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Blog Explainer

I love xkcd. It’s a MWF dose of nerd crack. So for Christmas my wife gave me a copy of Thing Explainer, by xkcd’s author. This creative book simplifies complex ideas using only the thousand most common English words. So instead of “washer/dryer” you get “boxes that make clothes smell better”. “Thousand” becomes “ten hundred”. The “Saturn V rocket” becomes the “Up-Goer Five”. “NASA” is “US Space Team”. Entertainment and enlightenment in one place.

It inspired me to try my hand at it. I took the text of a previous blog post and winnowed it down using the simplewriter tool. The process taught me several things:

  • Making something simpler improves your understanding of that thing. If you can’t take a ten-letter word and break it into a few five letter words – do you truly understand it?
  • Simplifying also means more than just making a bunch of details smaller. I took the words that I had written without the “thousand words” in mind and changed them in place. The post would have come out much cleaner if I hadn’t kept myself to the same layout and idea structure. In other words, I made some of the words simpler but not the idea.

Simplifying means challenging your assumptions and then changing your model accordingly. Making something simple is harder than making it complex. That’s why so much software winds up kludgy. Case in point: my exercise in the thousand words trick made the post less simple, because I focused on a bunch of small things first without cleaning up the idea itself. If your users complain they can’t use your software and your thoughts go to the background color of your input boxes – you’ve gone down the wrong path.

Why am I going on and on about simplification? Because at Mindset, that’s what we strive for. Top to bottom. Ideas to details. All our foci – mobile, cloud, analytics – aim squarely at simple.

Without further ado, I present “Gopher Works” pseudo-simplified (with handy glossary below):

 

Dirt Throwing Animal Works

I’m excited about flying machines. Not as much as some people, but I always turn my head to look at flying machines above me. Put it this way: it’s safer to let someone else drive you past the flying machine house. My let down feeling at missing the largest flying machine in the world is big.
Anyone with excited feelings about flight will be familiar with Smelly Animal Works. Well-known, very interesting flying machines first saw light from them. The U-2 flew high, SR-71 fast, and F-117 could not be seen by light return finders. All in ways never done before. Smelly Animal Works’ special powers? Working alone, not writing lots of papers, and making things no one had ever seen.
Laughing at thinking we are not great, we think we are a kind of Smelly Animal Works. Except instead of flying machines, we work in computer information plans. Instead of flying machine builders, we work with computer information plan builders, screen builders, and business plan builders. Instead of war teams and people who look at other people quietly, we work in big businesses. And instead of the west big ocean state, we have our business in the state with one hundred hundred water holes.
So instead of Smelly Animal Works, think “Dirt Throwing Animal Works”. And we think you’d love to work with the Dirt Throwing Animal Works team on creating your next big business plan for fixing problems. Check out some of the interesting things we’ve done:
Reach out to us, follow us on Word Shooter, and see us on our far away computer information shower page. Talk to us about bringing your really great big business ideas to life, and remember nothing’s too crazy in making lots of ideas!

Just don’t call us Dirt Throwing Animal Works, because I’m the only one in the office who thought that was a cool name.

Glossary

Dirt Throwing Animal Works: Gopher Works
flying machine: airplane
flying machine house: airport
let down feeling: disappointment
Smelly Animal Works: Skunk Works
light return finder: radar
working alone: autonomy
not writing lots of papers: lack of bureaucracy
laughing at thinking we are not great: scoffing at modesty
computer information plan: software
computer information plan builder: developer
screen builder: designer
business plan builder: analyst
war team: military
people who look at other people quietly: reconnaissance
big business: enterprise
west big ocean state: California
state with one hundred hundred water holes: Minnesota
Dirt Throwing Animal Works: Gopher Works
big business plan for fixing problems: enterprise solution
information tables: BEx
Pretty Screen Maker: Fiori
way of meeting your computer people: experience
in your computer house: on-prem
someone else’s computer house: cloud
In-Memory Computer Information Plan Machine Cloud Computer System Plan Service: HANA Cloud Platform
Information Finder: Google
Business Computer Information Plan Maker: SAP
Cloud Information Sheet Helper: CloudSimple
On-Clothing Problem Telling System: Wearable Issue Reporting
Cloud Information Sheet Helper for Information Helping: CloudSimple for Analysis
Business Computer Information Plan Maker Information House: SAP BW
Word Shooter: Twitter
far away computer information shower page: the web

Paul Modderman loves creating things and sharing them. He has spoken at SAP TechEd, multiple ASUG regional events, ASUG Fall Focus, Google DevFest MN, Google ISV Days, and several webinars and SAP community gatherings. Paul's writing has been featured in SAP Professional Journal, on the SAPinsider blog, and the popular Mindset blog. He believes clear communication is just as important as code, but also has serious developer chops. His tech career has spanned web applications with technologies like .NET, Java, Python, and React to SAP soutions in ABAP, OData and SAPUI5. His work integrating Google, Fiori, and Android was featured at SAP SAPPHIRE. Paul was principal technical architect on Mindset's certified solutions CloudSimple and Analytics for BW. He's an SAP Developer Hero, honored in 2017. Paul is the author of two books: Mindset Perspectives: SAP Development Tips, Tricks, and Projects, and SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori: The Psychology of UX Design. His passion for innovative application architecture and tech evangelism shines through in everything he does.

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