Exactly a year ago, on the occasion of my blog’s first anniversary, I posted an article with some advice for starting a blog. As part of that article, I posted a list of blogs I enjoyed and had been reading. Since today is the second year anniversary of this blog, I thought I’d continue the tradition and make it an annual exercise.

I did not write a lot on this blog this year – I have been incredibly busy. However, I am very happy to report that the blog has not died! I still managed to post some stuff here and there despite all of the craziness, and I’ve very happy with the quality of all of the blog posts I did manage to publish. I’m not as proud of all of the draft blog posts I started that I’ve yet to finish, but oh, well. You win some, you lose some. I still managed to write some spur-of-the moment angry rants but post them shortly thereafter, which I think is really what the spirit of this space existing is all about.

I think “communication skills” should really be thought of as two separate sets of skills.

There are the “hard” communication skills, which are easily visible and which I’m going to call “expository communication skills”. These are things like being articulate, being able to write coherently, being good at public speaking, etc.

Then there are the “soft” communication skills, which I’m going to call “collaboration skills”, which are all about having the ability to understand and influence and compromise and work with other people. These are largely invisible.

While the terms “distributed systems” and “distributed computing” are often used interchangeably, for my purposes, I’ve found it useful to draw a distinction. Distributed systems research is often focused on how to get multiple components of a system to act together in a reliable way, whereas distributed computing research is focused on how to use multi-component systems to solve a problem by breaking it down into different parts. While distributed systems is more of an engineering discipline focused on systems architecture, distributed computing is more of a mathematical discipline focused on the design of algorithms.

These are the notes I took while watching How to Speak, which was MIT professor Patrick Henry Winston’s yearly lecture on how to give talks. (It’s an iconic lecture, and you should definitely watch it). These notes are the key points, and they’re mainly for me, but I thought I’d share them here in case someone else might benefit.