PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

April 2, 2004

April 2 2004

Interweb Wrangler

One of the more onerous duties of being a web architect is answering the ubiquitous small talk lead-in, “So, what do you do?”

To the unacquainted, it may appear to be an easy and straightforward question, equal in simplicity to questions like, “how are you?”, or, “did you happen to see a small monkey in a tutu come by this way?”, when in fact supplying an adequate response is a Byzantine process that depends upon the following criteria:

  1. Do you actually know what web architecture is?
  2. Are you really just wasting time until the one person you know at this party shows up so you can say “hi” and leave?
  3. Does this person that you’re talking to give a crap?
  4. Are you trying to get into this person’s pants?
  5. Could this person tell you the difference between AOL and the Internet?

In most cases, a “yes” to two or more of these questions leads you to assume that you are dealing with a technologically competent individual, and you, confident in your assertion that a short job description would suffice, proffer the following.

“I’m a website architect” — the addition of “-site” eased into your job title, just in case the inquirer is susceptible to thoughts of you being some kind of bioengineer who is trying to recreate spiderwebs.

The response comes back to you like a post-garlic-festival belch, “Oh, you make web pages!”, a response that sweeps the very foundation of hierarchical superiority out from under you and lays you down flat next to the guy who advertises web design services on Craigslist and openly admits he works exclusively in FrontPage.

Telling a web architect that he makes web pages is akin to describing a neurosurgeon as one who shaves people’s heads, a tax accountant who does math well, a trial lawyer who knows how to use Lexis-Nexis — all true, but completely missing the crux of what the profession is about.

“Well,” you say, with the appropriately sympathetic but hubristic intonation, “I lay out the plan for the entire site, how people move through it, what to call everything, where to put things on each page, etc., etc.”

“Oh, so it’s more like project management?” is the next attempt at summarizing your job, which is now tangentially moving away from your explanation. At this point, you determine that continuing any further discussion about contingency design, controlled vocabularies, and n-tier acrhitectures would be unproductive.

“Yeah, pretty much,” you concede.

And for the remainder of the day, you simply answer, “Yes. Yes, I do make web pages. Have you ever been whitehouse.com?”



4 Comments »

  1. Haha…so funny. Whats’up with the six month gap in posts? BTW, I lost your number with my last cell phone. Send me an email yo!

    Comment by Pat — April 28, 2004 @ 3:51 am

  2. So true.

    I am not a web architect (at least not yet), but trying to describe the difference between making a website and developing web applications is rarely a successful endeavor.

    Comment by David S — July 6, 2004 @ 5:21 pm

  3. What do you do? I’m an Internet Consultant
    Almost everytime time we socialize we come accross the point where someone asks What do you do? I usually answer I’m an Internet Consultant. And that’s because Web related jobs have so many definitions that people tend to call you…

    Trackback by blog.deLaranja.com — July 11, 2004 @ 3:03 am

  4. What ever happened to Software Engineer or even the general “programmer” (aka “The Person That Makes Your Job Easier or Worse”). If your job title has the word “web” in it, you can count on people dissmissing you as a real professional. I usually make no indication and just say “I write software”. This sets up the next serious of questions that help you describe what you do with more ease. Hey, at least I’m not a “Cave Dweller” ! :)

    -CV

    Comment by CV — July 21, 2004 @ 10:03 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

 

Reading

Viewing

Linking

  • The combination of Pitt and Soderbergh and Lewis wasn't enough to keep the Moneyball movie afloat...Sony canceled it "days before shooting was to begin".

    Accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.

    Sony was probably looking for something more BIG RED TEXTish.

    Tags: books   Brad Pitt   Michael Lewis   Moneyball   movies   Steven Soderbergh

  • Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!

    Tags: baseball   Ben Fry   infoviz   sports

  • Things will be significantly slower than usual around here this week...I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I'll see you next week.

    Tags: kottke.org

  • The New Yorker has an iPhone-specific site up. (thx, @level39)

    Tags: iPhone   The New Yorker

  • From Joseph Clarke in Triple Canopy, a comparison of the histories of the American megachurch and corporation.

    Lakewood and America's twelve hundred other megachurches -- congregations that draw between two thousand and fifty thousand people per weekend -- are not simply vast machines for passive spectatorship. Sunday services are convergences of worshipers who spend their weeknights at prayer groups, Bible studies, ministries, and missionary training sessions. Successful megachurches are like well-run companies, with intricate corporate structures devised to keep each member personally engaged; their pastors are like chief executives, maximizing the productivity of laborers in the evangelism enterprise. Jumbotron notwithstanding, the architectural and organizational tropes of the megachurch are best compared to those of the modern white-collar workplace.

    Tags: Joseph Clarke   religion

  • It looks as though the Netflix Prize might have been won through a combined effort of the top two teams. (thx, bergmayer)

    Update: All teams have 30 days to better the current high score before the winner is declared. But, someone has won the Prize. (thx, all)

    Tags: Netflix   Netflix Prize

  • New father Paul Drielsma thinks that the language around fatherhood needs to change.

    Scour the parenting forums on the Internet and you'll find the common lament that "DH" (darling husband) expects a medal whenever he "babysits" junior for a few hours. I have little sympathy for DH in these cases, but maybe a step in the right direction would be to stop using language that suggests hired help -- to stop referring to DH's job in the same terms as somebody who could legitimately stick his hand out at the end of his shift and demand a tip. DH isn't babysitting, he's parenting, and just changing that one word changes, for me at least, all sorts of connotations.

    Tags: language   parenting   Paul Drielsma

  • The clothes from Irina Shaposhnikova's Crystallographica show look as though they were created with 3-D rendering software but haven't quite finished rendering yet.

    Irina Shaposhnikova

    (via today and tomorrow)

    Tags: fashion   Irina Shaposhnikova

  • A short appreciation of the SR-71 Blackbird, an airplane that was literally faster than a speeding bullet.

    "It wasn't like any other airplane," he told me. It was terrifying, exciting, intense and humbling every time you flew. Each mission was designed to fly at a certain speed; you always knew the airplane had more. It was like driving to work in a double-A fuel dragster."

    The skin of the plane's fuselage was a whopping 85% titanium, which was purchased, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union.

    Update: See also SR-71 Groundspeed Check, Google Map of where all the Blackbirds are, and SR-71 Disintegrates Around Pilot During Flight Test:

    Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us. From that point, I was just along for the ride.

    (thx, doug, clay & tom)

    Tags: airplanes   SR-71

  • David Galbraith calculates that if buildings by famous architects were priced like paintings, a Le Corbusier building would be worth more than the entire US GDP.

    The top floor of Corbusier's Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.

    In terms of signaling, it's difficult to hang a house on one's parlor wall...buying a Corbusier means living in it wherever it happens to be located, at least part of the year.

    Tags: architecture   art   David Galbraith   economics   lecorbusier

  • You've likely seen this comparison of Harry Potter and the first Star Wars movie but that comparison has recently been expanded to include not only Potter and Star Wars but also The Matrix and Abrams' Star Trek.

    Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.

    Update: The connecting theme is the monomyth. (via @adamlgerber)

    Update: Or perhaps Potter is really Young Sherlock Holmes? (thx, stephen)

    Tags: Harry Potter   movies   Star Trek   Star Wars   thematrix

Links provided by kottke.org.

Archiving

Offering

Syndicating