an …

I've worked remotely to a greater or lesser extent for three or four years now -- ranging from working from home a few days a week to being …

My friend Justin Gehtland tweet this a bit ago: At its root, every problem is a *people* problem, because only people have problems.Without …

Picking up on that "how do I know what I think" quote -- let's start to tie a little bit of this into topics that might be more interesting …

OK, who's heard of Radical Honesty?

Some years ago, I remember hearing about a novel (short story, maybe?)

I was listening to an interview with Dan Ariely on NPR earlier today -- he was talking about topics from his latest book (The Honest Truth …

I've been fascinated by levels of description for as long as I can remember: physics, chemistry, and biology as a kid -- with both expected …

As promised, here's the first installment of my Fractal Design series.

I'm on my way back home after a great Ruby Hoedown in Nashville, where I gave a talk called "Fractal Design."

Oh!