Kategorie: Thoughts

Conference Tweeting or What Is Up With That?

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed: I was at a conference last week. Not only did I announce it several times, but I’m sure that the frequency of my tweets increased at least slightly. (Actually, I think it increased a lot, but who am I to say?)

The problem with tweeting from conferences is that it can easily scare those who don’t really have a connection with whatever I’m talking about. There probably were a couple of questions: What the hell is up with that? Why is she tweeting so much? And what’s she talking about? And why is she suddenly tweeting in English?

Well, there are answers to all that. But let’s begin from the start…

About the same time last year I was at a Lean/Kanban conference in Munich. Those were two days filled with talks, keynotes and pecha kuchas about Lean and Kanban, agile and processes.

I didn’t really think about it when during the first talk I unpacked my laptop and began tweeting about what was happening on stage. Even better, and faster than I expected I got feedback. People replied to my tweets, retweeted and faved them. Pretty quickly there was an official hashtag for the conference so that it was even simpler to follow all the tweets between and during the talks.

„Ah, you are Anne. I think I’ve retweeted you“, someone said when I sat down for a talk. I’m not one of the hot shots of the Agile scene, but using Twitter made it unbelievably easy for me to get to talk to other people. After all, we had been going back and forth on Twitter all day.

It was at this conference that I learned how to use Twitter. Before that I didn’t really feel comfortable replying to people who didn’t follow me. I thought it would seem weird, even a bit pushy, since – after all – they didn’t know me. At the Lean/Kanban Conference I learned that this is bullshit. Twitter, for me, is best when used as a tool for communication and that’s what I’ve been using it for ever since.

A lot of the people I started to follow at this conference, I still follow. Some people who started following me then actually still follow me, although a lot have dropped out when they realized that usually I don’t actually tweet in English and very seldom about software topics. I can’t blame them. But it means that I’m even happier for those that stuck around.

This year, once again, I was at a conference. This time it was the Agile Testing Days in Potsdam. Because I was pretty certain that I knew what was about to happen I wrote a couple of warning tweets, including the hashtag of the conference. And indeed it was just as predicted: The minute the first keynote started I was there with my Laptop tweeting along and following the tweets of my fellow conference tweeters. Of course I wasn’t alone, actually a lot of the speakers of the conference were big on Twitter, too. There was Lisa Crispin, active as always, as well as Mike Scott and Matt Heusser (whose talks I unfortunately missed), Sigurdur Birgisson and Huib Schoots, who walked up to me during one of the words saying „I have to meet you, I’ve been retweeting you all day“.

The experience basically was the same as last year. The timeline was busy with people writing, replying, retweeting and faving. I seem to be at least fairly good at what I call „conference tweeting“, at least that’s what I gather from my average retweet quota. Conference tweeting isn’t actually that easy and has some disadvantages. First of all, it’s hard to adequately squish the content of a 45 to 60 minute talk or keynote into a couple of 140-character-or-less snippets. And secondly, it does require some of your concentration. I’m still busy repeating these last three sentences in my head to write them down as truly as possible while on stage it just goes on. Nobody waits for me to be done with that tweet.

It’s a trade-off: Trade you loads of awesome interaction and communication for a certain percentage of your concentration. But since I believe that this interaction and communication is one of the most important things at a conference I’m happy to trade. I can understand why other people won’t do it, though.

But I will keep on doing it. For all my „normal“ followers, there’s no need to be scared. I don’t go to conferences that often, and it’s likely to stay that way. But maybe now it’s a bit clearer why I do what I did. And if you don’t happen to find what I tweet from conferences interesting I’m sure there’s a neat filter option in your Twitter client that you wanted to try out anyway.

Most of all I was amazed that some of my tweets actually got positive feedback from people who were not at the conference, sometimes not even involved in software development, but still seemed to like what I was writing (or at least some of it). I actually would like to write about „Agile“ for non-software people, but I will have to think about finding the right angle to attack this huge topic. We’ll see.

After all, you can have a lot of fun on Twitter. When in the first keynote of the conference, Scott W. Ambler said „in the real world“ one time too often, Gojko Adzic couldn’t help but writing:

another f*ing „in the real world“. does everyone else live in the unicorn land? #agiletd

Gojko Adzic, November 20, 2012 10:05

 

new task for #agiletd speakers. add unicorn pictures in your slides

And that’s why at least 75 percent (that’s a complete guess, by the way) of the presentation suddenly contained unicorns. This caused enthusiastic cheers from those who knew and some irritation for those who didn’t know what the hell that was about. It wasn’t until the second day when I realized that in this case, what happened on Twitter kinda stayed on Twitter, when I overheard a conversation from three conference participants who tried to figure out what was up with the unicorns. Apparently they didn’t use Twitter.

