My New Space on Quora

I was trying to figure out what subdomain name to choose for my new space on Quora, I tried "musings," of course, to go with the name of this blog. 

"Taken," said Quora. 

I tried a few others until the word "triumphant" came into my head. Does anyone really understand what causes certain words to jump into your consciousness when you're trying to think of a unique name for your website domain name or company name? 

I tried it and to my surprise, it was not being used and the subdomain became mine.

triumphant.quora.com

That's the address for how to get to my unique space (web page) on Quora.

Pretty damn neat.

It wasn't until later on when I picked up the book I had been reading that I came to understand why "triumphant" had been the word to pop into my cranium at that moment.

That book is "Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialized World."

In the book, David Epstein lays down a compelling case for what I've always believed. I've marketed myself as a "technology generalist" on my LinkedIn profile for perhaps a decade or more. Occasionally I viewed that as a failure. Was I not dedicated enough to pick a technology and specialize in it? Was I too eager to blow with the wind and move from one technology to the next as fashion evolved in the world of hi-tech? Or was that the right thing to do? 

When I received my computer science degree from the University of Windsor in 1993 and launched my career, the web was on the cusp of exploding. My degree program actually included COBOL as one of the courses. Mind you, the program also included courses on computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and discrete math. The point is that COBOL hadn't yet been completely ousted from CS degree curriculums at universities. No one knew where the web was going to take us. 

Being agile and willing to switch focus from the entrenched technology of today to the technology of the future was probably a smart enough idea. But it was not the instinct of my parents' generation where one picked a field and a job and an employer and that was what went on your tombstone (so to speak). 

The book "Range" argues that specialization, such as what Tiger Woods did by investing his entire childhood and life into one narrow skillset, rarely leads to overall success in life. Instead, a much more diverse set of skills is favored. Think of it as a multi-disciplinary approach to life. 

With that in mind, I guided my daughter to take a course in C programming even though her major is biology and her curriculum actually recommended calculus more strongly. I felt vindicated when while reading through "Range" I came across the paragraph that talks about Jeannette Wing, a CS professor at Columbia University, and her philosophy of teaching students about "computational thinking" as a way to introduce multi-disciplinary elements into specialized degree programs. 

In her words, "Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task. It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem."


Thanks for reading.

To read more about my activities on Quora, check out triumphant.quora.com.

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