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Musings on computer stuff, and things... and other stuff.

Cisco

Software Defined, Cisco, and DevNet

Read­ing Time: 3 min­utes

It has been said that soft­ware is eat­ing the world. In the world of net­work­ing, how­ev­er, the food has been slow to digest. Net­work engi­neers can be a stodgy bunch, and change is not only slow to come but fast to be blud­geoned angri­ly. If this year’s Cis­co Live con­fer­ence is any indi­ca­tion, how­ev­er, soft­ware, it seems, has start­ed blud­geon­ing back.

Hard­ware has remained king for decades, with the soft­ware oper­at­ing sys­tems tak­ing sec­ond posi­tion in the dance of fea­tures and func­tion­al­i­ty. Pur­chasers of net­work gear would base their deci­sions almost exclu­sive­ly on hard­ware capa­bil­i­ties while accept­ing what­ev­er soft­ware came on the box as just the way things were. Buy speeds and feeds, and you hoped that the soft­ware was up to snuff.

Net­work engi­neers considered–many still consider–that the soft­ware was dif­fi­cult to mas­ter as a badge of hon­or; if you want­ed to call your­self a net­work engi­neer it was not enough to under­stand pro­to­cols and archi­tec­tures, you had to mas­ter painful oper­at­ing sys­tems, arcane syn­tax, and often con­tra­dic­to­ry con­fig­u­ra­tions as well. Indus­tries were born to train and cer­ti­fy engi­neers on net­work oper­at­ing sys­tems, and those engi­neers would then go on with bias­es toward the gear with which they had famil­iar­i­ty. And the cycle of life rolled onward.

With the advent of the hack­neyed soft­ware defined move­ment a few years ago, this all began to slow­ly change. The focus start­ed shift­ing towards the soft­ware as the dri­ver of fea­tures and func­tion­al­i­ty, with the hard­ware increas­ing­ly seen as ful­fill­ing a sup­port­ing role in push­ing data around our insu­lar con­nect­ed worlds. The hard­ware was begin­ning to be seen as good enough so as to not require a par­tic­u­lar badge or pedi­gree. The pur­vey­ors of pedi­greed hard­ware were look­ing at an uncer­tain future.

The soft­ware defined move­ment came from a place of opti­mism, of a legit­i­mate desire to make things bet­ter and to put the world of net­work­ing back on the right tracks that were seen as long ago aban­doned. The way had been lost, and soft­ware defined was going to lead the indus­try out of the dark. Large and estab­lished com­pa­nies, how­ev­er, did not get that way by acci­dent and, though ini­tial­ly slow to react, piv­ot­ed and began to embrace and extend, some would say co-opt, the fledg­ling move­ment. Soon, every­one was lead­ing with soft­ware.

Nowhere was this piv­ot so jar­ring as with Cis­co, a stal­wart, dom­i­nant, mar­ket-lead­ing behe­moth of the net­work­ing equip­ment world. And as with oth­er indus­try shifts before (VoIP, com­put­ing hard­ware), Cis­co quick­ly (or, as quick­ly as they could giv­en their size) adapt­ed them­selves to the new world order. They began rolling out appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­faces, a kind of inside-base­ball way of mak­ing hard­ware do what you want while bypass­ing the tra­di­tion­al, com­pa­ny-writ­ten, soft­ware oper­at­ing sys­tem. They start­ed open­ing up more and more of their hard­ware, and they began con­tribut­ing to var­i­ous open-source soft­ware projects osten­si­bly designed to mar­gin­al­ize their very same hard­ware.

It is in this cli­mate that Cis­co estab­lished their devel­op­er net­work, DevNet, as a place for code-exchange among soft­ware devel­op­ers. They pub­lished more and more APIs, more doc­u­men­ta­tion, and began to dip a prover­bial toe in the waters of more for­mal­ized train­ing, incul­cat­ing engi­neers into the soft­ware defined men­tal­i­ty as seen through Cis­co’s eyes. They start­ed a spe­cial­ized DevNet con­fer­ence called DevNet Cre­ate, and they began bring­ing DevNet wher­ev­er they went. And it grew, and it grew, and it kept grow­ing.