I love tweeting at conferences. Before you know it you are in, communicating, getting to know awesome people and having fun. It’s also great for those who cannot make it to the conference but get to follow it at least a little via Twitter. If anyone is looking for professional conference tweeters for software or internet conference, I’m totally up to it! Although I’m sure there are lots of people who will be there anyway willing and able to do the job. (Damn.)

It’s Oh So Quiet

It’s been slow here, but mostly because it hasn’t been slow elsewhere.

I’ve been writing a lot on that other blog of mine, the one I started in January. It’s been a fun ride so far, which is why it’s been so quiet here. Unfortunately for some of you, my other blog is in German only. But I usually post lots of pictures, so if you’re interested in seeing photos of my little adventures, you can head over there and take a look.

I’ve also been busy filling my other blog with foodie content. Unfortunately, it’s German yet again. I’m sorry.

So that’s that. Apart from that we’re currently working on some music stuff which hopefully will be presentable to the public some time soon and of course between work, writing blog posts and singing into the microphone there’s this thing called life.

But the good news is: This blog right here isn’t dead. (Yay!) It’s just currently on a little vacation. I have posts in my mind that I would like to write, I just haven’t found the time to do it yet. But I will.

In other news, there’s a little surprise coming up. I’m excited about it, and will post the news as soon as I can.

So, please be patient. Thank you.

(All) Boys Club Follow-Up: Links and Stuff

There are a couple of interesting organizations and articles regarding the gender gap I talked about in my last post. I only have listed a few here, if you know more, please don’t hesitate to post in the comments or send me a mail.

There’s the Ada Initiative and Ladies Learning Code, both non-profit organizations aiming to get more women into coding by organizing conferences, workshops, trainings, etc. You can also check to see whether there is a Girl Geek Dinner organized in a city near you.

Then there’s a very cool blog post on the Fog Creek Blog called Girls Go Geek… Again! which (amongst other things) briefly sums up the history of women in programming and includes an article with a female developer at Fog Creek Software.

Another nice article over at Sharp Skirts focuses more on the communication differences and what it means in the workplace and it’s called Girl Developers vs. Women In Tech: More Conversations That Need To Change.

My favorite article though is located over at Microsoft, more specifically Jennifer Marsman’s MSDN blog. It deals with the question why there are so few women giving talks at conferences. This is one of the articles I routinely search for and link when someone asks the „Why so few women?“ question. It’s called Why are more women not speaking at technical conferences? Insights from the WiT discussion at CodeStock and most of all it’s awesome.

Yeah. And there’s this. I thought you shouldn’t miss this.

(All) Boys Club

Let’s try to make this post non-complainy, shall we?

But see, I am annoyed. I am annoyed that at my job I’m usually surrounded by men with hardly any other woman in sight. (This is not completely true. I know and have worked with other female developers, but they – or we – are scarce.)

What I am most annoyed with is that I don’t know what to do. I am perfectly aware of the fact that nobody actively discourages women from going into programming and IT. Yet at the same time I’m tired of hearing excuses like “Women are just not that technical” or “Well, that’s just the way it is”. Even if this is true, I still think that we should care about changing this outrageous status quo and getting more girls and women interested in coding.

See, I don’t believe that it’s a biological thing, but that the biggest reason for the big gender gap in IT is cultural conditioning. And I think I have proof for that.

When we were in Vietnam to train our off-shore developers I noticed that the female-to-male ratio in the development department there was way better than what I have seen in about every company I have worked for in the past ten years. It wasn’t 50/50, but a fair guess (without any numbers to prove it) would be that it was about 30/70 (maybe even slightly more), which is pretty good and the overall impression was that the ratio was enough to make it feel somewhat balanced.

If you look a bit into the history of programming, you’ll also see that back in the 60s it used to be foremost a women’s job, but that pretty obviously has changed.

Now, let me get that straight. I have been lucky and never have I worked in a team where the testosterone level was so high that it made me feel out of place. Most of all I am a software developer and a geek and I enjoy working with other geeky (and non-geeky) developers. But I am also a girl (well, woman, but you know…) and I wouldn’t mind seeing more female developers around. More than that, I would welcome it. Maybe with a song.

