Research

I'm currently working on a short term project that requires me to do a bunch of research so that I can get to the point where I understand an industry and a marketplace well enough to present a solution to common challenges. It's a challenging writing task, longer than a blog post (and longer than I'm used to) and one where the end result needs a level of crispness and polish that's beyond the usual.

My favorite tool for research these days is to search the web and bookmark everything that I find that might be useful. I'm using Pinboard for bookmarking, in large part because in addition to supporting public bookmarks for sharing and being social, it also has a well-thought-out set of tools for keeping your private bookmarks private. Clipping my way through the net and storing things away has made it possible to get to a level of confidence that I know something about the topic, enough to tell a condensed story of how it works and to simplify where it's possible to simplify without adding confusion.

The other favorite tool for research is the phone call. I'm surprised in this case just how many people I know who know details about the field, and how easy it is to get them to talk at length about what they know and about issues that aren't typically written down. Whenever you look at a completely new field there will be some substantial gap between what's been committed to publication and what people who are experts know from hallway conversations at conferences, and it's been good to tap into that.

The actual writing is a process of slowly and thoroughly cranking out a shitty first draft of what I think I want to say, printing it out, carving it up and editing on paper, and then going back to sort through what I did to make it better. I'm hoping I can get to a proper second or even third draft before the project is due, and not change my conclusions too much before I'm done.