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April 9, 2003
Teaching Complexity
When I worked at Center7, I got to work with some of the most talented technologists in Utah. One of the people I most enjoyed working with was Marcel Davidson. Marcel is one of the top Oracle DBA's in the state, possibly in the nation. He understands Oracle inside and out, and often educates Oracle about their own product.
Database administration is a complex operation. You have to know all sorts of intricacies of the hardware, software, network, application and users to optimize the performance of the database. Many times you have to make assumptions and projections based on your own experience, to make sure that when the database grows up, it still performs well, even though at the beginning those decisions didn't make much sense. I spent a lot of time with Marcel learning the basics of what DBA's have to know, and gained an appreciation for how much complexity goes into their decisions.
I spent most of the day today thinking about how to teach something that's very complex. I have been asked to convey some concepts of IP routing and BGP policy, which are fairly intricate and complex. Things that people spend weeks in training to understand the basics, and years of actual experience to fully understand and be able to figure out what's best. I've spent hundreds of hours tinkering and learning and testing, and thousands of hours seeing real-world what works and what doesn't.
How to convey meaningful aspects of that in some meaningful, succinct manner, without spending so much time? And to what end?
I am often frustrated by the teaching aspect of being a technologist. I love to learn, can't get enough of that. Being a teacher is a totally different animal. Usually it's a breeze, and I do a fair amount of teaching that is easy and even enjoyable to do. But every once in a while, I get to teach something that is incredibly difficult, requires a lot of work just to figure out how to teach it, and a lot of time to teach it properly. I think this is one of those times.
Posted by pete at April 9, 2003 11:55 PM