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Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?
- rlpb 16y agoThe strategy StackExchange is following is textbook. In fact, here it is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-Disruptive-Mainstream-Essentials/dp/0060517123 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-Disruptive-Mainstream... The network effect and the quality of contributors is everything. Start in an entirely new field and you'll end up with the blind leading the blind, and the quality and reputation of the site will plummet. Just take a look at That Other Q&A Site. For a new field, the site needs enthusiastic and highly competent contributors; otherwise it will fail.
- ojbyrne 16y agoI briefly liked Quora (partly because its the first site I've seen that serves up minified HTML). Now I find it boring, insular, and full of group think. Much like this article. And the valley. The concept that some non-valley site, that doesn't have all the cool kids behind it, might actually be successful is just not allowed within the techcrunch world-view.
- TomOfTTB 16y agoYou're a little harsher than I would be but you make a good point. The problem with online reputation on this type of system is most people won't verify the answers before they upvote them. At the same time an insular community creates a competition for status. So you get people who try to find and answer questions as quickly as possible regardless of whether the answer is right or not. As someone who goes to Stack Overflow regularly I see this situation all the time. It goes like this... 1. Person asks a question (e.g. "I need to build a service that will serve school districts in Los Angeles County. How do I go about doing that?") 2. Someone comes along and answers the question with something that seems right (e.g. "Here are a bunch of links on building REST services...") 3. That answer gets upvoted and the answerer gets his reputation boosted 4. Later someone comes along with the right answer (e.g. LA Unified requires all services to be WSDL discoverable so you need to look at SOAP"). But it's too late because the question's already scrolled into the abyss. So the guy who gave the wrong answer gets a better reputation and the guy who got the right one gets nothing (and the person who asked the question likely took the upvoted answer and didn't check back so they waist untold hours on the wrong thing)
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoI try and do my part by voting up the answers that are truly useful when I come across a question by searching, but I agree that it does tend to be a first-come first-serve type of system for the most part. They've taken some steps to alleviate that (badges for getting an older answer upvoted to +5), but it's still an issue.
- moe 16y agoI think your description of the problem is about right. But: As a SO-consumer this particular problem doesn't phase me. The better answers usually have more votes and sometimes the green checkmark is even on the best one - but when it's not, who cares? To me as a SO-consumer a bigger problem recently has been the duplication. For any given question there may be dozens of threads which makes it harder to track down the good one(s). If SO wants to improve they should imho work on their deduplication efforts. This might even be automatable to a point; let users vote on questions to be merged, and perform the merge when either the author agrees or a vote-threshold is met.
- tastybites 16y agoIt's faze. Read more books.
- moe 16y agoIt's also phase. Get out more. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=phase http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=phase
- tastybites 16y agoWow, urban dictionary. Consider me schooled.
- Locke1689 16y agoYour pedantry is not welcome here (as supported by your comment score). Please follow this rule in the future for posting on HN: always consider other user's comments in the best possible way they could have meant them.
- cheald 16y agoI'm curious why you're impressed by minified HTML. Usually, given the CPU cost to minify a page and the fact that savings are in the tens of bytes after gzip, it is nearly certainly an overall performance and user experience loss.
- adrianwaj 16y agoI think it makes the browser's job faster and easier. Minifying for me has improved the speed of my sites.
- codinghorror 16y agoThe savings is fairly minimal after gzip, and it comes at a cost -- removing all readability of HTML view source.
- 46Bit 16y agoOut of interest ... measured how?
- adrianwaj 16y agoSubjective measure. And I am not uncertain if an improvement has occurred or not. edit: however, I do not minify on-the-fly, I keep the source HTML, CSS and JS files space and line-break compressed (and variable-name compressed.) The speed increase may be due to less going down the wire, or it may just be faster to process by the browser due to some other mechanism. Also, having css and JS code within the HTML itself has sped things up too - no external files. Have a look at the source of http://twitya.com/index.php http://twitya.com/index.php - I also Gzip that, and this speeds it up as well. I keep a few line-breaks in for readability. Takeaway: what matters most is having as little data go down the pipe as possible in a compressed fashion, and not worrying about server load - that could be offset by the improvements on the browser. Also, Gzipping http://hackerbra.in http://hackerbra.in has led to a marked improvement, with its large slabs of text.
