Tim Bray’s Law of Explanation

July 23, 2009

Earlier this summer, XML co-inventor and director of Web Technologies at Sun, Tim Bray was asked to give a convocation speech at his Alma Mater.

The whole speech is excellent, but the part that particularly resonated with me was his “Law of Explanation”

The first half says “When you’re explaining something to somebody and they don’t get it, that’s not their problem, it’s your problem.” Anything that’s important, that’s deep enough to matter, is probably not self-evident; it’s going to require a lot of explanation, and that’s an essential part of your job.

The second half says “When someone’s explaining something to you and you’re not getting it, that’s not your problem, it’s their problem.”  The effect of this one is that you have to do a very courageous thing: say “No, I don’t understand.”

Very well captured.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Thanks to Tim Bray I’m an Honourary Cheeky Brit

June 25, 2009

Reg_Podcast_Logo I was quite chuffed to find that my first freelance piece for The Register was featured on the front page.  The piece is a 17 minute podcast and accompanying intro article that covers the conversation I had with XML co-developer and really smart guy, Tim Bray.

Tim was a great interview.  Not only is he very knowledgeable but he answers questions very lucidly.   Take a listen and see for yourself.

>> Listen (17:24)  mp3 version | ogg version

Why's Tim so Jazzed about 20 year-old Swedish Telco language (other than the cool graphics)?

Why's Tim so jazzed about a 20 year-old Swedish Telco language (other than the cool graphics)?

Some of the topics Tim tackles:

  • The state of the web today.
  • The evolution of Twitter: Ruby on Rails + Scala + ?
  • Dynamic languages that rock Tim’s world:  PHP? Python? Ruby on Rails?  Closure?
  • And speaking of dark horses, what about Erlang?  dealing with wider CPUs and concurrency.
  • Is Google’s Wave the next Twitter or the next Lotus Notes?
  • What’s happening in browser land?  And what about HTML5 (video and canvas)?
  • Opera’s recent announcement and the value of web hooks.
  • Tim’s been “Kindled.”  What other web business models are working out there?
  • What most rock’s Tim’s world: 1) Databases duking it out – what’s the right way to persist data at scale and 2) Mobile platforms: Android, iPhone, Palm Pre — all very different approaches.

Shout outs: To Terri Molini for setting this up and Paul Bonser of X-team for introducing me, over beers, to Erlang.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George