The Importance Of First Hand Experience

Over on SearchForTruth (gack, I hate that title), WardCunningham wrote:

This site remains dedicated to capturing and examining the real experience of expert developers and succeeds to the degree that it gets expert developers to report their first hand experience.

... and helped me realize another facet of what I like so much about WardsWiki. You can find guys spouting about programming anywhere, along with the normal hard-headedness that goes along with cerebral guys talking shop. But for whatever reason, WardsWiki has a climate where people are encouraged to talk about their first-hand experiences, too.

In fact, I'd say it's to the extent that people might even feel a little underqualified to discuss something if they haven't tried it. This is often okay, because we're not asking somebody to try running a marathon or converting to Christianity. We're asking programmers to do small things: Try adding UnitTests to a project you're doing in your free time, try communicating with the project manager in a slightly different way, etc.

We even talk about our feelings: When you tried this new thing, where you nervous? Anxious? Happy? Did the code give off a smell? Was working with it painful?

Before I start asking for a group hug, there's a reason I'm noting this dynamic at all. This is almost entirely absent from the SociologyWiki-type pages, and perhaps that's part of what makes them seem so worthless to me. I love politics, but none of us seem to have much first-hand experience in politics. So we all sit around spouting about Israel and Palestine or AynRand and the whole thing starts to sound like the DJ 3000 on that Simpsons episode:

"Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns."

You don't wanna sound like that, do you?

-- FrancisHwang

I think that asking people to speak from experience also removes a lot of the possibility of futile argument. Many of the SociologyWiki-like pages ask "what do you think" as opposed to "what have you seen/done". When asked what I think I give my opinion. You can then argue that I am right or wrong. If I tell you what I have experienced you can't tell me I'm wrong. All we can do is see what the differences between our experiences have been and try to understand why they differ.

The most interesting (IMO) pages on this Wiki are those that synthesize/distill the experiences of several people. From these pages I can learn what others have tried and whether or not they found it helpful.

-- IainLowe

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See ReplaceUselessFantasyWithExperimentation