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Good standards are like a good starting word in Wordle
What’s your starting word in Wordle?
I use STEAM. It has a good combination of common vowels and common consonants, and for some reason I find it pleasing (something to do with steam engines?). There are words which are mathematically proven to be better, but I like this one.
In case you’re one of the few people who didn’t become familiar with Wordle during the pandemic, I should explain. It’s an online game where you have six attempts to guess a five letter word, and each letter in the guess is marked green, for a correct letter in the correct place, yellow, for a correct letter in the wrong place, or grey for a letter which is not in the word at all. It’s just about hard enough to give you a sense of achievement, but easy enough that you get the right word most of the time. It also has the virtue that everyone who plays the game worldwide gets the same word every day, making it feel as if you are all playing together - you can also share your pattern of green, yellow and grey without giving the game away.
Eat your standards: they’re good for you
I didn’t like vegetables much when I was growing up.
This might have been due to my immature palate, or it might have been because the quality and variety of vegetables in British cuisine in the 1970s were limited. I knew that I was supposed to eat more vegetables, but why should I when there were plenty of burgers, chips and beans to go around? (Do chips and baked beans count as vegetables? Technically, yes, I suppose, but not aesthetically or nutritionally.)
I think that technologists sometimes have a similar attitude to standards. We know that we should follow them, we know that they are probably good for us, but we also feel that they cramp our style, and that they are rather less fun than they could be. This is especially the case when we have the figures of central governance, change boards and process approvals looming over us, asking us whether we have implemented our standards and whether we can prove it, the technical equivalent of asking whether we have eaten our vegetables and whether we have clean plates to show for it.