Sunday, December 31, 2017
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Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Monday, December 18, 2017
Innovation - How to explain code to someone
Case in point: Home for the holidays, I was asked about recent accomplishments and attempted to explain the process of producing compact visualizations of branched undo/redo histories.
You've gone into the wrong kind of detail. The useful answer generally has the form "X is the general problem that people have which you can relate to in some way from your personal experience. Y is the state of the art. I've improved upon the state of the art in Z."
Thus: "You know how sometimes in Word you type a paragraph, then want to undo it and start again, but you sometimes want to keep a sentence or two from the thing you typed even though you undid it? People usually use copy+paste, if they remember, but it gets hard to keep track and sometimes you accidentally mess things up so you can't redo back to your first draft. You're confused at this stage? -- exactly!
People aren't interested in the technical details of your solution. They're more interested in the general scope of human endeavor, and the conflicts and social dynamics in the research field. So if you meet a researcher or a PhD student, the second question you ask them (after "what's your field?") is "what are the main opposing ideas in the field?"
If you're not advancing the state of the art in any way, and if you're just implementing a solution that someone else has done, again don't talk about the technical details of the implementation. For instance you're doing a back-end database and you're copying some scaling algorithm/implementation from someone else, you can say "Imagine how Amazon must have to process like two hundred million order requests every day? My company also needs to process one hundred million widgets. We're not quite at the same scale as Amazon, but I've been copying some of their techniques too. It's fun. I've learned [incidental social fact about the human endeavor that is software development]".
My day job is doing technical implementation of language features inside a code editor (think autocomplete, signature-help, hover,