Learning

Sometimes it's difficult to see the benefit of things (like studying for A levels or degrees) from the perspective of the present, for young people today this seems ever more difficult as the world around us changes ever more rapidly and it feels like the learning of the past can become redundant even more quickly. I always advise the younger people I deal with at work to hold onto the thought that no learning, however small or seemingly irrelevant, is ever wasted and the trick is to be patient, a time will come when most of the things we know can be used, re-used or adapted to meet a new challenge. 

I was reminded of this recently at work where we're in the process of building a new software product. It's a tricky piece of engineering, in a subject area where we (as a team) have little experience. One of the biggest challenges when putting together a new product is to find an over-arching model or metaphor into which you can layer and fit the various concepts and components you need to build, this helps you to develop a set of terminology that everyone can learn and a structured way with which to describe the functioning of it to those inside and outside the team. We struggled for a while to capture this for our new product until I managed to dig up an old model for a product that I built back in the late 90s. That product is long since dead and was totally different (in purpose) to this one but it had an underlying dimensional-rule based model that suited the new product perfectly! With a quick dust off and a little re-jigging, the concepts and (updated) language could be re-used and learned by a whole new set of people to achieve a whole new set of outcomes. Of course the technology, architecture, data-storage and programming languages used to build the new product (i.e. the tools) are completely new and different and much more efficient that the original ones, but the underlying conceptual framework and terminology is about a 90% fit. 

I wonder if these same ideas will resurface again in another 20 years, when I'm long gone and the youngsters on the team now are scratching around trying to design some new product and need a bunch of solid concepts upon which to base it, what goes around etc..