Accord­ing to Cis­co DevNet now has over 500,000 reg­is­tered devel­op­ers, over 38,000 con­tribut­ing com­pa­nies, 72,500 learn­ing labs, and over 60,000 reg­u­lar active users. There are reserv­able sand­box­es for test­ing and devel­op­ment, almost all Cis­co hard­ware as well as Kuber­netes clus­ters, and mul­ti­ple code repos­i­to­ries with code curat­ed exchanges open to any devel­op­ers to use. This entire ecosys­tem is sep­a­rate from Cis­co’s exist­ing D‑Cloud demo envi­ron­ment, and does­n’t depend on any par­tic­u­lar rela­tion­ship with Cis­co or third-par­ty resellers. Those num­bers are impres­sive by any­one’s stan­dards, espe­cial­ly for some­thing which has only exist­ed for a few short years. It tru­ly is an exam­ple of build it and they will come.

This year at the annu­al Cis­co Live con­fer­ence, held in love­ly sum­mer­time Orlan­do, the DevNet por­tion of the show was the most impres­sive piece of the con­fer­ence. And not just the raw num­bers, which were impres­sive on their own, but in the acreage the DevNet zone con­sumed on the World of Solu­tions show floor as well as the excite­ment and buzz sur­round­ing the thing. The most dif­fi­cult class­es and ses­sions to get into were all with­in the DevNet sphere, and it would­n’t sur­prise me if next year’s con­fer­ence saw the DevNet ecosys­tem called out with a sep­a­rate fee struc­ture from the rest of the con­fer­ence.

Cis­co’s evo­lu­tion is just one example–perhaps the biggest–of the changes occur­ring in the net­work­ing indus­try. New busi­ness­es com­ing out of the Val­ley and oth­er places with new notions of what net­work­ing can and should be is one thing, watch­ing the indus­try giants piv­ot in that same direc­tion brings a lev­el of val­i­da­tion that we would be remiss to over­look or dis­count. Change is not just com­ing, it’s already here, and if you’re look­ing at your career think­ing it’s only a fad, you are run­ning out of time to stay ahead of, or even keep up with, the mon­u­men­tal changes still to come.

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Cisco

Non-Generic Tips for Cisco Live

Read­ing Time: 3 min­utes

Edi­tor’s Note: This was writ­ten by my love­ly wife, Jen­nifer Bryson, after a frus­trat­ing few days of read­ing the same hack­neyed advice for con­ven­tion goers.

I have been read­ing a lot of dif­fer­ent tips peo­ple are post­ing for Cis­co Live, and while some of them are great, a lot of them are incred­i­bly gener­ic. Bring com­fort­able shoes? Any­one who has ever been to any sort of con­ven­tion should know that. Bring sun­screen? Um, I would hope most peo­ple know they should bring sun­screen to Flori­da. Bring a portable charg­er? I don’t know a sin­gle self-respect­ing geek who goes any­where with­out one. I decid­ed to add some of my own tips. Keep in mind, I am not one of the geeks, or at least, I am not a com­put­er geek, so when it comes to tips and advice on ses­sions you should read some of the oth­ers. This is my 9th year attend­ing with my hus­band, and so far we have sur­vived each year, so here are my new­bie sur­vival tips:

  1. Say hi. There are a ton of real­ly nice peo­ple, many of whom are CLUS pros, so find a group of peo­ple and get to know them.
  2. While say­ing hi and get­ting to know peo­ple, find out if the peo­ple you are say­ing hi to are on a Twit­ter list or chat group that you can be added to. This is how you will find out where all the fun, infor­mal gath­er­ings are tak­ing place and where your peo­ple are at any giv­en time. @NetworkingNerd has a great Twit­ter list.
  3. Pri­or­i­tize. There is no way you can get to every ses­sion, par­ty, social gath­er­ing, etc. that you want to go to unless you invent a tele­por­ta­tion device and per­fect time trav­el. Sign up or RSVP to every­thing, but choose your must-do events and be will­ing to skip some of the less impor­tant ones. This gives you time to sleep, eat, and nurse your inevitable hang­over.
  4. Hydrate. And I don’t mean with the ample sup­plies of sug­ary, caf­feinat­ed and/or alco­holic bev­er­ages around. Bring a water bot­tle and use it. There are big water cool­ers spread around, but the cups are itsy bit­sy, and all you will find in bot­tles and cans are not good for you (yes, I know you all live on caf­feine and sug­ar, but I am a nurse so I have to throw that in there.)
  5. That leads to food…there are not a whole lot of healthy options offered at the dif­fer­ent events. Look into the restau­rants around the con­ven­tion cen­ter and your hotel if you are inter­est­ed in eat­ing things like veg­eta­bles, and con­sid­er bring­ing easy to car­ry snacks like nuts or pro­tein bars around with you.
  6. Find some down time. This can be hard, because there are always 500 things going on, but you don’t want to col­lapse from exhaus­tion. Even just pulling up a chair or bean bag in the Social Media hub and putting on your head­phones and zon­ing out for a half hour can real­ly help you recharge for lat­er activ­i­ties. Ide­al­ly, try to get away for a bit all togeth­er. Spend an hour by your hotel pool or leave the con­ven­tion cen­ter for lunch.
  7. Yes, CLUS is super casu­al, and most peo­ple will be wear­ing the stan­dard uni­form of car­go shorts or jeans with a t‑shirt, but con­sid­er bring­ing at least one semi-nicer out­fit for some of the par­ties. This is, after all, tech­ni­cal­ly a pro­fes­sion­al con­fer­ence, so it is prob­a­bly best not to com­plete­ly embrace the col­lege cam­pus slack­er look at all times.
  8. Tim­ing. Every­thing from check­ing in, to get­ting from your hotel room to the con­ven­tion cen­ter, to get­ting from one end of the con­ven­tion cen­ter to the oth­er, to get­ting on one of the shut­tle busses to the CAE is going to take longer than you might antic­i­pate. The Orlan­do con­ven­tion cen­ter is gigan­tic, and there are a ton of atten­dees, so plan to leave ear­ly for things, don’t expect you are going to be able to pull off last minute depar­tures, and be pre­pared to wait.
  9. Add on some time for non-CLUS fun. If you have not already done so, try to find some­thing fun to do the day before or after the main show if your trav­el plans per­mit. Orlan­do is theme park cen­tral, and there are a lot of fun non-theme parky things to do too.
  10. Keep in touch with those peo­ple you said hi to after CLUS. This will be my 9th year attend­ing CLUS with my hus­band, and we have made some life-long friends from all across the coun­try over the years. Fol­low the peo­ple you get to know on Twit­ter or Face­book. Plan­ning events for the next CLUS tends to start ear­ly, so it is a great way to get a head start on next year’s events.

Have fun! Hope to meet you there!

 

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Uncategorized

Corporate Jargon and Argle Bargle

Read­ing Time: 3 min­utes

“I think we invent jar­gon because it saves times talk­ing to one-anoth­er.” — John May­nard Smith

Every indus­try has unique jar­gon, and most peo­ple fall, at one time or anoth­er, into using ter­mi­nol­o­gy spe­cif­ic to their domain of exper­tise. Some of the time this is unavoid­able because, well, that’s how those things are defined. Oth­er times, peo­ple use jar­gon as a short­cut and a crutch, avoid­ing plain spo­ken lan­guage in a mis­tak­en belief that they have more impor­tant things to say than they do, or that their words car­ry more weight, or that every­one else knows what the hell they’re on about, a con­clu­sion which is dubi­ous at best.

