March 31, 2009

danah boyd - is just cool. I follow her work closely because her research is applicable to the world we live in today and one I am intimately familiar with.

However, I have to disagree with her recent post requesting a rubber-meets-the-road coder that realizes her streams of consciousness. Not because it is a bad idea - she probably will achieve decent success with it, but because it is the wrong chain of command. Assuming she does have powers vested in her to assemble resources where the count > 1… she really needs a distiller.

Distillers, are an intermediary between a highly creative personality and the coder(s). They are especially adept at grasping the personality’s frequently ephemeral thoughts and subjecting them to a reality check. They are good at that because they were coders once. They understand what is in the realm of possibility, but most importantly, they can add nuance and color to the personality’s thought process.

I understand that danah just wishes to build constrained happy-path prototypes, but she does mention a whole host of technologies. This means you are going to get a swiss army knife - adept at a lot of things, but brilliant at none. Distillers give you a degree of abstraction. They solidify the vision, and nullify your dependency on specific skills or resources.

From my experience, good distillers are the difference between success and failure. Idea factories struggle for traction without these mediums, and coders are rudderless. Maybe danah will listen, regardless, I wish her the best.

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