The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Chapter 34. The Reveal

You’re building...something.

The whiteboards are covered with multicolored, indecipherable flowcharts; there are 16 empty coffee cups on your table; and both flat-panel monitors are covered with code. Your plant is dead. Again. It is at this moment that you discover the one thing about the thing you are building, the one feature that, when your users see it, will help them fully understand what you have been building.

This is the Reveal.

The Reveal is the other half of the Holy Shit. You, the developer, create the big idea—the Reveal—and when the idea is discovered by your users, when they recognize the magnitude, they literally say, “Holy Shit.”

A Reveal is a contradiction, and it’s this contradiction that gives the Holy Shit legs. The contradiction lies in the Reveal’s deceptive simplicity. It’s the construction of a very simple idea from previously incoherent complexity. This is how it slips so easily into the mind of the consumer. It’s a single word or image that completely sums up what was only recently described by a book, an application, or an entire college degree. The amount of unspoken information contained in a good Reveal is staggering, and that is why, when we see it, we say, “Holy Shit.”

In a Reveal, you have artfully and simply described the complicated; and while I know there is the taste of excitement when you discover the Reveal after that 16th cup of coffee, you haven’t proven it yet. It needs testing; it needs definition...

It needs a ...