I cannot, for the life of me, stop thinking in metaphor. My speech is riddled with simile. I understand the world best when I apply a reductive approach to it. I get animated and my arms start waving when I hit upon the right metaphor.
The other day I was talking about software design. We had a team that had gone and built a sub-system that did not talk to any others and just quietly did what it was supposed to. Now the task at hand was to integrate it into an ecosystem of other sub-systems. The only way I could talk about it was to compare it to an internal combustion engine that had been designed in isolation but now the block needed to be lowered into a chassis, and we needed to make sure all the connections were made and the structural integrity was OK and so on. I probably sounded incredibly patronizing as I said it, but I could not help myself. I was dazzled by the image. People likely went on mute and groaned...
The other day I was talking about software design. We had a team that had gone and built a sub-system that did not talk to any others and just quietly did what it was supposed to. Now the task at hand was to integrate it into an ecosystem of other sub-systems. The only way I could talk about it was to compare it to an internal combustion engine that had been designed in isolation but now the block needed to be lowered into a chassis, and we needed to make sure all the connections were made and the structural integrity was OK and so on. I probably sounded incredibly patronizing as I said it, but I could not help myself. I was dazzled by the image. People likely went on mute and groaned...
