I have a tendency to follow the line that less is more. Maybe it’s because I’m short. I like short sentences. Short paragraphs. Bullet points. And one side of A-4, no more!
But sometimes I have to admit that more is better. What would Proust be like without the long, meandering, sentences that wrap you up and spin you round until your own thoughts are as mixed and muddled as the memories his narrator is dancing through? That must be the very effect he is aiming at. More is also sometimes better when it comes to software and learning.
I am continuing up my learning curve with Drupal. It’s getting better. (Well, I mean I’m getting better at it.) I’m discovering the efficiency that comes of managing multiple Drupal sites. I’ve got three live ones on the go at the moment as well a few test sites. For the live sites I’m trying to follow good practice. Part of that is implementing only what you know. The efficiency comes in when I am able to propagate something new across numerous sites. Repetition, as Proust knew well, has a strengthening effect on memory. My learning curve gains breadth as well as height.
Not so long ago I met up with a number of people who make their livings setting up and maintaining Drupal sites. One thing that struck me was how many of them stuck to a very constrained set of parameters for clients. But it makes perfect sense. Their objective is both to provide the client with what he or she wants/needs while at the same time taking advantage of whatever efficiencies they can build into the process in order to minimize the time and labour cost of developing a new site. One person I spoke to said he could produce a new site, top to bottom, in 15 minutes (he was using the Drush Package Manager, which I’m not even thinking about at the moment).
There is a sense in which the more opportunities you have to exercise a new skill the less cost that is needed to reach a satisfactory end point for any of those opportunities. Which sounds rather convoluted. It’s probably simpler to say that: less is more and more is less.