interviewed by tangerinpenguin
1) What are you up to musically these days?
The only organized, regular thing is singing in the barony choir. I participate regularly in a musical congregation but usually don't have the chance to lead or innovate. I'm not currently doing anything with folk music or instruments.
2) From the viewpoint of a tech writer, what do you wish more developers knew, or would do differently?
A good tech writer is also a user, a usability advocate, and a coniving tester. So...
3) What, in your opinion, has been the biggest game-changing development in software development in the last five years?
This question is the main reason this reply has been so long in coming.
I'm really bad at the Big Vision Stuff; I don't have a good overview of where the whole field is and is going. I can only answer from my own little corner, so I'm going to give an answer that is almost certainly wrong in the grand scheme. Sorry.
Five years is also hard (presumably you intended that). Most things that came immediately to mind are older than that, or at least had their roots much earlier. I think part of why I struggle with this is that it takes a while to see what really turned out to be game-changing. Faster, multi-core machines were game-changing; IDEs were game-changing; test-driven development might be game-changing; Java generics (and their predecessors, C++ templates) are probably game-changing. But all that stuff is too old for this question. (Ok, not Java generics, but I also said "probably" there.)
So instead, I'll go in a slightly different direction. I think in the last five years we have seen a build-up (pushing past the tipping point) of demand for a new level of interoperability. More and more we are seeing open interfaces for data and services, and we are seeing the expectation that the client code you crafted is a starting point, not the end of the story. This is most obvious on the web, with mash-ups, browser extensions, data services, client-side page rewriting, and RSS feeds (your content is now just data). But I think we're seeing it in other forms too; I think the iPhone might have finally pushed small devices into the mainstream, such that software vendors have to pay attention to them. Yeah, others were there for years before, and what we got from it was a few web sites that understood the small screen and the idea of syncing your data to your desktop machine. I think there are greater expectations now and software providers have to pay attention. All in all, I think this is leading to a "have it your way" approach; the user is increasingly in charge. (Of course we have a long way to go yet.)
4) What's been your most intriguing daf so far?
Of the ones I've posted about, Sotah 12 because it contains so much nifty midrash about Moshe's early years (and things that immediately preceeded his birth, like Paro's decree, Miriam's correction of her father for divorcing her mother, and the deeds of the Egyptian midwives). Of all the ones I've studied, I think Bava Metzia 59, which argues about the source of authority in law. This contains the famous passage where one rabbi calls for miracle after miracle to prove his point, until he is rebuked by the others saying "torah is not in heaven" -- the authority is in men. That's the part everyone knows, but then the gemara goes in a somewhat disturbing direction where one of the rabbis involved is excommunicated; I don't completely understand it yet, but it certainly qualifies as intriguing.
5) Are there any SCA activities you could see yourself doing more often at this point?
Storytelling. Partly because almost anything is more than what I'm doing now, but it's something I'm interested in exploring, especially with the rich tradition of Jewish stories (midrash). Storytelling is portable in a way that the dulcimer isn't, too.
While I know some stories (not as many as I'd like yet, but a start), I don't know a lot yet about telling stories, particularly in a period-appropriate way. There are no SCA teachers accessible to me who are interested in the authencitiy angle, and I'm not interested in doing modern storytelling in the SCA. As a first approximation "imitate Cariadoc" works, but I'm not really sure where to go from there.
The only organized, regular thing is singing in the barony choir. I participate regularly in a musical congregation but usually don't have the chance to lead or innovate. I'm not currently doing anything with folk music or instruments.
2) From the viewpoint of a tech writer, what do you wish more developers knew, or would do differently?
A good tech writer is also a user, a usability advocate, and a coniving tester. So...
- Name things appropriately. Yes, it matters; we're not just being nit-picking word nerds when we push on this.
- Think about publicity levels at the beginning. What makes sense for an internal interface might not make sense for an API. Understand what that means up front; refactoring APIs is a PTIA (and often impractical).
- Document the contract for external eyes and the implementation for internal ones. I see too much javadoc that describes implementation, and that's rarely what was really intended.
- That said, document at all. :-) Look, no one expects perfection, but the time to capture your intent and design is, at latest, when you're writing the code. Not a year later when you finally have a user who wants to understand the patterns you're using.
- Eat your own dogfood. If you're making an API, actually write an application against it. To avoid too much insider knowledge, pair up with someone else so you're using less-familiar code. Ask yourself where the pain points were.
3) What, in your opinion, has been the biggest game-changing development in software development in the last five years?
This question is the main reason this reply has been so long in coming.
I'm really bad at the Big Vision Stuff; I don't have a good overview of where the whole field is and is going. I can only answer from my own little corner, so I'm going to give an answer that is almost certainly wrong in the grand scheme. Sorry.
Five years is also hard (presumably you intended that). Most things that came immediately to mind are older than that, or at least had their roots much earlier. I think part of why I struggle with this is that it takes a while to see what really turned out to be game-changing. Faster, multi-core machines were game-changing; IDEs were game-changing; test-driven development might be game-changing; Java generics (and their predecessors, C++ templates) are probably game-changing. But all that stuff is too old for this question. (Ok, not Java generics, but I also said "probably" there.)
So instead, I'll go in a slightly different direction. I think in the last five years we have seen a build-up (pushing past the tipping point) of demand for a new level of interoperability. More and more we are seeing open interfaces for data and services, and we are seeing the expectation that the client code you crafted is a starting point, not the end of the story. This is most obvious on the web, with mash-ups, browser extensions, data services, client-side page rewriting, and RSS feeds (your content is now just data). But I think we're seeing it in other forms too; I think the iPhone might have finally pushed small devices into the mainstream, such that software vendors have to pay attention to them. Yeah, others were there for years before, and what we got from it was a few web sites that understood the small screen and the idea of syncing your data to your desktop machine. I think there are greater expectations now and software providers have to pay attention. All in all, I think this is leading to a "have it your way" approach; the user is increasingly in charge. (Of course we have a long way to go yet.)
4) What's been your most intriguing daf so far?
Of the ones I've posted about, Sotah 12 because it contains so much nifty midrash about Moshe's early years (and things that immediately preceeded his birth, like Paro's decree, Miriam's correction of her father for divorcing her mother, and the deeds of the Egyptian midwives). Of all the ones I've studied, I think Bava Metzia 59, which argues about the source of authority in law. This contains the famous passage where one rabbi calls for miracle after miracle to prove his point, until he is rebuked by the others saying "torah is not in heaven" -- the authority is in men. That's the part everyone knows, but then the gemara goes in a somewhat disturbing direction where one of the rabbis involved is excommunicated; I don't completely understand it yet, but it certainly qualifies as intriguing.
5) Are there any SCA activities you could see yourself doing more often at this point?
Storytelling. Partly because almost anything is more than what I'm doing now, but it's something I'm interested in exploring, especially with the rich tradition of Jewish stories (midrash). Storytelling is portable in a way that the dulcimer isn't, too.
While I know some stories (not as many as I'd like yet, but a start), I don't know a lot yet about telling stories, particularly in a period-appropriate way. There are no SCA teachers accessible to me who are interested in the authencitiy angle, and I'm not interested in doing modern storytelling in the SCA. As a first approximation "imitate Cariadoc" works, but I'm not really sure where to go from there.