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Improper english

AIGA rail transportation symbol

Before retirement ended my last spell of unemployment, i wondered if the timing of that dismissal was ideal. one month earlier or later might have been better?

improving a server log was my last assignment. like many other companies, their senior management believed in their culture, technology, and tools. like other well-funded companies, they used Splunk and wanted to use JSON format. nobody reviewed the pull request that would have established a baseline for my work. their Splunk dashboard code was not versioned.

Overcommunicating

JSON can be ideal, and creating a data structure to discover if a log entry describes an error is easy and reasonably fast, but computers find strings very quickly. a faster algorithm uses less electricity; computer activity is human activity.

a new JSON object member doesn't interfere with older ones. this encapsulation is good, but it leads to interface bloat. for example, my supermarket's product representations contain descriptions like:

  • vitamin A; calculated by summation of the vitamin A activities of retinol and the active carotenoids

this text is actually part of the minimum viable details for a product.

Subtle consistency

continuing my rant about logging, a log should support finding information with grep or something comparable. it should look like it was written by a machine.

the log's dialect should be natural language augmented by jargon introduced by customers and product owners. the log should not mention implementation details like source code line numbers and thread identifiers, because such references make it harder to analyze failures by comparing logs generated at different times.

consistent language usage facilitates filtering/searching log entries, while natural language usage makes this consistency less stilted.

Prolix torture

precise language usage facilitates communication between team members with different linguistic backgrounds. synonyms may seem harmless to people who are fluent, but team members change and outsourcing is common. when two words have similar definitions, review their connotations to see if one is more appropriate. when all else fails, use the shorter word (which probably has fewer syllables).

it should be possible to analyze texts to discover the history of our (collective) affection for jargon. i assumed it was a side effect of technology infiltrating everyday life, but now i'm not sure.

during rush hour in a large city, sometimes someone would try to squeeze into my train, the door wouldn't close, and our departure would be delayed. to avoid this delay, the operator would tell people on the platform: “We have an immediate follower.” that rarely had the desired effect, so some operators would say:

  • We have an immediate follower behind us.

as Pogo famously said: We have met the enemy and he is us.

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