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Yeah, no. I've literally read hundreds of RFCs, thousands of man pages, and who knows how much else. If I spent time writing down everything I know, I'd never
by axaxs 5y ago
Yeah, no. I've literally read hundreds of RFCs, thousands of man pages, and who knows how much else. If I spent time writing down everything I know, I'd never get anything else done. And it's not like I'm some supergenius, all of this info is available freely on the internet. But that doesn't stop folks from asking about DNS, TCP, and other well documented things.
Many times domain knowledge is just a person who has the answers somewhat fresh in memory so you don't have to go trudging. But writing those things down each time is both futile and redundant.
- unishark 5y agoBut it also says .."in a document, bug, code comment—wherever..." You don't have to make a big effort of it. Paste the question and answers from the emails into a text file. Make it into a FAQ email to share or paste it into a comment block the next time you mess with that code.
- toast0 5y agoYep, my indespensibleness is that I have all this mostly useness knowledge in my head, and if you show me the problem, I can usually get something useful out of my brain to get somewhere quickly. And if not, I can skim the code and get an idea; and if not, I can sort of operate a debugger. What do you want me to write down to help someone else do that? Read all the things, just in case!
- puchatek 5y agoI think the article is not about general technical knowledge or even knowledge about specific technology used at your company but more about e.g. why a certain way to model your domain makes sense or how an unusual system design will pay off because of future plan X discussed with group of people Y in meeting Z - and here is the architecture diagram for it.
- skybrian 5y agoRFC's and man pages are written down already. When they say "write things down" it's not about duplicating that effort, though you might make an FAQ that links to them.
- axaxs 5y agoPoint 1 specifically says to write things down every time someone asks you a question. Taking DNS as an example, 1034 1035/4034 4035, among some others, I don't see how that's helpful even if I make a linking FAQ. My notes would say 'DNS question, read these 4 RFCs' over and over and over.
- ed_elliott_asc 5y agoYou could document what common issues you have or any tricky situation you dealt with. You don’t need to say “dns stands for domain na…” but knowing the why behind some of your decisions is super useful.
- noisy_boy 5y agoThe article is not a bible and there is something called judgement. If you are getting asked DNS questions all the time, this may be indicator of a wider knowledge issue and may be you can suggest conducting an internal session on DNS. Apply common sense.
- tomstoms 5y agoI think you’re interpreting the advice way too literally. The author probably didn’t mean for you to document the answer to every single question you get, but questions you get about the system or domain you’re working, and where the answer isn’t readily available anywhere else.
- axaxs 5y agoI don't disagree with you. If the question was about design decisions I'd made, I'd be in full agreement. But the article quite literally says 'every time.' You could rightly say I'm being pedantic, but if you're going to write life advice, it should be quite specific IMO. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but rightly (also IMO) pointing out flaws with the wording and tone.
- tomstoms 5y ago
- e12e 5y ago> Yeah, no. I've literally read hundreds of RFCs, thousands of man pages Well, that didn't take more than a single line: "please remember to check relevant RFCs and man pages for additional information. This system depends on DNS for round robin load balancing (etc)" :)