Getting Real is a “quick and dirty” read on doing things in a “quick and dirty” way. The tenets remind me of Voltaire’s Candide in his advice to tend to one’s own garden rather than fixate on the world at large, and of the seeming tautology: Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Yet works such as this provide a valuable loophole: gaining the vicarious experience of others bad judgment so that we may grow wiser while obviating first-hand failure. With perhaps more don’ts than dos, this book can help all of us emerge a bit from the self-regarding torment the words “new,” “technological,” and “project,” haphazardly strung together like Christmas lights at a frat house, brings to the junior academic soul.
Pick something, is it bigger than a breadbox? Do you even know how to build a breadbox? See, already we’re mired in considering yeast, gluten, temperature, humidity, materials and locations; the trap easily makes itself. While the advice in this book is specifically targeted to tech startups, it has some salient lessons for us (as we further embark on our ITCP projects), a few of which I will paraphrase. 1- Don’t try to “reinvent the wheel;” 2- Focus on a real thing or issue; 3- Don’t invest heavily in niche solutions (don’t learn java for one button;) 4- Don’t try to anticipate all possibilities, just be ready to respond; 5-get something done: ugly, wonky and working is better than a beautiful theory; 6-Don’t add features before you develop function. 7- Try to work in chunks; 8-keep working until you have something for others to test and critique; 9- If you can’t break the concept down to doable tasks, it’s still just a concept; 10-get feedback from those who may actually use your project.
My only issues with this “manifesto” are with points 8 and 10 in the previous paragraph. The truth is that academics work woefully alone. Academia is silos within silos, a nesting doll of departments and offices. As a rule, academics (emerging or otherwise) do not work in teams, this can make it very difficult to put realistic constraints on projects that often live too long and grow too large in the mind. This isolation has one retreating time and again to the grand recesses of our own overexcited minds. The esoteric nature of most academic content areas means that it is unlikely we will build teams to share in the workload and day-to-day decision making. Yet, I think academics can help each other “get real,” maybe this course will enable some such pairings. Having accountability buddies could help us all get out of our heads and on with our work. How wonderful and refreshing would it be to have someone also engaged in a technology project, though perhaps from another discipline, check in and tell you: “Don’t do that, that’s stupid.” I myself would be infinitely grateful.
