Thought Picnic: Simplicity is key

Simplicity is design

Working in Information Technology roles for over 25 years, you come away with a lot of insights and experiences that hopefully forms the body of knowledge that I carry with me anywhere my services are engaged.

What gets to me most about environments that have pre-existing implementations I either need to support or update is the simple things that administrators and architects fail to put in place to make support accessible and easy.

Fundamental design thinking that means you only have to go digging when necessary, I prefer to make process chains as visible as possible, this could be down to simple naming conventions that link different processes together that you easily know what connects to the other thing by simple viewing of an administrative console.

Simplicity in security

One other thing I have learnt working in multinational environments is never to create administrative or common use passwords comprised of keyboard characters that change locations on the keyboard depending on the language.

Then, security, I have tended to call them the security Taliban because they seem to forget that their function is to facilitate access rather than restrict access. Yet, what you encounter in many environments are walls and restrictions that excites the ingenuity of the humanity to find and dig tunnels are circumvent these restrictions.

Simplicity and simple

I always have the mind of always designing in such a way that users do not end up crafting breakouts or hacks to obliterate or replace my design. In essence, whilst this reads like a technical blog, the goal of what I do is to create simplicity from implementation through to ease of use.

I never try to reinvent the wheel, rather, I find ways to get a smooth ride, I’ll work on the road. This is the essence of keeping it simple, using the wealth of experience to take the complicated out of everyday things and finding the simplicity that allows others to carry on from where I left off.