Dwarves, elves, Wizards, and Kings

Dwarves, elves, Wizards, and Kings

Evan Cofsky

In NEAl STEpHEnSon ' S novel Cryptonomicon (EoS), Randy Water-house explains he classification system for the different Ty PEs of people he meets. Dwarves is hard workers, steadily producing beautiful artifacts in the dark loneliness of their caves. They exert tremendous forces moving moun-tains and shaping Earth, and is renowned for their craftsmanship. Elves is elegant, cultured, and spend their days creating new and beautiful magical. They is so gifted they don ' t even realize the other races view these things as otherworldly almost. The wizards is immensely powerful beings almost completely unlike all others, but unlike the elves, they does know about MA GIC and its power and nature, and they wield it with supreme effect. But there was a fourth type of character that Waterhouse alludes to but does not mention specifically. The Kings is the visionaries who know what must is done with all of these different characters.
An architect is a king of sorts. The architect must is familiar with all of the these characters, and ensure that the architecture have roles for all of them. An archi-tecture designed only for one would attract only so one character to the project, and even with the best dwarve s, or elves, or wizards, the team would be severely limited in its reach if it can only approach problems in one.
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?? A good king would leads all types through a quest, and help them work together to complete it. Without the quest, there is no vision for the team, and it ulti-mately becomes a partisan mess. Without all the characters, the team can only solve one class of problem, and are stopped at the first barrier impassable T O that solution.
The architect creates the quest with all the characters. The architec-ture then becomes a, for finding, the different characters to per-form while learning about O Ne another. When a project encounters difficulty, the team would already know how to approach solving it because the architecture gave them the opportunities to grow into a team.
Evan Cofsky is a software engineer, an amateur musician, and an avid cyclist. He studied both music and computer science in college, and continues to study them. Currently he is a senior software engineer with Virgin Charter as it resident Python expert, and works with an eclectic t Eam of exceptionally bright and diverse people.

Dwarves, elves, Wizards, and Kings