- yuvadam 16y agoActually, I think StackExchange is doing just fine. Going for the vertical communities (which have some overlap, no doubt) is a very clever strategy - it works. Pray tell exactly what Quora is achieving with its strategy. Right now it looks like an over-hyped version of Stack Exchange - Startups.
- Maro 16y agoI think online reputations work and matter a lot in Silicon Valley and the startup world, but anywhere else, not that much. Also, the attack on the "other" SE sites is lame. I regularly visit and am active on the Physics SE, and Quora's got nothing on it.
- taylorbuley 16y agoAgreed. The author: a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no. All these "other" SE sites are built around the things that real people are passionate about. That stuff is quite important!
- jayzee 16y agoThe point he is making is that stackoverflow is important because 1. It is useful at work 2. It is useful for getting work He dimisses the possibility that people asking questions about photography might not be photographers doing it for a living ( and a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no. ) Besides who can be more obsesses about scores than gamers?
- neutronicus 16y agoMathoverflow is awesome. I don't know if the stack exchange guys run it (it certainly uses their software), but it is already professionally relevant for practicing mathematicians.
- Aqwis 16y agoI believe he is referring to Math StackExchange (math.stackexchange.com), a site which was created to serve as a MathOverflow-equivalent for mathematics students or others who aren't professional mathematicians. I've found Math StackExchange to be highly useful, and the quality of the answers you get is higher than anywhere else.
- cristoperb 16y agoBut there is also http://mathoverflow.net/ http://mathoverflow.net/ Here's a meta question asking about the differences between the two sites: http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/41/differences-between-mathoverflow-and-math-stackexchange http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/41/differences-...
- codinghorror 16y agomathoverflow.net is an independent Stack Exchange 1.0 site on an old fork of the engine; math.stackexchange.com is a fully qualified Stack Exchange 2.0 peer site on the current rev of the engine. see: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-exchange/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-excha...
- wccrawford 16y agoI never understood this 'There can be only one' attitude. I'm fine with thousands of these sites existing. There doesn't have to be 1 that's better than all the rest, and I don't have to spend every waking moment finding it, or making sure I'm already using it. Sites also don't have to be 'important' for them to matter to people.
- brown 16y agoMy guess is that we're seeing the results of the tech blogger echo chamber. These self proclaimed experts need methods to legitimize their existence and quantify their awesomeness. What better way than a big fat number on the one end-all-be-all site? See also: Scoble was biggest contributor on Quora. Of course, it's all ridiculous (for now). Most people in the real world have better things to do than troll around on Q&A sites hoping for karma. Until someone figures out how to convert karma into a competitive paycheck, this is all nonsense.
- SwellJoe 16y agoI'd be hesitant to hire someone that had huge karma on any site (including HN), unless they had real projects to show that their passions include shipping rather than just talking real pretty about it on the Internet. Someone can be clever and knowledgeable, and still be a poor employee or co-founder. (And, my least productive times are often when I'm most interested in what's happening on reddit/HN/etc.)
- robryan 16y agoDecently large karma means there would be a lot of comments to browse through though which can give you an idea about the person. To a point be knowledgeable on startups and the tech scene is an advantage but yeah there is a point where time is better spend getting something done.
- SwellJoe 16y agoMy comment should be taken with the knowledge that I have pretty big karma at both reddit and HN (and StackExchange, though I've never browsed or considered signing up for quora). Obviously, I like to think I'm a pretty useful person to have around in a company. So, my comment is definitely one of balance rather than "don't hire people who talk a lot on the Internet".
