Pounding the understable into the tangible

Expounding on idea. Expounding a concept. Ex, pound. Harshness.

This word popped into my head today as I was walking from an impromptu tutorial on Photoshop Vector tool usage to my office. The word comes from the latin "ex-", which means 'out from' or 'put forth'. Since it comes to English by way of French, I suspect it's part of the French invasion of words from the 1066 hubbub. That also explains why it's considered higher language than explain or even elaborate.

The word strikes me as having something to do with striking. A pound after all generally refers to a sound smack with something blunt. Since expound doesn't actually come from the same root, being tied instead to the root of words like "position," I guess it's not a perfect tie in to the title of this entry. Nevertheless, I'll proceed.

Expound also rings (and in my experience is usually pronounced like) 'exbound,' which isn't a word. To my mind, exbound sounds more fun though, like breaking the boundaries and going into the unknown. That doesn't suit the definition well though. Exbound would make more sense as a verb cousin of tangent. Maybe next year Webster will give it a try.

Moving on, I'm trying to decide whether phrases like 'pounding it out' make me think of dumb brutes pounding a square peg in a round hole or smart people working hard to get something done. Maybe it's a phrase invented by someone really, really smart (or just clear minded at the moment of coining) who recognized the inability of people to really understand things completely. Knowing this, everyone is always pounding things out to a lesser or greater extent.

We do a lot of pounding, people that is. A smart guy I used to work with once said, "If something is really difficult the way you're trying to do it, you're probably doing it the wrong way." Put another way, if you find yourself pounding rather than placing, something about your method is likely wrong. I tend to agree with this. Being a guy whose intelligence, or at least whose access to such, is determined largely by the amount of sleep I've had and the amount of time that has past since I had it, I also recognize that our ability to determine what is pounding and what isn't is limited.

Beyond that though, at some point, everything requires effort. If you're an algorithm writer, you recognize some methods as being more efficient. In fact, there may be an optimal method for accomplishing this or that within the confines of human understanding and ability. That said, whether you use the optimal route or not, you can get the work done. Like Amelia Earhart said, "The most effective way to do it is to do it." I think there's a wisdom in that as well. In between the optimal and the passable is a range of successful possibilities. As a guy who doesn't live in an ivory tower and who deals with the nuts and bolts more so than the theories and concepts, I find that shooting for the optimal against all odds often leaves you overextended. Likewise, shooting for the passable leaves you, well, so far in my experience rarely at a loss.

Having said that I will follow by saying also that I never shoot for the passable. In fact, I try to make the distance between the optimal and the reality as small as possible. Yet, I can't help but glance at the work being done in other places by other developers, even at work being done in other industries that doesn't even attempt to adhere to a standard other that functional.

Walmart is a prime example. Their products are far from the best. They don't pay especially well. However, they get things done to a base requirement. This is true of lots of the off-shore development work I've seen. Heck, it's true of lots of on-shore development. I used to work for a "high end" web shop that often produced stuff that was only just functional. Did anyone care? Did anyone but people like me even notice? Not so much.

However, I also look to places that really excel at this or that and I see a higher than necessary level of competence in the work. Taking the two ends of the spectrum together, I can only put together that there is a curve of effectiveness, of rightness. At the one end, the rightness is low, but the effort is also low. At the other end, the rightness is higher and the effort is higher. The things that seems to swing the curve is the intelligence of the people doing the work, the ability of the people doing the work to apply that intelligence, and the amount of experience the gang has in doing the type of work.

I guess this isn't really surprising. Toddlers pound before they place as does anyone honing a skill.

Anyway, I'm pressed for time (real world nuts and bolts at work), so I have to wrap this up. The bottom line is that for people who only deal in concepts, optimal is attainable. For whoever has to translate that idea to something real, the challenge is greater. Imagine a perfect solution to a real world problem and then try to build exactly that solution and you will immediately find snares and snags that complicate things. Many of such snares are things like the human attention span or the imperfection of what's already there just to name two.

It's the task of the builder to navigate the snares as deftly and completely as possible to deliver something as close to optimal as possible. For you pure concept folks out there, your task is to define what is passable and what is optimal and to know up front what point in between those to you will accept. The idea person expounds the concept while the implementation person pounds out the tangible product.