Are you a developer? If so, look at this Far Side cartoonReplace the word “Ginger” with the words “token ring” and “extension methods”, and now you will get a good appreciation of what human tharn looks like. Human tharn is what non-developers feel when you, as a developer, speak to them in Ginger-speak. 

Try speaking code in poetry. Dress your developer avatar up in rainbow tie dye, or devil horns, but whatever your do, don’t talk code to non-developers.

Whatever you do, explain dev stuff to non devs in Code Poetry.

Lesson 1: “We need to put DRM or some sort of tunneling VPN in and out of the transfer into Azure Table storage”

Instead tell the project manager, “If you don’t do what I say, someone is going to hack them, just like we hacked “INSERT OFFICE GAME RUN BY YOUR CEO”!  Then what’s going to happen is that all their private videos made only for “INSERT SPECIAL PEOPLE OF AUTHORITY” will show up on youtube!”

Lesson 2: “Let me explain token ring. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, token ring BLAH BLAH wide area network BLAH BLAH BLAH OSI model BLAH BLAH BLAH frame check sequence BLAH BLAH”

Instead tell the project manager, “A token ring is a bunch of people standing up in a room yelling at one another until they all shut up and only one guy talks.” 

All credit for that goes to Bill Zack, author of Cloudy in New York. Any error was mine.

Lesson 3: “Let me show you how to create an Entity Relationship Diagram for the business requirements you mention”

Instead tell the project manager, “Let’s break this out into nouns, verbs and adjectives using the technique so cleverly undocumented Chapter 3, of the series Women Build 

Chapter 3 will be written once there is sufficient demand.

Lesson 4: “I don’t know why you don’t understand Extension Methods, clearly they are the better alternative. Let me break it down into the differences between Imperative and Declarative Code and you will see that the Cloud economics on the alternate route are negligible and that Extension Methods are superior. It is not my fault that this knowledge transfer session is taking so long and that I am, as some people consider, genius.”

Instead tell the project manager, “Let’s say you want to wash a very big rock.  You could put the rock in the bathtub, then go to the well, fill up a bucket, dump the water into the bathtub, and then go back to the well and get more water, and repeat it until you have enough water in the bathtub to wash the rock.  That’s one way to do it and it will definitely wash the very big rock.”

“Or, what you could do is hurl the big rock and skip it a million times across the surface of a large ocean.”

“That’s a better way to do it.  Extension methods.”