{"id":613,"date":"2011-02-11T22:06:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T04:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/?p=613"},"modified":"2011-02-11T22:06:37","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T04:06:37","slug":"design-balls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/archives\/613","title":{"rendered":"Design Balls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend once told me about one of his introductory computer science classes, wherein a fellow student would occasionally stop the professor to ask &#8220;Yeah, but, how do we know what computers can do?!?&#8221;. The professor didn&#8217;t really have a great answer for him, and after a while the student gave up asking and dropped the class.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s easy to think that this person just <em>did not have it<\/em>, whatever it takes to be in computer science. Naturally, he should leave because he had no business in the class in the first place. And in a sense, yeah, that&#8217;s precisely right, he didn&#8217;t have It, and It is quite necessary. But I wonder whether what It was is something that could be gifted by the professor or another student, or if he could have continued with the lectures and exercises for a while before It began to dawn on him, and things would start to crystallize.<\/p>\n<p>I also wonder whether It was, to quote a phrase that popped up unbidden in my head just a while ago, &#8220;design balls&#8221;. Because I remember a time when I didn&#8217;t have my computer program design balls, when I was basically bluffing it, and now I really have It, and I&#8217;m not bluffing. I&#8217;ll have to do some serious introspection to determine when the magic transition happened, though I can say that luckily it happened well before I was taking formal courses in computer science, so I didn&#8217;t have the great difficulty outlined above.<\/p>\n<p>You can build a textbook definition of the design process by stringing together various phrases:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>define need<\/li>\n<li>derive system outline<\/li>\n<li>calculate component parameters<\/li>\n<li>analyze expected system response<\/li>\n<li>simulate or prototype system<\/li>\n<li>verify conformance to the specification<\/li>\n<li>ship design artifacts to manufacturer for implementation<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>blah blah blah, you know what I mean. Those phrases even make sense to someone who is already past a certain point in their design education. But there&#8217;s an unspoken, ummm, let&#8217;s say, glue, that holds the pieces of the process together. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s unspoken because it&#8217;s impossible to speak of, as my lame analogy suggests, or whether it&#8217;s just that sort of silence that develops around certain conceptual vortexes in a field, for whatever reasons.<\/p>\n<p>And for now, I&#8217;m going to give up on speaking about this. Not forever, because now that I&#8217;m pondering it, I feel like it&#8217;s a really important thing, and perhaps there is hope and help for those who want to have It but don&#8217;t yet have It, and maybe It is teachable. Hmmmm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend once told me about one of his introductory computer science classes, wherein a fellow student would occasionally stop the professor to ask &#8220;Yeah, but, how do we know what computers can do?!?&#8221;. The professor didn&#8217;t really have a great answer for him, and after a while the student gave up asking and dropped [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","author-admin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}