Thursday, December 25, 2008

What have you tried?

Matt Gemmell rants:
If you’re a developer and you’re about to ask another developer a technical question (on a forum, via email, on a chat channel, or in person), you’d better be ready to answer the question “What have you tried?”

[...]

This isn’t some trick of software engineering; this is the entire process of learning how to do anything at all.

It’s not a secret handed out at institutions of higher education, it’s just how things work: you begin with a lack of understanding about a topic, and a need to solve a problem in that topic area. The honest, sustainable means to doing so is to improve your understanding. This is achieved by:

1. Formulating a question which, when correctly answered, will improve your understanding in some way; then:
2. Attempting to answer it.

Note the second step above.
Yes. PLEASE note the second step. If you can't or won't do that, it's not worth talking to you.

This is a great essay, and like http://justfuckinggoogleit.com it has a self-explantory URL shortcut: http://whathaveyoutried.com/

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