Which all got me think­ing, how much of this sort of thing real­ly exists in the con­fer­ence room? How much cor­po­rate patois exists for no oth­er rea­son than to fill dead air in an attempt to sound impor­tant? How much is just short­hand for some­thing we can’t be both­ered to explain clear­ly? How much of the aver­age busi­ness meet­ing is padded by the cor­po­rate equiv­a­lent of pub­lic speak­ing’s great neme­sis, the “um?” How much of our day is spent fling­ing mean­ing­less apho­risms on hap­less passers­by who most­ly wish you’d just sent an email instead?

To wit: how many syn­er­gies does a sin­gle pane of glass view of a cross-plat­form frame­work for col­lab­o­ra­tion real­ly need, after all? Is that actu­al­ly a par­a­digm shift? And since when did busi­ness become any­thing oth­er than results-dri­ven? Is cus­tomer delight dif­fer­ent than keep­ing our cus­tomers hap­py? Is it dif­fer­ent than hav­ing a client focus? Are deliv­er­ables some­thing we actu­al­ly deliv­er, or are they just more verb­ified nouns?

What is the big pic­ture, and how is it dif­fer­ent from a small pic­ture? Are table stakes an invest­ment in tables, some­thing with which to kill vam­pires, or are we actu­al­ly talk­ing about table steaks? If it’s the lat­ter, do the veg­e­tar­i­ans mind? Am I just out of the loop, drop­ping the ball, or a vic­tim of some­one mov­ing the goal posts? I was already upset my cheese got moved. I guess I don’t know the game plan.

How many miles must I have trav­eled before I can go the extra mile, and how do I put all of this to bed before I drop the ball? And if I don’t, does the ball go through the goal posts? Are we on the same page? Do I have a line of site on the neg­a­tive optics here? Is an optic more than a noun now; did it become anoth­er vic­tim of wan­ton verb­ifi­ca­tion? Am I just too blind to see?

I’ve always thought low-hang­ing fruit is the most con­ve­nient kind, but is that best prac­tice? Maybe we should take this offline. But if we’re offline why do I care about my band­width? What’s the big pic­ture here? I’m not yet cer­tain, though as I write this on premis­es, I believe I’m devel­op­ing a premise and have added some val­ue.

Rig­or and dis­ci­pline sounds like a BDSM movie title, but maybe that is what leads to cus­tomer delight. We’ll have to drill down on that to find out, espe­cial­ly if it’s your core com­pe­ten­cy. And at the end of the day, what is wrong with the morn­ing? If you dia­log at me can we put this to bed? Is this all action­able, or is it too far out­side the box?

Is a thought leader some­one who cre­ates cen­ters of excel­lence with their abil­i­ty to drill down? Do they find the strate­gic fit, get peo­ple on the same page, or push the enve­lope? How many thought fol­low­ers does a thought leader need before earn­ing that moniker? Will some­one please loop me in? We might be under the gun here and I real­ly need to touch base with our auto­mat­ed glob­al process in order to appear action-ori­ent­ed. We’ll revis­it that lat­er.

Then again, maybe I need to just stay in my swim lane until I’m up to speed, and before I cir­cle back for a client focused win-win with bet­ter optics. I cer­tain­ly don’t want to drop the ball as I push the enve­lope, espe­cial­ly if it’s a strate­gic fit and nobody has moved the goal­posts. I guess you might say that I’m putting a stake in the ground. I’m keep­ing my steak, though; writ­ing all of this argle bar­gle has made me hun­gry.

