"God is in the details" said Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and my recent insufficient amount of attention paid to details had invoked a great deal of wrath from the said god who punished me with sprees of weekend/late night work sessions. The best kind of education an engineer can get, I've come to see, is perhaps participation in large-scale projects that tend to forcefully demonstrate to us that engineering is just another name for detail management.

   Unfortunately the mere notion that details matter is only the first, and utterly inadequate, step towards effectively taming them. As I (rather belatedly) noticed, paying attention to details is oftentimes a choice -- a hard one -- that repeats at numerous junctures during a long project, and it's not dissimilar to the choice of whether to go for a run in a frigid morning. What it frequently comes down to is, at the end of a long day, perhaps frustrated and surely fatigued, whether I still take out my notebook and write down all the questions I need to ask certain people the next day; Or can I still sit myself down to write a note-to-self summarizing a piece of code I spent a few hours reading to help me come back to it more easily the next time.

   With the heightened awareness of how big things are realized by executing small details with high quality, I began to look for interesting details in the world, or put it another way: to study the architecture of details -- both their individual importance and how they play into a larger context to make their respective "wholes" better. By jotting down some of them, I hope to keep a record of, and think more deeply about, the art of herding details (cats).

   Writing novels, like any other important undertakings, are long-term projects by nature, with its many ups and downs. when the goings invariably get tough, the ability to just stay on the task becomes as important as the ability to do the task. One detail in Haruki Murakami's work habits is designed for such long-drawn-out battles, and he laid it out with an analogy to his beloved running: "... the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel: I stop everyday right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do this, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly ... To keep going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow." ¹

   In programming, to thoroughly understand something, be it a feature or a piece of code, one needs to step one abstraction level down. In other words, the know a bit more beyond what's necessary for the problem at hand. Likewise, stepping one level deeper often leads to remarkable products. When Gary Rogowski, a master furniture maker based in Oregon, set out to build some tables for a library, he didn't stop at the functional imperatives -- the tables should be at the right height and steady, etc. Recognizing that people who sit in a library love to daydream about what they are reading, he took the project to a whole other level with a thoughtful nuance: "I also wanted something in these tables to rest your eyes on. A detail that would help your mind wander." ²

   Chefs are consummate craftspeople, and at the core of their practice is mise-en-place -- French for putting in place, which essentially means keeping one's station clean and organized. Steve Jobs took this detail -- inconspicuous to most -- to an industrial scale: "I'd go out to the factory, and I'd put on a white glove to check for dust. I'd find it everywhere -- on machines, on the tops of racks, on the floor. And I'd ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory ... She didn't understand why. And I couldn't articulate it back then. See, I'd been very influenced by what I'd seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there -- and part of what we were lacking in our factory -- was a sense of teamwork and discipline. If we didn't have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren't going have the discipline to keep all these machines running." ³

SF. 08/2023