I get the question “Kent, what exactly is it that you do?” quite frequently, especially given that I go on trips to various locations in Mennonite-land at least once per quarter.

On one such trip, I realized the difficulty of explaining what I do while—surprise!—explaining what I do. The bottom line of this difficulty is abstraction. If you ask a farmer what he does, he can go to the grocery store, pick out any assortment of non-gluten-free, non-keto items, shake them vigorously in your face and yell, “SEE I MADE THIS!”

I, on the other hand, have nothing to put in your face and yell, “SEE I MADE THIS!” So, I get to say something like this:

Well, I just kinda tap on a keyboard, maybe go on a little walk. I don’t really know, sorry. Not sure what I do. I code. I don’t know. I work in cybersecurity. No, no, we don’t protect from hackers, we just have this management tool that we do. Well, we do this aggregation thing that we sell to other companies. Well, we aggregate data from SIEMs and SOARs and IAAS and CMDBs and data lakes and other vendors and put it all in one place so you can data more effectively. Hey where are you going? Sigh….

Back to this conversation I had with someone one time. After trying to have the above monologue, I started talking about a very cool sheet music app that I’ve been pretending to work on for the last year. Then I realized, oh, I can pull out my phone and ACTUALLY SHOW people what this thing is. It’s something that will “disrupt the way YOU experience sheet music” or something like that.

So, on to some of these thoughts about abstraction. Lately at work, I’ve been researching Kafka. Now, as you may not know, Kafka was a famous author that was born in Czechia in the late 1800s. No, actually that’s not the right Kafka. Let me try again. Kafka “is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.”¹ This is actually a good description of what Kafka is. It doesn’t have as much soul-suck as some things do.

I started watching an hour-long presentation about using Kafka for “Developing Real-Time Data Pipelines” and that’s when I realized once again, that abstraction is a recipe for soul-suck.

Here’s a sample:

Here’s how you can Big Data your Big Data faster and with more energy! Most companies start out with Data and Hadoop and the data goes into Hadoop but then you Kafka. Now you can Kafka to make your Hadoop Scale Data Bigger. Decentralize your Data Pipelines with Kafka so that you can Big Data more effectively! What about Data is Big? Why is it Big? What Data is it? We don’t know. It’s just Data that’s being Data’d so that people can Data things with it. What sort of things, you ask? Well, we don’t know, but we’d better support it. With a Hadoop cluster we can do data things and then we have problems. If we do it with Kafka then we can change our data from XML to JSON to Avro to BSON to MessagePack and then back to XML. Oh, wow. And then you can do something with it every step of the way. What’s better than having your social security number exposed in one format? How about FIVE formats! What fun!

Ok, so, this kind of stuff really sets me off to the point that I eventually have to vent about it. So what am I supposed to do about this? I think this is the nature of most work in the corporate world. I, the programmer, am isolated from the users. I don’t know any users of my product. In turn, those users will be isolated from the person who actually decides to purchase the product for them to use (this isn’t always the case, of course)

The answer to this problem, of course, is to just go be Amish. Or not. Maybe pick a job with less abstraction, like carpentry. Maybe one day, this stuff about “data” won’t suck my soul dry anymore. I don’t know.

On a different note, go check out https://stanzamusic.org. It’s going to be an amazing thing.

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