The reason I think is mostly to blame are cultural stereotypes and prejudices and the fact that nobody seems to care enough to change it. And while it’s true that any girl can decide for herself whether to go into IT or not, this is not an excuse to just throw your arms down and say “Well, so they are just not that interested. We can’t force you to.”

The truth still is that the whole IT community sometimes feels like an all boys club and while this might sound a bit lame, it’s not that easy to enter this boys club when you’re a girl and not feel weird. I was raised to believe that I could do anything I wanted to, so I did. I was pretty good at math and took biology as a major in high school and was one of the first pupils to spend their afternoons at one of the two computers connected to the internet at my school. I have never and hopefully never will let anyone tell me what I am supposed to like or do or be interested in because I am this or that (e.g. a girl).

But I fear that not everyone is like that, and I also fear that society is still doing a pretty good job in steering boys to science and technology and girls to languages, art and humanities and encouraging girls that it’s perfectly okay to not understand a computer and boys that it’s okay not to be into learning Italian as long as they know how a car works. This, in my belief, is utter bullshit, but I don’t know how to fight it, either.

These prejudices and conceptions of what is acceptable based on a gender run so deep that it’s hard to imagine a world where certain areas of expertise are not predominated by one gender or the other. It happened to me, too, despite of what I said a few lines earlier. I never took any programming classes in school, although I would probably have liked it.

So here are some simple ideas:

  • Make programming classes mandatory for all pupils in school for at least one year. I bet you’d be surprised at how many girls find out that programming isn’t nearly as hard as they imagined and – more than that – that it’s fun and that you can do pretty awesome things with it.
  • Offer programming classes (in school, at university or as evening classes) for girls and women only. Yes, I know, that sounds like the wrong direction. We want to get rid of the gender gap, not feed it with special courses just for the ladies. But the issue here really is to get rid of the fear of failing for just as long as it takes to make it clear that programming is no rocket science (unless you are actually coding for a rocket, in which case, maybe it is) and that it is not magic either. We need to get over that first hurdle and this is probably easier done in a (temporary) all girls club.
  • Cater to the prejudices. While they are still there, let’s make use of these stereotypes we talked about. Maybe coding is uninteresting for girls because it seems so technical. Make it look more artisty, colorful and fun. Start with building websites. While you could argue that HTML and CSS are not strictly programming languages I do believe they are the perfect gateway drug to actual full-fledged coding.

So there. Three simple ideas. They won’t solve everything, but they might be a good start and maybe other people have even better ideas.

Just personally, I’m sick of being the one girl crashing the boys club. I’m tired of pretending that I’m somehow less female or different from other girls or women because I work as a software developer. I’m not. And if I could get the support of other awesome girl geek developers out there, that would be pretty sensational.

What Does Like-Minded Mean?

I saw the term “link-minded” today on the website for an upcoming conference. The exact words were:

Our aim is to attract as many like-minded thinkers as possible.

And I wondered: What does that even mean?

Don’t get me wrong. I think I know what it means, but I’m still confused as how this works together with aiming for diversity. Where does the good like-minded end and the bad like-minded begin?

But let me explain:

  • Good like-minded: Aiming for the same goal, being able to communicate without difficulty, sharing the same interests.
  • Bad like-minded: Not able to think out of the box, very similar backgrounds, no disagreements, no challenges.

The bad like-minded is like a club that only accepts members after making sure that they won’t disturb the peace of the club, won’t question long-held beliefs and will hopefully just blend in without anyone noticing.

The good like-minded is like a community with a shared interest which is always happy to accept new members, search for new ways to look at things and will not shy away from anyone questioning them (as long as it is done in a socially acceptable way).

I’m pretty sure that what was meant on the website was the good like-minded, the one where a common goal is key and like-minded means “people who are smart and love to argue and discuss stuff and are not afraid to speak their mind, because we sure as hell aren’t”.

But the fact that it started me wondering (and partly worrying) also means that it’s a fine line between looking for allies in the battle for knowledge and a better world and trying to avoid those that might challenge you and make you feel uncomfortable.

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The Technology Gap or Why I Should Not Email My Parents (and a Bit About How Little I Like Phone Calls)

My parents are not technophobes. They’re not technophiles either. They’re somewhere in between.

