[thelist] The myth of Common Knowledge

[sam foster]

Its all to easy to make assumptions about other peoples knowledge /
abilities. How many people have given a talk or presentation on one
topic, and someone says "whoa how did you flip between those
applications so fast. What's Alt tab?" Or wound up explaining the
differences between an absolute and relative path.

(at this point I'd suggest several people on the list will quietly
mutter to themselves, so what *is* the difference between an absolute
and relative path? And why is "./somepage.html" perfectly valid? ..
another assumption, sorry)

That's the value of having a list like this. The most basic SQL
question will push me into lurker mode and I'll sit back and soak it
up. But I can add to front-end development discussions, for example.

Recently I saw a presentation where the speaker showed some
conventions he'd come up with for formatting sql queries. Wow. Why
didn't I ever think of that.. a stupid simple thing that it turns out
is really important to someone. Same goes for regexp - in "Perl Best
Practices", Damien Conway advocates treating regexp as any other
subroutine, using the /x flag, and indenting and formatting as you
would any other. Its stuff like that...

Sam

On 10/2/06, Joel D Canfield <joel at spinhead.com> wrote:
> > What do you think?
>
> Excellent idea.
>