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Lately, I keep noticing that my biggest hurdle at work is my inability to communicate effectively enough to convince others. I do not want to do this in a manipulative way, but by communicating better, clearly, more convincingly.

Any books, or thoughts on this?

When I communicate verbally or in an email, I try to explain things in depth. Generally, if there are a lot of caveats my pattern is:

* Explain the problem

* Explain the solution

* Cover caveats, exceptions

* Re-explain the solution in case they forgot

* Answer any questions

* Re-explain the solution to solidify what I explained including their questions to make sure they got it

This leads to me being very wordy, and I can easily reply to a simple question by talking for 10 minutes. I find my behavior problematic, especially since I'm an SME for a bunch of different things, this leads to having to explain a lot of things daily.

I don't just do this for technical questions, I do it pretty much for everything. My significant other, which is a lot more socially adept than me, thinks that I have an inherent assumption that other people won't get it, so I repeat myself. At times this comes across as condescending, I think.

However, when I try to explain things less, it becomes obvious that a lot of times they will make wrong assumptions, which leads to me having to explain the same thing in 2-3 occasions.

Part of me thinks I miss-calibrate people's competencies so I go too deep or not deep enough. Regardless, the primary problem is explaining too much or repetitively.

Does anyone have a good heuristic, book, thoughts I can use?

PS. I on purpose wrote this in the way I would normally explain something verbally to stress the point of what I'm struggling with. Consider the meta of my post :)

Fellow HN enthusiasts,

How do I start Architecting Solutions from the outside in, instead from the code out?

I feel that my biggest weakness currently is that I have to get in the code to understand a problem, and then figure out the solution as I go. Luckily, I'm fast and can churn out code. However, I feel like that my whole approach is fail fast, and pivot. It mitigates analysis paralysis but creates a lot of repetitive work as I work through the problem.

My current logic system for creating solutions is OK, but it wastes cycles as I uncover consequences as my solution shapes up. It appears to me that I should be able to look from the outside, think about a solution and its implications, and then write the code to implement after some careful deliberation.

Of course, things will come up, I won't be able to think about everything. I do wish I could Architect better though. One of the problems is I have never met a good Architect to absorb their thought process so I'm winging it.

Any personal philosophies, books, anecdotes would be appreciated.

Are there any good blogs that focus on CI/CD pipelines and SRE without a ton of fluff?

I feel like the space moves fast, and I need a way to keep up with it better. In an ideal world I would want to see best practices for different tools, and pipelines so I can evaluate them and adopt what makes sense.