- gsivil 16y agoThe issue of "reputation" is really interesting and my guess is that will be more and more important in the future. It is already important in specialized communities where it makes sense to be an expert or a master or a ninja or you name it or gain karma points. But I am not sure how important can it be in communities with many many users and without a well defined focus. He refers to a few metrics for the social component but it is not clear yet what a good and appealing "reputation metric" could be.
- neutronicus 16y agolet people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms. StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back and it makes absolutely no fucking attempt to worm its way into my social graph.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jules 16y agoWhat happens if you clear your cookies?
- Tycho 16y agoDoes it really matter? Accounts are just a minor convenience for most users of StackOverflow, they're not the gateways to your content like Facebook.
- jules 16y agoWell, one of the dynamics of stackoverflow is karma points, so I suppose yes.
- pan69 16y agoYou become a new user. Unless you solidify your account before doing so.
- kmontrose 16y agoThere is a way to recover your account if your cookie is lost. http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery (this is linked from /users/login) It does require that you provided a valid e-mail address at some point, which we don't require.
- statictype 16y agoDumb question: I went to http://www.quora.com http://www.quora.com and it's asking me to sign up. I know that the actual questions and answers are publicly viewable but is there any obvious way to get to them from the home page?
- benologist 16y agoClick one of the links down the bottom, the other pages have their infamous search/ask/etc input.
- statictype 16y agoYou're right, thanks. I'm giving my nod (for whatever that's worth) to the Stack* sites for putting questions right on the home page
- andywhite37 16y agoI agree, Quora has a pretty bad first-time user experience.
- ceejayoz 16y agoEspecially the "we've opted you into 15 different e-mail notifications that you'll have to disable one-by-one".
- linker3000 16y agoTotally. StackExchange sites welcome you with a display of their goods as soon as you approach the front of house, but having just headed over to Quora for the first time ever, I felt like I had been chased up a blind alley and couldn't find a doorway. I managed to sneak in through a crack in the fence (by going to another page as suggested in this thread, but the site front end seems to be designed to put off visitors.
- Ygor 16y ago"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX" SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it. And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?
- ceejayoz 16y agoClearly, StackOverflow needs more colour gradients.
- flyosity 16y agoThe same people who say SO has "a poor UX" are the same people who say that Reddit has "a poor UX". They're conflating gradients, rounded rectangles and text shadows with a user's experience of the site.
- bayareaguy 16y agoNot so. As I commented earlier[1], SO's data/ink ratio sucks compared to YC. 1- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305304 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305304
- codinghorror 16y agothe use case is rather different, though: Hacker News is a list of articles other people have written with discussion and commentary. Stack Overflow is a list of questions from your peers with potential answers. (Also, that's a really old screenshot)
- lukeschlather 16y agoQuite the opposite. I find SO's interface very busy, and wish it was a little simpler, closer to Reddit. Ultimately it's the community that makes it, and the UX is fairly irrelevant.
- seiji 16y agoI want to make this Blue Oranges 35 thing real. Here's a start: Level 0 (basic): • XHR, not ajax • No anchoring namespaces (no /r/ or /b/, just have users/spaces at the root.) • No file extensions in URLs (no .html, .cgi, .aspx, ...) • All production HTML/JS/CSS has newlines stripped to 32k characters per line. • gzip for all html, js, css, json, ... • Proper password storage • Not exploitable by injection • No XSS problems • ... Level 1 (extended): Level 0 + • Proper expires headers • Proper CDN usage • All authenticated transactions over https • All JS/CSS minified but with full versions readily accessible. • ... Level 2 (optimal): Level 1 + • All pages generate in under 300ms • All images properly sized/crushed • ...
- tejaswiy 16y agoI also find the Stackexchange sites generally give me more relevant answers faster. The advantage of having a beta time where a core group users get to explicitly state their interest perhaps?
- jsavimbi 16y agoStackoverflow has provided value to me. Quora just provides moments of lazy recreation, if any. And who is pronouncing Twitter as the silver? None of my Fb contacts are even remotely aware of any of the apps I use, never mind have an account or a need to use them. With Twitter I usually find at least ten followrazzi for every new app/service I sign up for. Twitter is business. Facebook is the ten dipshits and the nine-toed women I used to know.
