[Sigia-l] Programming IAs was: Little things an IA MUST know/do

[James Spahr]

This has been an interesting thread for me--considering that I'm 
someone who wears a couple hats.

The original question was 'what else does an IA need to know?' I think 
an IA needs to know enough about the technologies that she deals with 
at the office, so she knows what she doesn't know--and she knows where 
she can acquire knowledge if she needs to.

Now this is a fuzzy and vague answer. Some people are socially astute 
and can make it through life by building a strong social network, and 
leverage that network so the depth of their knowledge doesn't need to 
be deep. Others need to have deep knowledge so they can be part of (and 
get access to) someone else's social network.

Then there is the small minority (not unlike myself) who would prefer 
to foster a respectable knowledge base in a couple areas, just because 
using a social network was never a very comfortable thing to do. (that 
was a difficult sentence to write)

So the answer (IMHO) is that it depends, but at least I explained what 
is depends on.

------

On the subject of learning to program and that doing so will make you a 
better IA/Designer/Sushi Chef--I say for a majority of people this is 
simply not true.

For the most part, I'm an information designer. I can code, I 
understand basic OOP design, and I can  manage, and create (a properly 
normalized) RDBMS. For the most part this hampers my ability to design. 
Perhaps it is because I am usually doing the code and the design 
work--but more often than not I find that having elegant, efficient 
code and a wonderful UI means that you have a really ugly layer of code 
interfacing the two.

Perhaps it's because I'm a crappy programmer (programming is certainly 
not why I was but on this earth), perhaps it's because I'm working with 
the wrong language or maybe it's just the nature of the web.

Either way, my designs will suffer because of technical issues, and I 
need to work hard so I can view my design work without the cloud of 
technical knowledge informing my decisions. I would much rather 
approach the design work with a very user centric view point, but since 
I'm doing the coding as well, that is a very easy view point to forget 
about.


James.