How I Spent My COVID Vacation

I haven’t blogged in, what, ...forever. A couple of years.

I have been writing, though. Just not here. A lot, actually. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve done during my lapse here:

• 2020-01-28 – “Solving the unsolvable performance problem” (2 pages)
• 2020-02-14 – “Method R Workbench: the pesky, intermittent performance problem” (video 4:57) 
• 2020-03-11 – “Preventing the post-production performance problem” (2 pages)
• 2020-04-23 – “Better testing, better risk reduction” (2 pages)
• 2020-05-07 – “Some things you probably didn’t know about tracing (Dallas edition)” (video 1:03:27)
• 2020-06-10 – “Death to the health check… Long live the health check” (2 pages)
• 2020-07-01 – Method R Workbench 9.0, a huge new release of my company’s flagship software system. Since 2001, this software has grown from a tkprof replacement to a system for mining and managing 10,000s of trace files at once.
• 2020-07-01 – “Method R Workbench 9: a whole new way to see Oracle performance” (video 5:36)
• 2020-08-26 – “Some things you probably didn’t know about tracing (Chicago edition)” (video 1:07:34)
• 2021-01-19 – CMG IMPACT 2021 “Three tricky performance problems solved with Oracle trace data” (ad video 6:12)
• 2021-08-09 – Method R Trace 21.2, a re-imagining of our trace file collector extension for Oracle SQL Developer.
• 2021-08-11 – “Method R Workbench video tips” (8 videos, each 2:21 or less)

But the biggest reason of all: I’ve spent every spare moment outside of my work obligations since March 2020…

 …writing a new book. 

The working title is How to Make Things Faster. It’s a book about making things (including software) go faster, for readers who aren’t necessarily technical. It will be about the size of a Dilbert book and contain pretty much everything I’ve ever learned in 30 years of work, both technical and political. The audience I’m aiming for is every IT professional, business leader, and consultant on Earth. I hope you’ll be able to find it in airport book stores next to Liz Wiseman and Dr. Phil.

The book is story-driven. You’ll get a fun story or two and then half a dozen bite-sized (~2½-page) chapters teaching lessons inspired by the stories, then a new story and more bite-sized lessons. I think that people will be able to enjoy reading the book both serially from front to back, and randomly two or three short chapters at a time.  

To ensure that the material would be accessible to non-technical readers, I hired a very special first reviewer for this project: my mom. My instructions to her were to identify anything that was either unclear or boring. Thanks to her help, other reviewers so far have characterized the book as “fun,” “lively,” “quick,” and “important.”

It’s been a lot of work, and there’s still a lot to do. I’m excited about it, and I hope you’ll be, too. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can.

If you want a peek, you should join me next Thursday, October 7 at the Dallas Oracle Users Group’s “DOUG Training Day 2021,” which will convene live (!) in Grapevine, Texas, not too far from where I’m sitting right now. This will be an important event for me: it’ll be the first time I’ll have presented face-to-face with a live audience in nearly two years, and it’ll be the first time I’ll have presented material from the book. Plus, it’s a keynote for the event, so …the pressure’s on. :-)

If you’re interested in the sound of the material, please consider booking me for a workshop.

Brown Noise in Written Language, Part 2

Here is some more thinking on the subject of brown noise in written language, stimulated by Joel Garry’s comment to my prior post.

My point is not an appeal for more creative writing in the let’s-use-lots-of-adverbs sense. It’s an appeal for clarity of expression. More fundamentally, it is an appeal for having an idea to express in the first place. If you have an actual idea and express it in a useful way, then maybe you've created something that is not spam (even if it happens to be a mass mailing), because it yields some value to your audience.

My point is about being creative only to the extent that if you haven’t created an interesting thought to convey by the time you’ve written something, then you don’t deserve—and you’re not going to get—my attention. (Except you might get me to criticize your writing in my blog.)

What Lanham calls “the Official Style” is a tool for solving two specific problems: There’s (1) “I have no clear thought to express, yet I'm required to write something today.” And (2) “I have a thought I'd like to express, but I'm afraid that if I just come out and say it, I'll get in trouble.” Problem #1 happens, for example, to school children who are required to write when they really don’t have anything in mind to be passionate about. Problem #2 happens to millions who live out the Emperor’s New Clothes every day of their lives. They don’t “get” what their mission is or why it’s important, so when they’re required to write, they encrypt their material to hide from their audience that they don’t get it. The result includes spam, mission statements, and 98% of the PowerPoint presentations you’ll ever see in your life.

I’m always more successful when I orient my thoughts in the direction of gratitude, so a better Part 1 post from me would have been structured as:

1. Wow, look at this horrible, horrible sentence. I am so lucky I don't have to live and work in an environment where this kind of expression (and by implication, this kind of thinking) is deemed acceptable.
2. I highly recommend Lanham's Revising Prose. It is brilliant. It helps you fix this kind of writing, and—more importantly—the kind of thinking that leads to it.
3. I’m grateful for the work of people like Lanham, Fried, Heinemeier-Hansson, and many others, who help us understand and appreciate clear thinking and courageous writing.

Writing is not just output. Writing is an iterative process—along with thinking, experimenting, testing—that creates new thought. If you try to use the waterfall approach when you write—“Step 1: Do all your thinking; Step 2: Do all your writing”—then you’ll miss the whole point of how writing clarifies and creates new thought. That is why learning how to revise prose is so important. It’s not just about how to make writing better. As Lanham illustrates in dozens of examples throughout his book, revising prose forces improvement in the writer’s thinking, which enriches the writer’s life even more than the writing, however tremendous, will enrich the reader.