We had our first computer in 1985 or so. We actually went through two computers, the first with green letters on black, the second orange on black before we got our first all colors Windows computer.

I distinctly remember one program where you could enter a combination of letters and numbers and you would get beautiful patterns painted on the screen. That was the green computer. If someone could identify this program (or the computer) for me, I would be much obliged.

I also remember our printer with TWO different fonts and you could buy some kind of extension to get an additional FOUR more fonts. (We never got the extension. It was very sad.)

I do remember navigating through the file system with only the keyboard, using arrows and function keys to write stuff or play games where the monsters were Hs that you needed to crush between square blocks. It was kinda awesome. And hell, I created my first database of the CDs I owned (Or was it taped videos? Whatever.) with Quattro Pro. Yeah, you heard right. Quattro Pro. At some point in my life I knew how to work with that.

So as far as I was concerned there was always a computer in the house. My mother was less interested, but she would always hold the high score in both Solitaire and Moorhuhn. (She was crazy good at Moorhuhn.) Once she found something that she liked she would learn the exact steps she needed to get it to run and then she was happy.

I tell you all this to explain that both my parents view on computers is mostly that it’s something that helps them do something they like or need to do anyway and that’s it. My father uses it to save and listen to the recordings he makes of bats (no kidding!), my mom uses it to research antique stuff, and from what I hear (and have witnessed myself) my father spends a lot of time browsing YouTube for music videos.

A couple of months ago we got to talk about communication and social networks. Apparently my cousin had showed them my Facebook page, and though my mother has no real objections she really doesn’t see the need for something like Facebook. For her putting your personal stuff on the internet is somewhat strange and I guess she just doesn’t see the point.

My parents seem to be phone and meet people. What I mean by that is that they seem to prefer phone calls and meeting in person to email or anything socially networky. Communication via email, chat or whatever else there is on the web is a very unnatural means of communication for them.

My father does have an email address – he has two actually, but I’m not sure if he’s ever used the second one -, my mother has none. Sometimes I sent them little mails with links or just a short message about what I have been up to. I’ve learned that they don’t regularly check their mail, so whenever I sent something I am well aware that it could be a week or so before they actually read it.

What I wasn’t aware of was that the emotional reasons for the phone versus email thing would be so different from what I would have expected.

I don’t particular enjoy phone calls. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I don’t specifically like to be called or to call someone. That is not to say that I hate it with a passion, it’s just that I don’t enjoy it. I can enjoy a specific phone call and I don’t despise you for calling me. But I am not someone who calls someone up just to talk (except for my husband, my parents and my grandmother). In fact, I don’t even have a mailbox because I don’t want people to be able to leave me messages making me feel forced to call them back. Ugh. Never.

When I want to just say hello, how are you, what have you been up to, I would probably write a mail. Or post something on Facebook. Or whatever. For me that’s saying: „Hello, thought it was time to say hi again. Nothing urgent. Let’s get in touch. How are you? Reply when you find the time. Thanks. Bye.“

I thought that was the normal conception: Phone is immediate. Talk to me now. I called you. Pick up. Email is relaxed. Just thought I’d say hi. Don’t hurry. No rush.

For my parents somehow the emotion is reversed. When they get an email they feel pressured. They think they are somehow required to reply with a carefully put together mail. They feel like it’s something at least partly official or at least formal. Especially my mother, who still needs a lot of time typing, feels pushed into doing something that she doesn’t really like to do. An email, for her, is time-consuming as well. Not quite the five minutes I take to write a quick reply.

There was no special point to the discussion, but it was interesting to hear such a completely different take on way to communicate than what I feel myself. I’m not saying either of us is right or wrong. We’re both right, because it’s just a personal experience and preference of how to communicate with other people. I tried at least to make my parents understand that I was pretty sure that when someone was sending them an email it wasn’t meant to make them feel pressured for a response, probably rather the opposite.

I’m calling this the technology gap because I’m pretty sure that it’s not a generation gap. I know a lot of geeky people on the internet who are as old or older than my parents and who probably use the internet as well and heftily or even more so than I do. And I’m bad. I think it’s a technology gap. It’s a question of interest and whether you feel comfortable with delayed and somehow removed communication or if you prefer talking to someone directly. The gap will probably get closer but I’m not sure if it will go away completely. It’s probably a good thing if it doesn’t.

