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As for markdown I showed it to my girlfriend and this is now what she uses for everything. She is a designer and loves that here she does not have to bother wit

by atoav 4y ago

As for markdown I showed it to my girlfriend and this is now what she uses for everything. She is a designer and loves that here she does not have to bother with design, just with markup. She hates Microsoft Word with a passion. People who used formatting in any 2000s internet forum know in principle how to use markdown. That aside, I see it as a problem that tech people fail to anticipate the needs of their peers. I know people like that, who dare to say: "Oh you just need to reverse proxy the port on your server" and they fail to realize the person opposite has a face that seems to be assembled purely out of questionmarks. Explaining someone what a reverse proxy is involves explaining them: - what a server actually is (confusingly both the machine and the software) - how/that web clients communicate with that server (HTTP) - that on that machine there is software running that communicates a local loopback port (127.0.0.1:7777) - that a webserver can be configured to grab normal traffic coming to port 80 (http) and 443 (https) and forward it to that loopback port - that this is called a reverse proxy Most people are not idiots and will understand an explaination like this. Even if they don't they will be happy that you gave a coherent explaination. I just tend to remember myself and how unclear everything was to me when I was a teenager. What explaination would that former me appreciate? Sometimes the most important thing to say is something extremely obvious that helps the person to conceptualize the whole thing (e.g. clients communicate with a server and a server has ports).

solarkraft 4y ago
> I see it as a problem that tech people fail to anticipate the needs of their [non tech] peers Highly agreed. This seems to be common among all programmers, but most prominent in products that have little input from non-programmers (e.g. open source projects). Most people would understand your explanation ... given the effort. But they don't care, they just want it to work. And that sometimes involves going with an expensive proprietary solution over a FOSS one because the first screen provides a better introduction. "Do I look like I know what a Jpeg is?".
orwin 4y ago
My sister never even owned a computer before starting uni at 22 after 6 years as a cook. I got her hooked on markdown for note-taking, I just had to find the right editor to convince her to let go the few hours of Word she 'learned' at school. Thank to all Joplin SWE, managers and designers. Great product. And BTW, I still think org-mode is overall better, but sometimes worse is best, and to me Markdown won.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
This isn't a programming problem, or exclusive to our field. Go talk to any expert in their field about something in that field, and have the same reaction. I tried my hand at blacksmithing, and had to learn (what seemed like) a lot of metallurgy before half of what my mentors were saying made any sense at all. Sometimes it's on the expert to make it clear to the non-expert. Other times it's on the newbie to learn the basics so they understand the answer to their question. .
- atoav 4y ago
  > Sometimes it's on the expert to make it clear to the non-expert. Other times it's on the newbie to learn the basics so they understand the answer to their question. I think most of the times it is on the expert to be clear, because as an expert you should know what complexity your experise involves, while this cannot be expected of the non-expert. That being said, it is totally okay as an expert to answer in the sense of "that involves a lot of things that you need to know beforehand" and then give them a hint where they can learn those things and ask them to come back when they did their homework. What does not help anyone is if you just answer the question without giving context. Great, technically you were right, but you are also the only person who can tell it was. Communicating clearly is a separate skill. Not every expert has that skill. But every expert could potentially profit from having that skill. If you have that skill it does not mean you now need to put in a lot of work in explaining things to everybody – but it means you can explain things if it is needed. People are surprisingly happy if someone manages to clear things up for them without looking down on them or going into teacher/preacher mode.
- brightlancer 4y ago
  It's not exclusive to programming or "tech", but computers are so pervasive while most folks' eyes glaze over at the simplest tasks. There are lots of folks who don't know how to check their oil or check their tire pressure (or even whether they have a jack and a spare), but in the US we do have a general expectation that folks know how to do those things, so most folks learn. With computers or "tech", there are almost no expectations that folks should be able to do any maintenance or troubleshooting, so most folks don't learn. This is why "Is it plugged in" has to be the first question. Software developers don't always make it easier, but our expectations for users are also too low.

by atoav 4y ago

solarkraft 4y ago

> I see it as a problem that tech people fail to anticipate the needs of their [non tech] peers Highly agreed. This seems to be common among all programmers, but most prominent in products that have little input from non-programmers (e.g. open source projects). Most people would understand your explanation ... given the effort. But they don't care, they just want it to work. And that sometimes involves going with an expensive proprietary solution over a FOSS one because the first screen provides a better introduction. "Do I look like I know what a Jpeg is?".

orwin 4y ago

My sister never even owned a computer before starting uni at 22 after 6 years as a cook. I got her hooked on markdown for note-taking, I just had to find the right editor to convince her to let go the few hours of Word she 'learned' at school. Thank to all Joplin SWE, managers and designers. Great product. And BTW, I still think org-mode is overall better, but sometimes worse is best, and to me Markdown won.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

This isn't a programming problem, or exclusive to our field. Go talk to any expert in their field about something in that field, and have the same reaction. I tried my hand at blacksmithing, and had to learn (what seemed like) a lot of metallurgy before half of what my mentors were saying made any sense at all. Sometimes it's on the expert to make it clear to the non-expert. Other times it's on the newbie to learn the basics so they understand the answer to their question. .

atoav 4y ago
> Sometimes it's on the expert to make it clear to the non-expert. Other times it's on the newbie to learn the basics so they understand the answer to their question. I think most of the times it is on the expert to be clear, because as an expert you should know what complexity your experise involves, while this cannot be expected of the non-expert. That being said, it is totally okay as an expert to answer in the sense of "that involves a lot of things that you need to know beforehand" and then give them a hint where they can learn those things and ask them to come back when they did their homework. What does not help anyone is if you just answer the question without giving context. Great, technically you were right, but you are also the only person who can tell it was. Communicating clearly is a separate skill. Not every expert has that skill. But every expert could potentially profit from having that skill. If you have that skill it does not mean you now need to put in a lot of work in explaining things to everybody – but it means you can explain things if it is needed. People are surprisingly happy if someone manages to clear things up for them without looking down on them or going into teacher/preacher mode.
brightlancer 4y ago
It's not exclusive to programming or "tech", but computers are so pervasive while most folks' eyes glaze over at the simplest tasks. There are lots of folks who don't know how to check their oil or check their tire pressure (or even whether they have a jack and a spare), but in the US we do have a general expectation that folks know how to do those things, so most folks learn. With computers or "tech", there are almost no expectations that folks should be able to do any maintenance or troubleshooting, so most folks don't learn. This is why "Is it plugged in" has to be the first question. Software developers don't always make it easier, but our expectations for users are also too low.