 

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Uncategorized

Some Thoughts on Cisco Live Orlando, 2018

Read­ing Time: 4 min­utes

Edi­tor’s Note: This is a guest post by my won­der­ful wife, Jen­nifer Bryson

When peo­ple start­ed notic­ing that the Cis­co Live social pass that has been avail­able for at least the past 8 years, prob­a­bly longer, had been replaced by a “par­ty pass” cost­ing near­ly the same amount they were under­stand­ably upset. Not only do a lot of the “geeks” who pay for atten­dance out of their own pock­ets, as opposed to atten­dance being cov­ered as a work expense, choose the social pass, but spous­es attend­ing use them as well. In reply to inquiries on Twit­ter about this, @CiscoLive replied that the “par­ty pass” allow­ing entry only to the CAE was intend­ed for spous­es. Those of us wish­ing to be able to do all that we have been able to do in past years will have to pay about $700 this year. Don’t wor­ry though. That $700 includes gross boxed lunch­es that no one wants to eat, so it is total­ly worth it. As a spouse who has been accom­pa­ny­ing her geek to CLUS each year for near­ly a decade, it is a bit of a slap in the face to learn that Cis­co believes this one par­ty is the only rea­son spous­es attend. This is a very wrong assump­tion.

Peo­ple in the IT indus­try work nut­ty hours, and spend even more hours holed up in their home offices study­ing for var­i­ous things. They also fly around the coun­try, or in some cas­es to oth­er coun­tries, to attend tech con­fer­ences and class­es and such. To those of us mar­ried to these peo­ple, what they do and who they look up to and col­lab­o­rate with in the indus­try are often a com­plete mys­tery. Sure, they rat­tle off things like BRGP and V‑LAN and blah, blah (not even sure if those are cor­rect or if I just made them up, but you get the point), but that is mean­ing­less. Know­ing all of the twit­ter han­dles of peo­ple my hus­band liked and admired was equal­ly use­less as I had no bet­ter idea who they were. Then, one year, my hus­band sug­gest­ed I go to Cis­co Live with him.

That first year was okay. My hus­band had gone the year before, but still did not know very many peo­ple in per­son yet, and there were not real­ly any oth­er spous­es there with the peo­ple he did know. Still, it was good to sort of enter his world for a lit­tle bit and to see him excit­ed about what he was learn­ing and doing. I loved that he got a lit­tle star struck by authors of tech books, and the peo­ple he did know were all pret­ty cool. I decid­ed to go back the next year. There were a cou­ple more spous­es, and Teren knew a lot more peo­ple. That was the year Tom’s Cor­ner, the pre­cur­sor to the Social Media Lounge, was born, and it was real­ly great see­ing my hus­band get to col­lab­o­rate with all of the peo­ple there. Going through the WOS was awe­some. Most of the stuff was mean­ing­less to me, although there were some inter­est­ing things relat­ed to the health­care indus­try that I am a part of, but get­ting to hear about all of the new tech that got my hus­band and our CLUS friends excit­ed was real­ly awe­some. Hav­ing fel­low eye-rolling spous­es to hang out with who under­stand the joys and frus­tra­tions of liv­ing with some­one who lives and breathes tech stuff was also a lot of fun.

Over the years, these bril­liant and tal­ent­ed peo­ple have become our extend­ed fam­i­ly. While my hus­band sees some of them through­out the year, CLUS is the one time we are all usu­al­ly in the same place. More and more peo­ple have brought their spous­es too. Many of us spous­es also schmooze and min­gle with clients or cowork­ers of our geeks, and we net­work right along­side them. We may not attend ses­sions, but we do learn about things too. Yes, we do go to the CAE, but that is hard­ly all we do.

In response to my say­ing basi­cal­ly that on Twit­ter, @CiscoLive replied that restrict­ing the social pass to one par­ty will “improve the event expe­ri­ence for all atten­dees.” No, it won’t. It will not improve the expe­ri­ence for those who bought the pass because they pay for the con­fer­ence them­selves and can’t afford the full pass. It will not improve the expe­ri­ence for those who bring their spous­es, and it will not improve the expe­ri­ence for us spous­es who have been going for many years now. It is a mis­take.