At least now I know a little bit more about what my parents think about communication and it actually really helps to know why they feel the way they do and why I shouldn’t expect my mother to write me a mail. It’s okay. I can call.

—

One other thing: My mother now has an Android phone and while she’s not thrilled with the touchscreen („I always touch something that I didn’t intend to touch“), she said that she planned on keeping it. She even signs up for a limited data plan whenever they’re not at home to be able to access the internet when she needs to. So I’m curious to see how that works out for her.

And another thing: I’m apparently not alone in this. I once read a blog post somewhere (I really don’t remember where) on the web, comparing phone calls to someone just walking into your living room and expecting you to interrupt whatever it was you were doing and TALK TO THEM NOW! And I was thinking, YES, YES! That’s exactly it. I guess I am just not really a phone person.

This is the original quote and below are two links (one to the quote source and one to an article of someone who shares the feeling). Enjoy.

I am one of those people. But let me explain something to you. The telephone was an aberration in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting. it was never okay. It’s less okay now. Telephone calls are rude. They are interruptive. Technology has solved this brief aberration in human behavior. We have a thing now called THE TEXT MESSAGE. It is magical, non-intrusive, optional, and, just like human speech originally was meant to be, is turn based and two way. You talk. I talk next. Then you talk. And we do it when it’s convenient for both of us.

Original quote

Response on Prickly Goo

(Low-Maintenance) Content Pushing Strategies

A very long time ago when I was pretty new to Twitter I tweeted something along the lines of „You’re allowed to shoot me if I ever announce blog posts on Twitter.“

Yeah.

I would like to point out that this was really a long time ago, especially in internet time where last week is ages ago. Anyway, it seems like I have changed my content pushing strategies, and yes, I will gladly admit that I’ve been announcing new blog posts on Twitter for a little while now. And it works for me.

I started announcing blog posts on Google+ first. It works fine with linking to an article. Google+ will automatically try to find any images in the blog post and I can add a little synopsis which might or might not help others decide whether they are interested in reading what I wrote.

This has worked remarkably well and I’ve noticed quite a bit of traffic coming over to my blog whenever I publish a short blog announcement. After the Lean Kanban Conference I started to do the same on Twitter. This was mostly motivated by the fact that I had gathered quite a bunch of new followers and thought it would be the easiest to share any news about the conference or other agile blog posts via the platform where I knew the chance of reaching the target group would possibly be the greatest.

This, too, worked really well. So I’m keeping that strategy. I will happily link to new blog posts on this blog or my other one via Twitter and Google+. Twitter crossposts to Facebook automatically, so basically I have all my networks covered.

And why am I doing that? When I think about it I am sometimes afraid that it might seem that I’m desperately trying to drive traffic to my blog by advertising new posts aggressively on every platform.

And you know what? Exactly. That’s what I’m doing. It might not be exactly desperately, but yes, it is a bit aggressively and why the hell not. I try to take care when I write articles. I’m putting thought into them. I edit them and then I edit some more. Sometimes I add pictures. Sometimes I add links that I have to look up. In short, the average blog post seems to take at least one hour from starting the first words until hitting the save button for the last time. Often it takes longer.

And yes, I really want people to read it. I also want people to comment and maybe subscribe to my blog. And if there are little things that I can do to get a few more people to come here and read what I wrote and say what they think about it, then I am going to do it. I’m trying not to be obnoxious, so if you’re one of the few following me on more than one platform, this is my apology for you.

See, I’m guessing that most people are only following me on one platform. And especially Twitter is a very fickle thing where something that I wrote last night will most likely be lost in the depths of everyone’s timeline. This goes for Google+, too, whose attention span is not quite as short, but where a single post will still always run the risk of being overlooked in the mass of other posts.

So far I’m happy with  the results and I’m not planning to add any new ways of pushing content. I am  – after all – a little attention whore. I guess you were aware of that, weren’t you? I wouldn’t be here and wouldn’t do the things I do and have done the things I have done if I weren’t. But I’m also trying to be interesting enough and not annoy you more than I have to. I hope I am doing okay.

(And just in case you were wondering: Yes, this low maintenance method of linking to a new article really works. I run a statistics tool on all of my blogs and traffic usually increases after a tweet or Google+ post goes out. I’m trying to tell myself that most of you who come here also read what I wrote and don’t think too bad of it. If this is the case, don’t hesitate to tell me so. If it’s not, just shut up and let me live in my happy little dream world, willya?)

