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I understand your frustration but I disagree. You should try explaining your work to a non-programmer. It's a challenge to 'dumb it down' and you only succeed i

I understand your frustration but I disagree. You should try explaining your work to a non-programmer. It's a challenge to 'dumb it down' and you only succeed if you truly understand your work. Sometimes the non-programmer is successful in suggesting a very possible solution which turns out to be a fun conversation.

fatman13gg 10y ago
Like Feynman said in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM, when trying to explain how magnate works to the reporter. I think it's hard for someone else to actually understand the problem when you two are not in the same knowledge framework. Cause then she/he will be perpetually asking the why and how question and being not satisfied. edited.
- asadlionpk 10y ago
  amazing video!
- justinhj 10y ago
  Nevertheless Feynman made many successful lectures to the public and undergraduate students and was able to explain things as complex as quantum electrodynamics in layman terms. Recently I tried explaining how Akka clusters work and what partitions are to a completely non-technical colleague. Not only was I able to explain the parts I understand well in a way that she understood, I also quickly found out there are parts that I don't understand at all.
ubertaco 10y ago
Yeah, I find that when I take the "implementation details" out and explain the general problem, my fiancée both loves hearing about how my day went, and sometimes has good ideas how to solve it (and sometimes she doesn't, but the process of distilling the "essence" of the problem helps me to see the problem myself more clearly). By stripping out the technical details, I explained to someone who thinks that the monitor is the computer and the tower is the "CPU" what the Maybe monad is and why it's needed. That being said, I also find that some problems are strictly-technical in nature, and can't really be distilled to anything informative (e.g. Ionic's livereload dev server randomly serves up an old build rather than the most recent build due to weird interactions with gulp watch). In those cases, sometimes it's okay to just say something like "our tools were being frustrating." The goal, at least with my fiancée, is to make an effort to communicate with her how my day went, because on a deeper level what I'm communicating is that I want to share my life with her, and that we're a team. There's a lot of implicit emotional elements to human communication, and sometimes to communicate one thing implicitly, you have to work really hard to communicate something seemingly-unrelated explicitly.

fatman13gg 10y ago

Like Feynman said in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM, when trying to explain how magnate works to the reporter. I think it's hard for someone else to actually understand the problem when you two are not in the same knowledge framework. Cause then she/he will be perpetually asking the why and how question and being not satisfied. edited.

asadlionpk 10y ago
amazing video!
justinhj 10y ago
Nevertheless Feynman made many successful lectures to the public and undergraduate students and was able to explain things as complex as quantum electrodynamics in layman terms. Recently I tried explaining how Akka clusters work and what partitions are to a completely non-technical colleague. Not only was I able to explain the parts I understand well in a way that she understood, I also quickly found out there are parts that I don't understand at all.

ubertaco 10y ago

Yeah, I find that when I take the "implementation details" out and explain the general problem, my fiancée both loves hearing about how my day went, and sometimes has good ideas how to solve it (and sometimes she doesn't, but the process of distilling the "essence" of the problem helps me to see the problem myself more clearly). By stripping out the technical details, I explained to someone who thinks that the monitor is the computer and the tower is the "CPU" what the Maybe monad is and why it's needed. That being said, I also find that some problems are strictly-technical in nature, and can't really be distilled to anything informative (e.g. Ionic's livereload dev server randomly serves up an old build rather than the most recent build due to weird interactions with gulp watch). In those cases, sometimes it's okay to just say something like "our tools were being frustrating." The goal, at least with my fiancée, is to make an effort to communicate with her how my day went, because on a deeper level what I'm communicating is that I want to share my life with her, and that we're a team. There's a lot of implicit emotional elements to human communication, and sometimes to communicate one thing implicitly, you have to work really hard to communicate something seemingly-unrelated explicitly.