Kevin's Weblog

It seems that there’s two basic types of domain experts:

A) those who think they are great because they understand X, and treat anyone who displays a lack of understanding of X with contempt. They tend to reply to questions and problems with an attitude of “how can you possibly not know this?”.

B) those who think that they are experts at X so you don’t have to be. They tend to reply to questions and problems with interest, and even excitement at helping someone solve a problem they are having.

In the last week, I’ve gotten to deal with one of each, in two systems which could be seen as roughly competing with one another. I wonder if the A realizes that acting in this way tends to push people towards the other system, and could ultimately be self-defeating for him.

Actually, thinking more, I can’t really think of any cases I’m familiar with of an A really rising in an organization. They usually seem to be permanently stuck as a front-line grunt, embittered that they never get properly recognized for their abilities. The reality, though, is that the Bs really are more valuable to a company because they get around to solving problems that need solving more quickly.

(And, yes, I am aware that I have a bit of an ego, and that I can be a bit prickly at times myself. But, I’m working on it.)

I couldn’t find any evidence that anyone else has done this already, so I spent a little time hacking together a screen scraper to generate iCalendars for each of the OSCON 2004 tracks. It’s probably not perfect, and I know that a couple sessions are missing. (Cancelled sessions are semi-intentionally missing.)

Observations:

• As always, “this’ll only take half-an-hour” took substantially longer
• Apparently O’Reilly are less expert in web publishing than in print publishing, as they can’t even manage to produce well-formed HTML.
• ... much less anything resembling semantic markup
• This would have been easier with some guide to the [iv]Calendar format other than the RFC.