Build a ramp, not a cliff for the reader—by Miu Tsutsui
Martin Fowler occasionally introduces himself as a guy “who is good at
explaining things.” Although this certainly has a touch of British
Understatement™, it also highlights a critically important but rare
skill in IT. Too often technical people either produce an explanation at
such a high level that it is almost meaningless or spew out reams of
technical jargon with no apparent rhyme or reason.
Build a Ramp, Not a Cliff
A team of architects once presented a new hardware and software stack
for high-performance computing to a management steering committee. The
material covered everything from workload management down to storage
hardware. It contrasted vertically integrated stacks like Hadoop and
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) against standalone workload management solutions like Platform Load Sharing Facility (LSF). In one of the comparison slides, “POSIX compliance” jumped out as a selection
criteria. While this may be entirely appropriate, how do you explain
to someone who knows little about filesystems what this means, why it
is important, and what the ramifications are?
We often refer to learning curves as steep, meaning it is tough for newcomers to become familiar with, or “ramp up” on, a new system or tool. I tend to assume my executive audience ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