- codeglomeration 16y agoI think Joel and Jeff touched on the issues discussed in the article in their podcasts. And Jeff always proclaimed that the purpose of the site is a very pragmatic one. To be a source of help for the specific professional community. Not a place to meet your buddies and hang out. And there's a place for both. Personally, I like that StackOverflow stays away from too much social interaction and focuses on providing valuable technical content.
- quan 16y agoIf reputation is that important, then StackExchange's partition strategy is actually very effective. If you want to find good coders you go to StackOverflow. If you're looking for good photographers, you go to SE's photography site. There's no need for a centralized reputation hub. The reputation of a great coder on StackOverflow can't be diminished as a result of the creation of some new SE's long tail site. But I doubt online reputation is that important. The reason I visit StackOverflow is to find answers to programming questions, not to look for experts. As for the experts, they don't need high karma on some Q&A site to get job offers.
- kayoone 16y agoSO is a very successfull Site without all the koolaid, wich is great. Hell, the even run everything on Windows... On HN you would probably get beaten to death when saying something like that.
- codinghorror 16y agoWe use a LOT of open source stuff too. We believe in the best of both worlds -- http://blog.serverfault.com/post/stack-exchanges-architecture-in-bullet-points/ http://blog.serverfault.com/post/stack-exchanges-architectur...
- arethuza 16y agoArgh - fat fingers, ipad, morning - downvoted by mistake!
- kayoone 16y agonp ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- georgieporgie 16y agoMy impression thus far of StackOverflow - and I could certainly be wrong about this - is that the most reputation goes to those in the most popular technology boat. In other words, a high reputation says as much or more about what you work on versus how 'good' you are. I guess this is a fundamental problem with any metric that reflects popularity.
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoReputation is, by and large, a measure of how time you spend on the site, much like an MMO. If you're interested in more popular technologies, you tend to have more questions to answer (and yes, more people read and upvote your answers).
- mmphosis 16y agohttp://stackoverflow.com/ http://stackoverflow.com/ is easy to browse without having to login. http://quora.com/ http://quora.com/ puts up a wall.
- mkenyon 16y agoFurthermore, when you create an account with Quora, it begs and pleads with you to give it all your personal information in your Facebook account. Not just "What is your token ID?" or even "Who are your friends?", no! Everything about you! But what takes the cake is the history tracking that Quora uses. It suggests topics that interest me. Like both Barnes and Noble and Borders... from an article I read on HN yesterday. Blatantly telling your users that you're spying on their activity is a great way to endear them to your service.
- lwat 16y agoYea I complained about this before. It's not clear at all what your facebook data will be used for. In fact I'm going to go delete my Quora account right now, I didn't realize just how much data they can get from me!
- tastybites 16y agoThe older I get the more transparent sites like techcrunch become. Shitty personal opinions are apparently worth a lot of money if you have the right audience.
- adrianwaj 16y agoI really like question2answer.org - a LAMP self-hosted Q&A site. http://www.question2answer.org/directory.php http://www.question2answer.org/directory.php, I set one up yesterday at http://revboat.com http://revboat.com - it reminds me of job board: http://www.jobberbase.com http://www.jobberbase.com. What question2answer needs is a plugin that calls upon the right users to come in and answer a question according to its tags and categories -- and ideally some shared session/domain login. With Q&A, one should go out to where the action is happening, so decentralization is the key in this case.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoI completely agree with this. I tried to get a product management site up and running (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28281/product-management http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28281/product-mana...), because I know the value I've gotten from the software development side. It is an impossible task that I've since given up on. My questions now go to Quora.
