When nothing is left to take away

[ewx]

My work consists of various parts: design, coding, bug-fixing, release management, and other things. This is true of my hobby software development too, though the proportions differ.

Bug fixing can take up a significant chunk of the implementation of a project, perhaps around half of the most recent release, for instance. Quite often the cause of a bug is obvious but sometimes a potentially lengthy investigation is required. Sometimes this is amounts to a steady growth of understanding but from time to time it involves a sudden insight into the problem. I've occasionally referred to this as 'bug satori'. The fix might not follow quickly from the insight, but knowing what the fix will look like is usually fairly easy afterwards.

A design exercise, for something heavy in data structures or algorithms, can produce another kind of experience: at some point I often find that, after making one key change in one place, everything else starts to rapidly fall into place. It feels like the complexity just collapses into a simpler system. Past experience shows that this is usually fairly late in the design (which means I've started seeing the light at the end of a particular tunnel). Unlike bug satori however I don't have a good name for this experience. Anyone got any suggestions?

Comments

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Those happen to me psychologically, in terms of my self-awareness, and I call them 'house of cards moments' - a whole huge complex 3D structure collapses into separate, two-dimensional, easily ordered objects instead.

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

Sounds like cornflakes - contents may settle in transit.

(S)

[nunfetishist.livejournal.com]

Simplification epiphany?

[angoel.livejournal.com]

I have similar experiences, both in programming, but mainly in games design. Indeed, I've come to view the understanding of how the base system of a game *really* works as being one of the prime factors which indicates that a game's complete. I don't have a name for it, though.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Not really what you're after, but you might be interested in it, never the less: Threshold Concepts (http://www.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/ETLreport4.pdf).

[fanf]

Is "design satori" too obvious?

[nomme.livejournal.com]

Revelation?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It feels different from the bug case: an event versus a process. In the bug case I have an insight which is basically understanding the bug. In the design case I try some change and as the change propagates through the design the whole thing simplifies.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

Following the use of the foreign word "satori", I was trying to find a Finnish word for "simple" in my dictionary and couldn't. So I went and discussed it with my colleagues. They initially suggested "helppo", which means easy, but actually it means trivial rather than simple. The best they could come up with was "koruton", which means "not complicated" (-ton at the end of a word in Finnish is like anti- or un- in English), although actually it means "not fancy" and is derived from "koru" which means "ornament" or "jewel".

We then concluded that there was no simple word in Finnish for simple. "Things are simple by default," they said. "So why have a word for it?"

[fanf]

I suppose "cascading simplification" is too objective? "progressive revelation"?

[sparrowsion]

Apocalypse. Has conotations of destruction (of complexity). Or of revelation, depending on which way you look at it.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Epiphany.