Time For An Exciting Career In Electronics

Monday, November 3, 2003

Depending on how you look at it, what I’m best at in the whole world has either become completely unnecessary or incredibly easy. The skill that I spent most of the last 10 years learning was to look at a group of types, APIs, reference docs, headers, source code, etc., distill it down to a set of architectural intentions and then to weave a story through the whole thing to make sense of it for developers that weren’t able to glean the intensions themselves (most often because they had real jobs). I call this exhaustive search for intention officially at an end. I’m no longer needed except as a gatherer for those not yet facile in RSS aggregators (which, luckily for me, is still a large number : ).

Blogs like Chris’s, Scott’s and Raymond’s go way beyond the “what” that docs and web sites and even mailing lists/newsgroups/web forums have typically stuck with and gone right into the “why.” And not only that, but Chris is actually taking that next step on his blog. In the old days, before my favorite technology company became so damn open, if I wanted to comment on something, I had to painstakingly track down the right people at Microsoft, make friends with them (which first demanded that I learn social skills) and then convince them that someone outside of MS might actually have something intelligent and useful to say. This often involved years of stalking ’softies in mailing lists and conference halls and now Chris is letting anyone give him feedback to which he actually listens!

What use a hack like me that doesn’t invent something, but merely figures out how existing things work so that I can tell someone about it if the guy that invents it does that part, too?!? I wonder if there are slots left in the vocational technical school near my house…