The black box
In technology and science, sometimes we use abstraction to make things manageable to be discussed, to be solved (if it a problem), and to operate. I remember one of my Professor when I was in college often called something a black box to define a theoretical object that we (student) are not fully understood or object of study. That is when I was in college taking engineering physics program, but now I am in software development field. We use abstraction to make things more manageable, to operate complex infrastructure, to build complex business logic on top of relational database, etc, you name it.
Today I was asked by one of my peer about how I setup a system which will run a set of test then put the report somewhere. I am not the one who create the test script, but I setup or integrate the test script with the whole system in place. I was asked specifically about how I manage to save the report location. I answered “I’ll saved it in our central file server”, he then answered that I can easily changed the original IP address in the script configuration to the location of file server. However, I still don’t understand. As a very technical person, I am not enough with someone said that you can change this with that and you got what you want. How do I put the file in file server if there is no authentication/permission setup? How do they communicate? Via scp? HTTP call? Or what? I need a concrete step, not a magical statement that I can automagically achieve this by simply doing that.
I know, software system sometimes quite magical and make the user take the system for granted and not curious about how it works. Yeah, there is another spectrum of people who like me or maybe like you as well who want to know how things works inside the black box.
Since in college I aspire to be a comb-shaped person although I just found the term of “comb-shaped” just few hours ago when I got yet another LinkedIn message selling a job opportunity. I aspire to become a people who can easily zoom-in-and-out and not losing sight of the bigger picture when doing something specific and not neglecting the detail when discuss or talk or thinking in higher level. For those who curious about comb-shaped you can click the hyperlink I put.
I hope my peer doing it in work as well, but yeah, people has different way of thinking given their background, how they grow and education. I am not saying my peer is not a good person, he/she is a good person, but I hope I better communicator, so that I can communicate better and able to bring people I talk to to where I want to discuss.
Well, this is just my random thought in the middle of the night. I hope I can be a better person each day. Do give comment if you have an opinion.
