about Mark...

[Mark Waddingham]

> I don't know why anyone is criticising Mark for participating on the 
> use-list.

I must confess I struggle to see the criticism - Colin made a rather wry 
observation in an amusing way (for me at least, as I said previously, 
text based communication is a huge source of ambiguity at times).

> I am quite the other way round, and am criticising all the other
> developers at RunRev for NOT participating: this is at least part of
> the
> problem I have addressed elsewhere.

One very important thing to remember is that communication of any sort 
takes a great deal of time, and if it is something you perhaps feel you 
are not particularly good at then you are probably not going to engage 
in it very often preferring to focus on things that you feel make the 
biggest difference. In terms of Software Engineering, then the thing 
that you would normally take as making the most difference is the actual 
engineering itself. After all, things that work, work well and do what 
is required tend to speak for themselves (assuming they have adequate 
documentation - perhaps a discussion for another thread ;)).

Software Engineering, as a discipline, tends to require a great deal of 
focus on very specific projects and problems (as do most other 
disciplines) - which is the primarily attractive thing to many people 
who choose to do it as a profession. Those that are the better 
communicators tend to end up being the (good) managers, architects and 
evangelists, however this in no way demeans or detracts from the fact 
that you do need the (largely hidden) 'gurus' who sit behind the scenes 
actually solving and implementing the problems that present themselves. 
(We have a few of these now and they've managed to do things in recent 
history that, whilst I understand in principal the ideas involved, 
perhaps wouldn't have been able to do myself especially in the time they 
managed to do them in).

This is especially true in a commercial context - time is money, time is 
required to produce a product.

> RunRev keep banging on about a "community": well, Mark is
> demonstrating that he wants to be part of that community!

Just because it might not be directly visible due to large amounts of 
communication, I do feel part of the community as do (I would hope) all 
my engineers.

To try and make a parallel, how much thought do you give to the 
thousands of engineers (in a given country) that keep you water, 
electricity, gas, telephone, broadband and all the other services we are 
accustomed to in the modern world running on a daily basis? Just because 
you don't directly hear from them does not mean that they aren't there, 
on your side, trying to ensure that everything works and working towards 
ensuring they do continue to do so in the future.

As in all things, there is a balance to be struck between doing and 
talking - I must confess I tend towards the doing rather than the 
talking and it is a constant contention even for me in any 
resource-constrained environment (which is, unfortunately, the world we 
live in - whether commercial, charity or any other realm you happen to 
exist in).

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps