James Tauber's Blog 2004/11/05
The Art of the Dust Jacket
I recently bought a copy of Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start. Great book so far, but one of the first things I noticed was the comment on the back inside flap:
The front jacket was created by Adam Tucker, winner of a design contest sponsored by Guy Kawasaki. Please take off the book jacket to see some of the other entries from his fans on the reverse side.
That's right. The inside of the dust jacket features 70-odd submissions for cover designs. Each of them is completely different. Makes you realise not only how much variation there can be in a book cover but also just how different one's perception of a book can be depending on the cover.
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. But have 70 alternative covers suggested to you and you pretty soon decide which make you want to buy the book and which don't.
For what it's worth, I think Guy picked the right cover in the end.
by jtauber : Created on Nov. 5, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : Categories books : (permalink)
The Key to Successful Technical Discussions
The key to successful technical discussions is precise, unambiguous terminology.
Last night I had a phone meeting with the mValent senior technical team in Boston discussing the design of one component of the next major release of our software. The meeting was focused and progressed us forward tremendously in a common understanding of how the component was going to work. The key, I believe, was a clear vocabulary of terms that I insisted everyone use.
Previously, I'd been talking with another colleague about a physical representation versus a logical representation in our system. The problem was, "logical" was terribly overloaded and sometimes was used to mean just part of what was being called the logical representation. I suggested we use a new term without the word "logical". Because it is the representation surfaced to the user, I proposed "surface representation". So then we had a physical representation and a surface representation. But when talking about the surface representation, we were getting tangled up because different object hierarchies within the surface representation had different characteristics. So I gave each hierarchy type a number. Then we could talk about H1, H2, H3, H4.
So last night, I started the meeting defining what the surface representation was and what H1 thru H4 meant. From then on, the discussion was crystal clear. At one point it looked like there were variations of H4. So we decided to refer to them as H4a and H4b. That way we could talk about the characteristics of H4 in general as well as drill down into the differences between H4a and H4b.
(And yes, jokes were made about the names sounding like US visas).
So often I've found that technical meetings become burdensome when people are arguing about what they think is the same thing but are really two different things. Or are talking about two different things that are really the same. Having unambiguous terms (even if they are silly things like H4b) is a tremendous help in discussions.
Most people at mValent think I'm precise about my terms because of my linguistics background. I'm not sure it's just that. I think my interest in linguistics is correlative rather than causal. Linguistics, like many sciences, is about categorizing phenomena. I think at the core, it's the categorizing that I love. That's clear in my previous post on thinking like a pure mathematician. I've always been fascinated by taxonomies.
I've also had ten years involvement in the standards-writing world including a significant amount of implementation of standards. That alone gives one an appreciation for precise, unambiguous terminology.
Next time you're arguing in a technical meeting and the other person just doesn't seem to "get it", take a step back and both agree on a set of terms to use. It really does work wonders.
by jtauber : Created on Nov. 5, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)