- charlesju 16y agoI was actually thinking about a startup idea around this general theme. I'm going to share it with Hacker News, tell me what you think. I do not think reputation should be owned by a single site because unlike social networking, there are going to be lots of places to contribute to your online presence. Yes, stack overflow is important when trying to hire a programmer, but I have also looked at blogs, twitter, github projects, etc. What really needs to happen is for a startup to create a way to aggregate activity online into a central location to disseminate to the world. Blogging made sense as a means to communicate an idea in 2001, but 10 years later, this needs to change. The internet is shifting heavily towards one that is more focused on communities and the interactions in that community are what are most reflective of an internet identity/reputation. Just think about your own lives. Yes, sometimes you have one off ideas that you would love to blog and tweet about. That's great, you should keep doing that. But I bet you are also dropping bombs of wisdom on various sites like Quora, Hacker News and Stack Overflow that you wish you could share with more people and keep in a more permanent place. There needs to be a central place to disseminante the highlights of an online presence. And that site should own the online reputation.
- adrianwaj 16y agoIt's not hard to display online reputations side by side on a resume. Reputations mean different things to different people, according to different contexts.
- gojomo 16y agoThis has been tried in several eras; there was an initiative 'OpenPrivacy' (folding around 2002) that wanted a standard for portable profiles and reputations, and this also seemed to me the original focus of RapLeaf. More recently, about.me (acquired by AOL) and flavors.me have tackled one portion of this, the user-controlled aggregation of their multiple presences. There may still be prospects for a new service, though the resistance of existing reputation silos could be a problem.
- charlesju 16y agoThese are not addressing the same problem, which is that we're shifting from a stand alone idea sharing platform model to a community idea sharing platform model that needs consolidation from the inherent fragmentation of the ecosystem (Quora, Hacker News, etc.) I think those are all trying to tackle a subtle difference than what I am talking about. About.me and Flavors.me is more so about one off content creation and status profile sites (blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook). What I'm saying is that things like Quora, Hacker News, are now becoming the preferred medium to share ideas as opposed to standalone sites. Many Quora answers are essentially blog posts.
- dkersten 16y agoMeh, I hate the Quora UI. I'm too busy/lazy to find questions that interest me on it. Stackoverflow, on the other hand, is very quick and easy to navigate and has a very friendly UI.End result: I use stackoverflow regularly and have only ever viewed Quora maybe five times.
- barmstrong 16y agoStackOverflow is definitely more important right now. But one thing I think they're messing up is the process for launching new StackExchange sites. They're trying this thing to qualify new sites to ensure they have critical mass, but I think it's too restrictive and hurting their growth. As an example, I "pledged" to contribute to the AI stack exchange site if it were to launch. When it launched as a trial it received maybe 100 questions and some good answers in the first few weeks. I got answers to all my questions - good ones which pointed me toward research I hadn't found in Google etc. But a week later it had been shut down and they emailed everyone saying it didn't meet minimum activity thresholds. Those questions and answers are no longer available on the net. The question is whether a StackExchange site with relatively small activity is still useful. I think it is - at least it's more useful than not having them at all. Who is to say a small site couldn't become much bigger over time. Reddit has done well letting users create any subreddit they want. There is a diverse ecosystem of subreddits out there with varying levels of activity. Keeping the long tail of subreddits around to see which flourish doesn't seem to hurt anything - so I don't understand the StackExchange approach to this. (It reminds me of Wikipedia deleting obscure pages also - what does it hurt to have them?)
- codinghorror 16y agoJust to clarify -- we always make the creative commons data available for all our public sites, and even closed sites. There have been two so far: AI and Gadgets. The AI creative commons dump is at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-intelligence http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607/artificial-in... and the gadgets creative commons data dump is at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/614/electronic-gadgets http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/614/electronic-gad...
- ivoflipse 16y agoSo you base that Stack Exchange has failed on one out of the two failed sites, out of over forty proposals that are still there? As has already been mentioned elsewhere, if the site lacks genuine expertise of the topic, the blind will simply follow the other blind. Putting a site that doesn't work out of it's misery is doing the users a favor in the long run
- praptak 16y agoThis cannot be stated often enough: SO reputation is worthless for assessing fitness for hire. Lots of short, google-able answers to trivial questions will get you much more points than thoughtful answers to hard questions. SO can be useful for preliminary screening, but only if you look at the actual answers.