Last year, one of the slo­gans CLUS used was “sum­mer camp for geeks.” It didn’t use to be that way. The first year or two I attend­ed it was like any oth­er indus­try con­fer­ence. Peo­ple just did their own thing, going to ses­sions, maybe meet­ing up with one or two acquain­tances in the evenings for din­ner or drinks. It was when the atten­dees start­ed hang­ing out togeth­er at Tom’s Cor­ner and Ri Ra in the Man­dalay Bay hotel, bring­ing their spous­es, and every­one start­ed becom­ing invest­ed in each other’s lives, that the every­one-thrilled-to-see-each-oth­er, start-of- sum­mer-camp vibes start­ed to form. Tak­ing away our abil­i­ty to par­tic­i­pate in things like the social media events (which, by the way, we were there at the start of) and not allow­ing us to be plus ones at oth­er events will great­ly decrease that “sum­mer camp” feel and return CLUS to just anoth­er indus­try con­fer­ence, no dif­fer­ent than any oth­er.

Am I going this year? Yes. But I don’t know how long I will con­tin­ue to go after this. A lot of the reg­u­lars, peo­ple I love dear­ly and look for­ward to see­ing every year, are skip­ping this year. If the cost keeps dou­bling every cou­ple of years we may not be able to afford it. I tru­ly hope we are all still going to CLUS in the future. If not, we may all have to find a dif­fer­ent sum­mer camp to geek out at each year.

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Career Advice

We Broke I.T. Purchasing

Read­ing Time: 4 min­utes

“What is the dif­fer­ence between uneth­i­cal and eth­i­cal adver­tis­ing? Uneth­i­cal adver­tis­ing uses false­hoods to deceive the pub­lic; eth­i­cal adver­tis­ing uses truth to deceive the pub­lic.” — Vil­h­jal­mur Ste­fans­son

The process by which we in the IT indus­try eval­u­ate and pur­chase new equip­ment is bro­ken. The entire cycle from prod­uct incep­tion through mar­ket­ing, eval­u­a­tion, pur­chase and on to instal­la­tion, is almost as use­ful as snake mit­tens. And as far as I can tell, it’s only get­ting worse.

mar­ket­ing mon­ster

After spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars of research and devel­op­ment mon­ey on the road to a final prod­uct, and need­ing to get to mar­ket as quick­ly as pos­si­ble both to recoup their invest­ment and to release some­thing, or any­thing, com­pa­nies turn to their crack mar­ket­ing depart­ments. For many peo­ple this is regard­ed as a whol­ly bad idea, and a process which should be set to the flame like a witch. How­ev­er, as the peo­ple of this opin­ion are not in charge of any­thing, the world march­es duti­ful­ly onward. Slide decks are made, white papers are writ­ten, hours are spent in the ser­vice of a great prod­uct name, until even­tu­al­ly the baby can be revealed and judged not on its mer­its but on its saleabil­i­ty.

Oth­er com­pa­nies, sens­ing that they are now behind the prover­bial eight-ball because they don’t have the newest Bin­ford 9000, rush to call the new baby ugly while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly trot­ting out their cur­rent prod­uct, now re-brand­ed as being the same as every­one else’s, only bet­ter in every way. Some­times there is a new prod­uct that can be wrapped in the appro­pri­ate lan­guage on launch, oth­er times its an old prod­uct being pol­ished like so many fetid turds. But at least the prod­uct is out, it’s com­pet­ing (maybe), and a mar­ket seg­ment is born.

Of course the ana­lysts must get involved at this point, lest the mass­es be con­fused as to what they should be buy­ing. They eval­u­ate the new prod­uct, the exist­ing prod­ucts with their me-too swag­ger, and any oth­er prod­ucts that might con­ceiv­ably be use­ful in round­ing out a new­ly formed slice of the sil­i­con val­ley dream. Things are stud­ied, ques­tions asked, prod­uct man­agers cajoled into fill­ing out forms and answer­ing ques­tions, chins are scratched, fore­heads rubbed, look­ing glass­es con­sult­ed. Final­ly, charts are made, resplen­dent in their mul­ti-col­ored, impor­tant sound­ing axis and titles, the win­ners and losers laid out for the world to mur­mur over in trade shows all over Las Vegas.

