Why Reasonably Trivial
The saying comes from my friend and co-grad student at Colorado State University, Cam. He would use the phrase when asked by our advisor how difficult something was likely to be. Cam, being smart and witty, would respond with a statement to the effect of "oh that's reasonably trivial" which was often far from the truth.
The thing is, Cam wasn't wrong in saying this or at least not from his point of view. He had a way of seeing through complexity that made genuinely hard problems look approachable. Whether that was confidence, competence, or some carefully calibrated mix of both, I never quite figured out. Either way, the phrase stuck with me, partly because it's funny, and partly because it gets at something else about difficulty being relative. What follows is the differences from one person to another, and vice versa. This story begs the question of what is trivial and what is reasonable from person to person?
What Even Is Trivial?
First, I think it's worth discussing what trivial means, because that definition is also a bit vague, and well, non-evident. The formal dictionary definition is fine as far as it goes about something of little importance or value. But I don't think that fully explains the usage of the word that's become more common.
If you spend any time around mathematicians or engineers, "trivial" gets thrown around constantly. In math, a trivial solution is one that's obvious or degenerate — like solving an equation by just setting everything to zero. In grad school, I heard it used as shorthand for "this shouldn't take long," which, as Cam demonstrated, was sometimes more aspirational than accurate. To me, when I think of trivial, I think of an adjective describing something that is straightforward with limited or no obscurity hidden. The definition I'm shaping this blog around is trivial meaning simplistic, but not unimportant, just not unnecessarily complicated.
The Reasonable Part
"Reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this phrase. What's reasonable to a senior software engineer is probably not reasonable to someone who just opened a text editor for the first time. What's reasonable to someone with a background in electromagnetics is going to sound like noise to most people. Reasonable is entirely contextual, and that's kind of the point as we are all unique people navigating this world and, in my opinion, what makes the world and the communities we build as humans so fascinating.
I think that's what made Cam's saying stick with me because he wasn't claiming something was easy, he was claiming it was manageable given what he knew.
So What Is This Blog?
I don't think everything is reasonably trivial, and I certainly can't opine on every topic as if it is as I don't know everything, and some (likely many) topics are well beyond any understanding I could ever have or even think to have.
What I can do is write about things I've learned, built, or thought about in a way that hopefully makes them feel approachable. If you come away from something here feeling like the topic is more manageable than it looked going in, then the name is doing its job.
If it turns out something was harder than I made it sound well then maybe ask Cam or someone else. They'll probably tell you it's reasonably trivial.