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What do all of these have in common?

They’re all ways for us to request silence. Momentary interruptions in the flow of information. They are essential tools in how we process sensory input. A pianist plays a phrase, and the rest allows the audience to process what they just heard. Silence helps our brain sort out the world around us.

Our OSU senior group projects have been assigned, and our team will be working on a Website Security Research Project. In this project, we get to make, break, and harden a web app against common security exploits. Fun!

During this project, in addition to doing a lot of coding, we’re going to do a lot of communication. We’ve got weekly standups to prepare for, articles to write, and progress to demonstrate.

In my last blog post, I implored you to explore an artful life, regardless of your role. In this post, I am asking you to embrace silence – visual, written, symbolic, auditory, interpersonal, gustatory silence. Think about sipping a warm cup of tea or a glass of wine. You could guzzle it down, but most of us prefer to add silence — time between sips — to extend and deepen our experience.

In this article, I am giving you a little extra silence.

In this article, I’m preparing where I can add silence to our project, to make it more effective.

Our web app will need a basic interface, a user database, CRUD functionality, multiple live versions, endpoints to access our hardening demonstrations, and good, modular code our team can quickly iterate on. We’ll need to set up a well-organized GitHub and write thoughtful articles. We’ll have the opportunity to plan our silences throughout:

• A minimal web app interface, to make it clear how to interact with the site (visual silence)
• Thoughtful, consistent comments in the code (functional silence)
• Time between standups, emails and text to allow the team to work on their own sections (interpersonal silence)
• A GitHub split into logical sections, that don’t contain too much information (symbolic silence)
• Well-paced presentations to demonstrate our progress (auditory silence)

Good communicators understand that silence is one of your most powerful tools. At the start of a project, we’re abuzz with ideas, conversations and plans. There’s so much to do and explore that the time for silence can get lost.

I am going to do my best to give silence its due in this project. I will not add feature “fluff” to our interface to take up space. I will slow down and write good comments. I will give my teammates the time they need to do their best work. I will plan and practice what I am saying, so I can be understood.

I will enjoy this warm cup of tea, and the silence it contains.