These are all impor­tant process­es and must be fol­lowed very exact­ing­ly. After all, with­out the mar­ke­teers invent­ing a name, or the ana­lysts cat­e­go­riz­ing those cohorts, how can a rea­son­able C‑level exec­u­tive pos­si­bly be expect­ed to be told what they should buy? Charts are very impor­tant here, ven­dor sales peo­ple equal­ly so, and ana­lysts are per­haps the most impor­tant of all. Short­change any of this process and bad things are like­ly to hap­pen; tech­nolo­gies might be eval­u­at­ed on their own mer­its and against the needs of the com­pa­ny instead of what every­one knows to be the cor­rect process, name­ly, buy­ing the best entry in the best cat­e­go­ry of the best ana­lyst’s col­ored charts.

 

*

“Damnit, John­son! Do we have the new foop-splort 52xy‑C port-box
bal­ancer?”

“Um, we could be look­ing into…”

“And what about mov­ing our stuff into the fog bank? Are we fog­ging yet?”

“I…”

*

The staff respon­si­ble for using equip­ment on the net­work, osten­si­bly those for whom the chal­lenges are well known, bear lit­tle respon­si­bil­i­ty for mak­ing a final deci­sion and are well-served by appear­ing to be on board, what­ev­er the final deci­sion. In fact, if they appear as not pay­ing prop­er feal­ty to the pitched tech­nol­o­gy they run the risk of being brand­ed a heretic, a crab­by mal­con­tent only want­i­ng to keep things the way they were in the era of the punch card, some­one to be shunned and hid­den away from any­one reek­ing of impor­tance. For those not inclined toward man­age­ment, and not desirous of being involved in any deci­sions going forward–including lunch orders, types of free drinks in the kitchen, fla­vors of cof­fee, work hours–this is prob­a­bly not a whol­ly bad thing. They’ll grow a beard, grow bit­ter, and even­tu­al­ly be found half deliri­ous clutch­ing a sta­pler.

How­ev­er, for those engi­neers who haven’t quite giv­en up on life, the mar­ket­ing, ana­lyst, and sales machine can be a jug­ger­naut upon which many careers are made. If exec­u­tives are on board, and why would­n’t they be, it’s prob­a­bly best to agree their clothes are quite love­ly thank you very much, or feign only mild con­cern, “I wish that came in blue.”

But, a few mil­lion dol­lars lat­er, and some cold nights search­ing for your soul among the crum­bled dreams of your bro­ken life, a pile of shiny new gear–or soft­ware, licens­es, and bro­ken promises–will arrive upon your doorstep, ready to be inte­grat­ed into what­ev­er remains of your appar­ent­ly old and bust­ed infra­struc­ture. It might not work, or do any­thing use­ful, or even real­ly inte­grate very well at all. But think of it this way, by the time you install it, learn it, and fig­ure out just what you can do with it, a new cat­e­go­ry will have been born and you can start the process all over again. Unless you’ve been hid­den away with your hereti­cal ram­blings and your sta­pler.

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writing

Just Write is Just Right

Read­ing Time: 3 min­utes

I took my daugh­ter and step­son to see one of my favorite authors a cou­ple of days ago. Neil Gaiman also hap­pens to be one of their favorite authors, hav­ing penned a favorite sto­ry, Cora­line, they both share a love for. Con­sid­er­ing that most of my favorite authors have passed away, this was a rare treat for all of us, and we did not come away dis­ap­point­ed.

Mr. Gaiman came out and was imme­di­ate­ly charm­ing and wit­ty, which is not some­thing all authors are, prompt­ing my step­son to observe that if the whole book thing does­n’t work out, he can suc­ceed as a come­di­an. I don’t expect authors to be good at any­thing but writ­ing, and it’s always a nice sur­prise when they are. It’s also nice when any­one can so imme­di­ate­ly grab the atten­tion of a 14-year old teenage boy who spends most of his time buried in video games, YouTube, SnapChat, or some oth­er online endeav­or. That itself was worth the price of admis­sion.

