More from the Cartesian Well. Mmmm, delicious.

Also via Merlin Mann dirtsimple.org

The Courage to do things Simply

In my second professional programming job, I had a really interesting boss. When we had a design meeting, we would all sit around a whiteboard, and as Roger (my boss) threw out things we needed to accomplish, the other programmers and I would propose solutions, and Roger would say, "Really? What if you just did X?", where X was some absurdly, ridiculously, jaw-droppingly simple thing.

Of course, X wouldn't always work; oftentimes one of us would find a hole in his idea. We'd all then try to fix the hole, but at some point the idea started to become too complicated for Roger's taste. "How about Y?" Still ridiculously simple, and tantalizingly close to working.

Oftentimes, he "cheated", by redefining the problem itself to make it a simpler problem to solve, or forcing the problem to fit some existing available solution. We would continue in this vein until the solution was so simple it hardly seemed like any work to actually implement, or it became absolutely clear that the problem would not yield to simplicity. In which case we simply packed it in for the day on trying to solve that problem, and we'd hit it again on another day.

[snip - some very, very beautiful stuff (tracing back to TRS-80 programming for one,) on looking through complexity for the always present threads of simplicity. Sometimes, for a thing to be easy, first it must be hard. Or...]

Sometimes, a minor tweak to a system produces great benefits; the difference of an inch can be the difference, as Twain put it, between "lightning" and "lightning bug". If you compare the complexity of the mainframe financial software that VisiCalc replaced, with the simple spreadsheet that replaced it, well, that's where you'll find that simplicity on the far side of complexity, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Roger, by the way, was not a programmer by trade. He was a teacher, mostly of learning disabled children. Patience, simplicity -- and doing whatever it takes, no matter how absurd -- were his watchwords. I owe him a lot for the things he taught me, but today I especially give thanks for the gift of simplicity, and for the courage to ask "What if we just did X? Would that work? Would it be simpler? What else might we gain?".

Couldn't resist posting that much, but left some of the best bits for you to find.

Quite a flurry of posts today, huh? I'm snowed in with the kids. And deep into an immediate-, and a longer-term project for a client that takes me to some of these sensibilities--stop me if this is too much information--to develop what some derisively call "low-wage workers'; yet, not ironically, ones who are charged with high degrees of responsibility. A valuation-compensation conundrum and a squished-ambition/learned-helplessness loop. Nice, yeah? I think so. Digital Don Quixotes? Nah, windmills are lame. (With the odd "green-power" exception, and "blogging," of course.)