By Stephen Toub
Writing an editor’s note is not an easy task. Based on my extensive research into many development magazines, I’ve found that to do it correctly you need to start by writing about a topic completely unrelated to anything development-focused.
You then wax poetic about the weather, political affairs, or the latest fad in high-tech gadgetry. And you need to come up with a few minimally thought-out recommendations for strategies that will solve all of the world’s problems.
To make it a truly outstanding editor’s note, however, you also need to invent a new word for something that already has several well-known names, “proclamize” your publication as the best thing since sliced bread, include several acronyms without definition, and throw in a few trite lines of code (which, ideally, will have a few lurking bugs).
When I set out to write this page, I intended to do none of this, but the pattern is difficult to avoid, IMHO. This being my first editor’s note, and most likely my last, I feel no compulsion to continue the pattern with the non sequitur that is supposed to follow—inevitably an attempt at using misdirection to convince the reader that everything discussed up to this point is crucial to her ability to implement the next big software application, or to even comprehend the pages that follow.
Snap Judgment 