I had an interesting insight while watching Episode II: Attack of the Clones (I had a hankering to see Yoda kick some butt, OK?!?). The definition of expert is someone that just does whatever it is they do; they don’t think about it. Everyone else is just learning. What drove this home for me was when Anakin heard of his mother being taken and how everyone else had failed or died looking for her, Anakin started out after her without any planning whatsoever. *That’s* an expert. Of course, he had The Force and the rest of us have to live with an average amount of midichlorian, but he’d done what I’ve seen other experts do, too: unconscious competence.

The reason that this is such an insight for me is that for my entire life, I’ve always felt that there were special people in the world that just know what they’re doing. These people worked in companies or were members of a profession and by their association with those organizations, I felt that they must be experts. I mean, how could someone be a member of professional for any length of time and not strive for mastery of the professional? It was watching Anakin that it finally sunk in that mere association is not enough; most organizations, no matter how high their standards, do not stop non-experts at the door. Experts are the ones inside the organizations that rise to the top, that stand out, that set examples for other members. Expertise is the thing that separates a moderately smart person studying up on a topic for a while from someone that really understands something down to their bones. This is what separates me catching up to my financial advisor after 6 months of study from a *real* money manager. That’s what separates a new computer science graduate from me.

That’s not to say that I couldn’t be better than some “real” money managers one day or that the new college grad couldn’t be better then me on day one. What it does say, however, is that encountering a true expert is a rare thing. Because of that rarity, I believe that most reasonably intelligent people can, with study and practice, get good at practically anything that they set their mind to. This means that I can, with a reasonable amount of study and practice, check the work of my financial advisor or my accountant or a plumbing contractor and come up with things that they don’t. I know that this is true because I’ve done it (not with the plumbing though, I’m practically clueless there : ). The amount of study I needed to catch up with my professional service provider doesn’t make me an expert, of course, because it’s highly unlikely that either of them is an expert.

So, now that I’ve settled the question of whether membership in a profession makes one an expert (it doesn’t), that leaves two questions:

1. How do you recognize expertise? I know it when it occurs in something that I’m familiar with, e.g. computer goo, but what about in a discipline where I’m not versed?
2. How do you obtain expertise? I’ve got this down to a science for programming APIs, but can these techniques be applied to other disciplines?

Comments on my continued quest for expertise welcome.

Want to write for MSDN online? Here's how.

I don't know why an ASP site is reviewing a WinForms book, but they do a thorough job and, of course, I like their conclusion: "If you are looking for a Windows Forms book, don’t let this one slip out of your hands. The book has such insight and experience included that every reader, beginner and professional, will get benefit from reading it."

Rory built me an RSS feed to track book reviews on Amazon.com. And then he thanked me for letting him do it. You're welcome, Rory... BTW, to complete your Vain Author's Toolkit, you'll need junglescan.com to track a portfolio of books' sales rank. If those ain't web services, I don't know what are!

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

I got an email today from John Reilly today asking me a question I get from time to time:

I got my signed copy of your book. It is a great read. You have information that a friend and I have been trying to dig out for weeks.

Which leads me to our question. How do you find out all those details? They are not to be found in the MSDN documentation, as far as we can tell. Do you just experiment, like we do? We have been unable to find any .NET training that is much more than how to use the IDE. Alan and I crave detail, meat, the stuff of your book. Seriously, how does one obtain this seemingly inside information? We are personally and professionally motivated weenies.

Now that I’m a Microsoft employee, I have access to not only the source for most of what I’m researching, but the architects and internal mailing lists populated by the developers on the project, so that really is “inside information.” However, over the 8+ years that I was a contributing member of the Windows developer community, 99% of what I’ve done has not been based on inside information. So, before I had access to internal info, how did I figure stuff out if the docs don’t answer my questions? I do the following, in order of decreasing frequency:

• I experiment, writing hundreds of projects consisting of 10 lines of code or less to experiment with particular features
• I read the source, even if that means reverse engineering it first (Reflector is fabulous for .NET code)
• I search on the Microsoft-specific Google search page
• I IM, email and call my friends who know more than I do (which is most of them : )
• I ask questions on my favorite mailing lists and newsgroups
• As a last resort, I ask my friends at MS. Buying a Microsoftie a beer at a conference, being smart in online forums and saying nice things about their technologies are all excellent ways to gain friends at MS

I think those Amazon guys knew I was talking about them...

I've noticed that lots of folks have nice things to say about "Windows Forms Programming in C#". I thank you and my publisher thanks you. If you do post a review, you'll likely get an email from me asking you to post it on Amazon.com. That's because Amazon has noticed that it's the number of reviews of a product that determines whether something sells better than it's competitors, not the rating of the reviews (although feel free to say nice things... : ). I'm posting this here to a) warn you that a review on my book is likely to get you an email from me and b) because Scott Galloway's Contact form is busted ("You must enter a search term"), so I needed *some* way to ask him to post his review on Amazon. Thanks!

As a deadline nears and I spend an increasing amount of time avoiding the work I should be doing, I find a finance geek acquaintance of mine asking what an RSS feed is after I implored him to add one to his web site. This is a 20-year old that’s owned stock since he was 11, read 12,000 company reports in 2002, earned 155% on his money is the last 11 months and recently been given his own $35M mutual fund to manage (becoming the youngest ever mutual fund manager). If this guy doesn’t know what an RSS feed is, then I’m guessing at least some of my readers don’t know either (yes, I’m talking to you, Mom). When he asked me what an RSS feed was, this is what I told him:

An RSS feed is a thing of pure beauty. If you’ve ever been to a web site with an orange XML or RSS button, clicking it will yield a page that looks something like this:

While RSS is fairly unreadable for normal humans, computers eat it up. For example, if you read the RSS feed from my site on a regular basis, whenever I make a new post, you’ll see a new entry in the RSS feed. RSS feeds aren’t useful for you, but when fed to an “RSS reader” program, you can keep up to date on literally hundreds of web sites without having to browse to them manually. The RSS reader will check each RSS feed to which you subscribe, letting you know when something new on a web site has happened and showing you what it is, giving you the option to follow up or ignore the new thing. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, letting me keep up on a bunch of things:

• My friends’ writings
• Global and financial news
• People talking about topics of interest to me, like my favorite technologies or my latest book
• My favorite comics strips (I need my daily Dilbert!)
• The latest product and articles releases from Microsoft
• Practically anything else I care about on a regular basis

I keep up on all of this without ever visiting the web sites themselves them ’til something of interest catches my eye.

There are a bunch of RSS readers in the world, but my favorite is SharpReader. If you install this program and start it up, SR will check all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to on a regular basis in the background while you work, notifying you of something new by changing it’s icon from blue to yellow. If you decide to install SharpReader, your next stop should be NewsIsFree.com, where you’ll find all kinds of RSS feeds in any number of categories. After subscribing to a few of those, you’ll want to stop by Tapestry, where you can find RSS feeds for tons of daily comic strips. If you want to get fancy, you can go to GoogleAlert, where you can subscribe to searches so that whenever Google finds something new on your search topic, your RSS reader will let you know.

If you find the ability to track hundreds of web sites without surfing to each of them manually, RSS is for you. If you find my instructions intimidating, ask a computer friend to help you out (I’ll be home for Christmas, Mom).