Complex vs. Complicated

Recently there were some tweets going back and forth in my Twitter timeline regarding the difference between complicated and complex. Let me start by saying that I have an opinion on that. I actually have an averagely strong opinion, meaning that I am pretty sure that I’m right, but I reserve some doubt just in case someone has mighty good arguments to convince me of their view.

Let me continue by saying that this opinion has in no way been influenced by literature, the study of complexity theory or any lengthy discussions with friends, colleagues or other people. It’s an opinion that seems to have formed over the years and is mostly a gut feeling that I have when I hear either of these words. It’s a natural reaction to what I’ve learned in the last 31 years of my life and I understand both words based on that life-long experience.

(I have also – on purpose – not tried to read up on existing definitions. I want to do that after I finished this post, but for now I thought it would be better to get my science-untainted view written down first before I can go ahead and let it be influenced by whatever is out there.)

From what I could gather in the tweets that were going around there are other opinions on what means what which is why I felt compelled to write about this in something that is more than 140 character (minus what it takes to add at least two persons‘ twitter handles).

To start with let me compare the two words in a few variations:

  • Complex is fine, complicated is bad.
  • Complex is inherent to the system, complicated is man-made.
  • The opposite of complex is simple, the opposite of complicated is simple.

Wait, what?

Before I get to that last statement which for me somehow explains why it’s so easy to get the two words mixed up and confused, I want to start explaining what I mean with the second statement. Mostly this is what I believe the main difference between complex and complicated is.

Or, put in another way: Complex describes a system and complicated is a description of a system.

Take a beehive for example. From what I know beehives are pretty complex systems with how jobs are distributed, how communication is handled, how reproduction works. There are a lot of little details that we may have trouble understanding or even realizing especially considering the fact that we are not bees.

Anyway, let’s assume a beehive is a complex system. There’s nothing you can change about that. A beehive will always be a complex system because that’s what it is. You can’t have a decent talk with the bees and convince then to devise a simpler system.

This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad system, though. First of all it means that explaining a beehive may not be an easy task. So, what do you do? You paint pictures. You write a description. You come with analogies, metaphors or whatever suits your needs. You draw a model. Or a chart. Or whatever. And this whatever-you-come-up-with to explain a beehive can be either simple or complicated. And whether it’s one or the other depends mostly on you. It may also depend on the difficulty of the task, but you are the deciding factor. Sorry.

Complex is the system, complicated is how we describe it. If we’re doing it wrong. What I’m saying is that you should always try for simplicity when you are describing or defining a system. Complicated hardly ever works. It mostly confuses people. And it is often unnecessary.

Complicated is a device often used by people who want to display their intellectual superiority by making things look hard. What they do not realize is that the real challenge is not to come up with a complicated model of a complex system. It’s coming up with a simple and understandable model of a complex system.

I know that you can only dumb down things to a certain level without running the risk of leaving out important parts. But in any case striving for simplicity instead of complication should be the goal.

So, once again I would argue that complexity lies within a nature of a system. For some systems this can be changed, but not for all of them and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means that a system consists of a lot of things which interweave and depend on each other.

Complicated is how we structure or describe things. A model or an explanation can be complicated. The organization chart of a company can be complicated. And complicated is something that we should be able to do something about. It’s not good. It’s making things harder to understand – sometimes on purpose, sometimes because we’re lazy and sometimes because we just don’t know how to do it better. But it’s not the nature of the system it’s the nature of the whatever model we use to explain it.

Which brings me back to the first statement. Complex is fine. If you can, make it simpler, but if you really can’t then that’s how it is. Complicated is not fine. Try to find a better way to do it. Complicated is adding details where we don’t need them or constructing detours where there’s a simple short cut or using big words when small words would totally suffice.

And as for the third statement. Yes, the opposite of complex is simple and the opposite of complicated is also simple. Maybe we need a different word for one of the simples to make the difference between the two clearer. And, to add to the confusion I would like to throw in another statement: The opposite of complex is complicated. How about that?

I guess what we end up with is that the difference between complex and complicated is a complex matter. I tried to explain my view on the matter as simple as possible. Did it work? Or was this too complicated. (Damn.)

Special thanks go out to @jurgenappelo, @alshalloway, @markusandrazek, @tastapod and whoever else joined in the discussion for giving me the motivation to try to put these jumbled thoughts into sort of coherent sentences.