My Curse by Design

I am cursed. The curse is so potent, so strong, that it could affect other people. In fact, not only can it affect the behavior in others, it could even make other people less productive than how much they could be.

I know too much.

My curse is that of the Knowledge. I've long realized that I must suffer from it, because I've written all the code. I know LightFrame inside-out. The presence of The Curse has been in my rationale at all times, but I just never actually noticed anything that would indicate its grave reality. Until now, that is.

The first time that I got a vague yet concrete hint of Its presence was when I did the presentation of LightFrame at work. Soon afterwards, I realized that with not-at-all-that-much of misinterpretation, people could've missed the essential points of this project. I knew the points – I have them lodged somewhere in my frontal lobe. I simply assumed that the choices of my words in my presentation conveyed them to others, but I never really checked whether they were clear enough, once the slides were done.

Listeners might not become imbued with the niceties of LightFrame, discard it as redundant and go on with their lives. In fact, just about that did happen.

A more recent and real slap-in-the-face is the documentation process I'm currently busy with. If you'll excuse a slight detour in my writing; as I've told before, I held a brief Git workshop at work. During the workshop, I happened to make a comment about Git's documentation: [paraphrased] "The documentation can be a bit confusing and hard to get grasp of. Although it's thorough and informative, much of it is written by [the author,] Linus Torvalds himself. And that's the problem – he knows the material too well, and apparently has a hard time explaining the concepts to a person who doesn't know all the things he knows."

Well, see: I'm there now. I'm writing a non-technical manual, that should be easy to read and understand, about something I have intricate technical knowledge of. It's hard, if not outright impossible, to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know what you know.

I find myself constantly analyzing what I've written; erasing passages too elaborate and verbose, rewording sentences here and there and/or rewriting paragraphs because I'm trying explaining it from various angles. What does the reader not know? In which ways could my words be interpreted? Is this more helpful than confusing? These are the self-doubting questions that haunt me. The answer to all of these questions, more often than not, is "I don't know!"

I wish I knew less, so I could do a better job...