Meanwhile in this corner

Let's take a quick break from our normal scheduling of craftiness and Midwestern oddities to explore this interesting idea.

Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software has lately been describing the business processes of getting an innovative software created and to the market. Today he was describing the software developer's frame of mind in the final debugging phase where they attempt to find and fix every single. tiny. detail.

And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away. The kind of product where that one-in-a-million user doing that one-in-a-million unusual thing finds that not only does it work, but it's beautiful: even the janitor's closets of your software have marble floors and solid core oak doors and polished mahogany wainscoting.

This has nothing to do with knitting or sewing but everything to do with my work and my dissertation. I've always loved how Joel talks about searching for and conquering all the details of a project to create that final masterpiece and it seems to apply so perfecting to my dissertation. I can't wait to get to the phase where I'm dissecting the raw data and putting it all in an order that makes sense to non-librarians and wows my advisers. But, before I get to that wonderful phase Joel is talking about, I believe that there's a different and darker phase: the stuck in the middle of the forest feeling lost phase.

See, I think I'm in that forest at work and at my dissertation. I hope know that what I'm studying will be valuable to someone someday, but right now I'm surrounded by large abstract ideas, like "change management" and "library assessment" that mean too many different things. Before I can get to the fun tasks of saying that, "My library is successful because we teach students to research and here is the proof," I need to figure out how to measure that students are actually learning.

Argh, I heard a long time ago that people tend be promoted to the level of their incompetence, and maybe this is mine right now. Joel's post is like a pep talk to me that eventually I'll figure out how to understand and measure terms such as "transformational change" and that I'll eventually even have my masterpiece of a dissertation. Until then, if you hear me whining about this process some more, please remind me of that quote above.