#emphasismine

As part of the kit, Kim created a headset with “low arousal colors,” or more neutral soothing tones, favored by those with autism, reproducing an “autistic vision” of surrounding stimuli. There’s also a set of earphones that provide the overwhelmed auditory soundscape that is one of the most distinctive sensory characteristics of autism. “Every noise and sound is magnified, distorted, and muddled so it becomes very hard to make conversation while using the tool, much as an autistic person would experience life.”

And are the demands being made really unreasonable? Sure, they may look unreasonable from the point of view of what I know, but I doubt that they’re being made just to be unreasonable. Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment, and ask what would it look like if the request did have value to the requester. What would that value be? What would have to be true for this request to make sense? This understanding is essential for a successful translation.

Of course, it is a lot more work than just going through the motions. But when I take the time and energy to do this, I invariably find that the request is not arbitrary, from the point of view of the requester. The request is just a manifestation of what they really want.

Like networking we have a complex stack, with infrastructure on the bottom and applications on top. Typically, we end up writing a lot of glue code to make this stack work. But glue code can be brittle: it needs to be maintained and tended to.

What we need is a common interface that allows pieces of this stack to communicate with one another. Ideally something already standardized in the industry. Something that would allow us to swap in/out various layers with minimal friction.

That is the power of SQL. Like IP, SQL is a common interface.