I went to school at Western Washington University and got a degree in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. In damn near every writing class, you’d hear the same 3 words. Show, don’t tell.
Independent of writing style, a scene inspires and communicates more. A quick example:
Version 1:
Bob was hurt and furious after Marie’s “I miss you.” text. “2 months and this shit?” he thought.
vs
Version 2:
The phone buzzed. A text. Marie: “I miss you.” Bob’s eyes watered a bit as he tapped the 3 dots, and hit ‘Block.’
I bring “Show, don’t Tell” up because, although it’s been embedded in my brain for the past ~20 years, a recent beer-night conversation with a friend (Hi Branden!) reminded me of those words. He was talking about the power of a good demo. Having tech to show off is simply more compelling than a simple conversation.
If you want to try something new, or convince someone of your idea, remember Branden and his idea. Show, don’t tell.
A developer I’ve been coaching finally executed a great demo on Angular for our weekly developer meeting. She spent nearly 3 months learning Angular. Her demo contained a soup to nuts implementation of a site, including tests, test coverage, a CI / CD pipeline deploying the site all the way to an azure site. She did this demo over the course of 45 minutes.
I was thinking about what sort of conversation it would be if she didn’t have the full demo. Maybe 5 minutes? Maybe she’d have been overruled, or even redirected to another technology.
But a full demo? She had the whole group listening.
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