The Temporary Expert
August 21st, 2005If you read this blog you may notice that from time to time I tend to write short, obscure and deeply technical posts, like yesterday about dynamic JavaScript in Safari, or a few weeks ago about MySQL parameter substitution in Python, or back in May about installing MSDE over remote desktop. Why the randomness? Well, it’s part of my programmer community service.
Back at Gnomedex I was having lunch with Josh from TinyScreenfuls and somebody from Microsoft whose name I didn’t catch. Josh was talking about his evangelism of blogging and RSS inside Intel, and how he tries to convince people that even though there is a large set of stuff (IP related information, release dates, etc) that they might not be able to talk about, there is an even larger set of stuff that they can. At which point, our lunch mate from Microsoft remarked (and I’m paraphrasing horribly) that in all fields, but especially technology, every now and then we are all temporary experts. When you’re sitting at your desk on Tuesday afternoon with seven opened browser windows and a dog-eared O’Reilly book going deep on a particular problem, chances are good that for that brief moment you are one of a handful of people across the globe that knows as much as you do about the problem you’re trying to solve. For that brief moment you are a temporary expert. And a blog entry is a great way to bottle that knowledge up.
So excuse the randomness in some of my posts. I’m just trying to help some poor sod get through his Tuesday afternoon.
August 23rd, 2005 at 5:33 pm
Great insight. I had forgotten about this conversation. I blogged it internally here at Intel - let’s see if it starts any interesting discussion. :-)