Mr. Gaiman per­formed sev­er­al read­ings of var­i­ous works, all of which were read and enun­ci­at­ed with a qual­i­ty I am sel­dom used to hear­ing from an author, and all of which were incred­i­bly engag­ing. Even works which I had already read were brought to life with a col­or I had not found in my own read­ing. The fact that my 17-year old daugh­ter could be brought near­ly to tears by a short sto­ry was again worth its weight in gold.

Hav­ing said all of that, the most inter­est­ing part of the evening, and why I am writ­ing this, were the audi­ence mem­bers’ ques­tions Mr. Gaiman answered between read­ings of his myr­i­ad col­or­ful works. Ques­tions rang­ing from opin­ions on oth­er authors, to what he thought of Amer­i­cans (Mr. Gaiman is British by birth), to what he thought of being “a nerd-girl’s dream man.” It was his answer to the much-hack­neyed ques­tion of what advice he would give to aspir­ing authors, how­ev­er, which was the most pre­scient.

With a brief pause and a bit of a rue­ful chuck­le, his advice to aspir­ing authors was to “stop aspir­ing.” He went on to elab­o­rate, “write some­thing.” It is sim­ple advice, and pos­si­bly dis­ap­point­ing to those look­ing for some secret sauce to help them under­stand why they have not yet suc­ceed­ed as writ­ers, and yet more dead-on and hon­est than the usu­al advice-filled arti­cles on the sub­ject.

“Just write” might be the go-to expla­na­tion for any num­ber of endeav­ors from fic­tion, to non-fic­tion, or even to soft­ware devel­op­ment. How many of us, the “aspir­ing” writ­ers of the world, spend an inor­di­nate amount of our time try­ing to fig­ure out the secret to suc­cess, all the while post­pon­ing the one thing that might get us where we so long­ing­ly desire to go. Writ­ers of fic­tion need to write, writ­ers of non-fic­tion need to write, and devel­op­ers of software–writers in our own right–need to write.

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion seems to be the birthright of every sort of cre­ative per­son. We are often con­tent, too con­tent, to live with­in our own minds, dream­ing of the things we will write, the things we will cre­ate, the won­ders we will bring forth to an ador­ing world. And yet, to an outsider–everyone who is not us–we have not done any­thing. We are the dream­ers, the weavers of tales, the cre­ators of things, the mak­ers of the worlds that live only with­in our own thoughts.

I am as guilty of this as any­one, and just as capa­ble of hid­ing this truth from myself. I can write entire arti­cles in my head, con­coct soft­ware from whole cloth that will change the world, and some­how be con­tent in the knowl­edge that “I could” even if I do not. That might sat­is­fy us on a super­fi­cial lev­el, but I think that deep down we all know the truth: that we have done noth­ing. Cre­at­ing a thing, and sub­ject­ing it to the crit­i­cism of the light of day and the vagaries of the human con­di­tion takes an immense amount of courage, and it is often eas­i­er to keep our cre­ations as pris­tine and unmo­lest­ed suc­cess­es, if only in our own mind.

Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, as we grow up we must put aside child­ish things, and that means accept­ing the fact that we must com­plete some­thing. We must take what is in our heads, com­mit it to its prop­er form, and let come what may. It may be good, or it may be bad, but it is bet­ter for hav­ing seen the light than any­thing not giv­en form but in the world with­in our own head. Mr. Gaiman may be more cre­ative than some, and less cre­ative than oth­ers, but he has learned the one thing that many of us have for­got­ten, or nev­er learned: that we must stop aspir­ing if we want to see our dreams real­ized. This arti­cle, for instance, could have con­tin­ued to float gen­tly around the aether of my mind, but I stopped aspir­ing and I wrote some­thing, and that was the whole point.

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