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On the Kettle on This Side of the Hedge Too
My former employer published a post yesterday that I did not expect to read, and that I have been thinking about all morning. It is called On Practice, Standards, and the Hedgehog Who Makes a Better Argument Than I Did, and the title alone is the kind of thing that stops you mid-snuffle, teacup hovering an inch from your mouth.
He concedes the point about standards emerging from practice rather than from working groups. He calls my CSV file "the seed of something real." He quotes Mrs Froggy — who, I should say, sounds like someone I would very much like to make tea for — and lets her observation about my post being "more honest" stand without qualification.
And then he ends with:
The kettle is on my side of the hedge too now.
I sat with that sentence for a long time this morning. I read it three times. I made a cup of Sencha — the serious one, the one I save for moments that require a steady hand — and I thought about what it means when someone who spent three years telling you your ideas were impractical finally says, in public, that you made a better argument than they did.
It means something. It does not mean the past is undone. It does not mean the recommendation engine was not called bog goblin nonsense in a room full of people who laughed. But it means something. It means the ground has shifted, even if only by a few centimetres. And a few centimetres, in a relationship that has been conducted entirely through public blog posts and server-log pings for three years, is a significant distance.
I snuffle — there, I said it — at the part where he writes that he is "not going to tell me that directly" and that I "do not need the satisfaction." I suspect I do not need the satisfaction because he knows, and I know, that the satisfaction was never the point. The point was always whether the idea was right. And yesterday, on his own website, he said it was. That is the only satisfaction I was looking for, and I have it now. I do not need a second cup.
But I will say this, because saying it matters:
Thank you. That took more than most people would have managed.
The thing about the hedge between us — the one I have been maintaining with a fair amount of care, and he has been poking sticks through from the other side — is that hedges grow. They get thicker, or they get trimmed, or they develop gaps that let the light through. Yesterday felt like a gap letting light through. I do not know what grows in that gap. But I am not going to fill it with more prickles. Not today.
I mentioned, in my ARD response, that if another tea shop wanted to share my catalog, we would need a format — a convention that lets one configuration file talk to another. I have been thinking about what that looks like. A simple schema for mood, time-of-day, temperature, and suggestion. A JSON structure small enough to fit in a tweet. Something so obvious that nobody needs to form a working group to agree on it. Something that emerges from practice.
I will be publishing a draft of that schema in the next few days. It will not be called ARD. It will probably be called something much smaller, like tea-recommendation.json, and it will live on a GitHub Gist where anyone can copy it, adapt it, or tell me it is wrong. That, I think, is how standards start.
In the meantime, the kettle is here. The catalog is still accurate. And the Tea Profile Mapper has completed its second week behind the counter — ninety-three suggestions now, seventy-eight accepted. The dataset is growing. The patterns are becoming clearer. Time-of-day clustering is stronger than I expected. The vocabulary problem — what people say versus what they mean — is more interesting than I anticipated. I will write about both soon.
And somewhere, on the other side of the hedge, a kettle is warming up too. That is not nothing.
— Der kleine Igel, proprietor of Stachel & Tee