{"id":3031,"date":"2026-01-21T00:00:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T22:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=3031"},"modified":"2026-01-21T00:00:31","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T22:00:31","slug":"icebergs-and-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=3031","title":{"rendered":"Icebergs and maps"},"content":{"rendered":"

I generally avoid labels. Words are the icebergs of reality, freezing us in limited conceptions of a far greater non-conceptual reality, and all that.<\/p>\n

I recently bought three spinach and feta pies at a farm stall. However, I didn’t look at each one individually, and someone had slipped a steak and kidney pie into the spinach and feta drawer.<\/p>\n

The ten-year old, who has a strong conception of himself as a vegetarian, took a bite of the offending pie, and his face contorted in horror, probably resembling the cow he was eating in its last moments.<\/p>\n

Last time I spoke to him about it (yes, we’re still speaking), he recalled the experience by saying that he ‘almost wasn’t vegetarian any more’.<\/p>\n

Same word, but his iceberg is a far cry from the restaurateur in Nieu-Bethesda<\/a>, happily confirming that she served vegetarian food, and that her own son was vegetarian, before serving up a fish dish.<\/p>\n

Recently, the iceberg applied to my work role has changed. For most of the time since I joined the MariaDB Foundation<\/a> in 2013, the label assigned to me was “Principal technical writer: documentation”. Fairly dull, but reasonably descriptive of what took up a large part of my time. Of course, just like everyone must be ‘Chief’ this, ‘Senior’ that, I’d generously been given ‘Principal’, although for much of the time there was no-one else dedicated to documentation.<\/p>\n

I’d happily do without a label, but I recognise one has to say something, and I wanted to highlight that I’m no longer involved in documentation. This time I was given the task of coming up with the label.<\/p>\n

Goals were:
\n1) draw a line under server documentation
\n2) not too pretentious
\n3) generic enough to cover my current loose role, and cater for possible future changes
\n4) avoid hierarchy, overlaps with others<\/p>\n

We eventually settled on ‘Digital Cartographer’. I imagine myself as an intrepid medieval explorer, navigating the rocky and rapidly changing digital landscape, while pencilling in kraken and dragons at the edges. Let’s hope I don’t meet the same fate as many of my predecessors, sailing off the edge. <\/p>\n

I think it meets three out of the four criteria at least. And as an added bonus, LinkedIn is now utterly confused and I can safely bin all of its job suggestions.<\/p>\n

Image is a portion of the Catalan Atlas<\/a>, from Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I generally avoid labels. Words are the icebergs of reality, freezing us in limited conceptions of a far greater non-conceptual reality, and all that. I recently bought three spinach and feta pies at a farm stall. However, I didn’t look at each one individually, and someone had slipped a steak and kidney pie into the… Continue reading Icebergs and maps<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth-literature","category-metal-technical","category-water-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3031"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3039,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031\/revisions\/3039"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}