- daemin 16y agoLike with other aspects of hiring (IQ Tests, Programming Tests, Writing Tests, Interviews, GPA's, Uni Results) they should be a facet in making the final decision. The way I see it there are two main ways to use someone's Stack Exchange reputation. First just using the fact that they have an account and reputation, in finding out how involved and engaged they are with the community. Secondly drilling down into the questions they've asked, and the answers provided to get a better understanding of someone's strengths and weaknesses, and seeing where their expertise lies. Also at the end if there's no other way to make a decision between two people, one can just take the person with the higher reputation score.
- scott_s 16y agoI looked at the existing answers, and I don't think anyone made this point: SO and its spinoffs are an example of do what you know. People can smell when someone not from their domain tries to make something for them - and it does not smell good. In order for the SO model to work, they need experts versed in the area to be the core of the community. There are two ways to do this: try to attract such people after creating the site, or let the site organically arise because it was created by such people.
- Hafiz 16y agolol. , Quora needs lot of improvement to compete with stackoverflow. And both have different structures
- kunley 16y agoI strongly disagree with the common conception that high points on StackOverflow would be a good measure of coder's quality. They are merely the measure of someone's involvement in answering the questions. Sadly, many answerers are just point hunters. They seem to monitor questions and quickly google for answers. I observed this asking specific detailed questions. Most answers were something obvious, something without accordance to the details of the question, or just blind guesses. People are just putting answers in the hope they will earn at least an upvote!! It's not only stupid, but i guess it's a massive abuse of the original idea behind this site. Add the fact that most points are earned by people answering questions about C#/.NET. It's related to the fact that this platform somehow has masses of mediocre programmers, or even people suddenly put in the role of programmers. They go asking tons of questions while they should rather RTFM or polish their skills by coding. No wonder that a mass of questions generates a mass of answers. So the whole stack exchange idea of points is about quantity, not quality.
- petercooper 16y agoAgreed. I'm somewhere around the top 40 on HN but it would be absurd to say I'm even near the top 100 hackers or entrepreneurs around here. I just know how, when and what to say more than many of the folks actually getting on with their work ;-)
- cletus 16y agoI clicked this link expecting the usual TC love-in with Quora--and I got that--but I actually agree that the StackEchange model is flawed. What works for programmers doesn't necessarily work for other groups (and vice versa). I will be shocked if any of these becomes a site as important in their respective field as SO. As for Quora... Please for God's sake TechCrunch will you shut up about Quora. It's a Q&A site with a Facebook login that is liked by the Valley insiders--and is thought important by the same--because the other Valley insiders use it. Until it gets appeal beyond the Valley it's a storm in a teacup. What's more I'll go out on a limb and say Quora will never get mass appeal. To the Quora founders: congratulations on the Emperor's new clothes. Sell up before the jog is up.
- adrianwaj 16y agoQuora has been successful at obtaining authoritative opinions - something that Google Knol failed to do because it grants an online reputation, instant readership and following to those that express their opinion, which seems to be important to such people. Furthermore, to me, it's like Ask HN and Hackerfollow on steroids. I still won't participate in it, but will read it like I read Wikipedia.
- dansingerman 16y agoQuite an annoying article - creating conflict for the sake of it? StackExchange and Quora are only very superficially similar. StackExchange is very specifically about asking questions that have definitive answers, and getting those answers. Quora is a question-based social network discussion site. Not the same thing at all.
- jdap 16y agoStackOverflow works beautifully - it's hit that "this just feels RIGHT" stage. It's less clear right now that the StackExchange / Area51 model is working. The process of selecting topics, building support and getting going looks good on paper, but it looks as though it's lost a lot of momentum. So the StackExchange team need to take seriously the issue that as things stand, the model of building out into new Q&A territories can't depend solely on people who are comfortable with SO (e.g. devs) and take that familiarity into another sphere (e.g. devs who also bake).