I had someone watching my screen at work the other day tell me, “You
can’t use comments in YAML.” I just smiled and said, “Well this is just
for now.” I didn’t have the heart to correct this senior architect at
my new place of employment. He also said, “You have to use Google for
that?” When I typed ? something onto the terminal to search with Lynx.
He said nothing. I think, um, I basically just silenced him. I had the
search result in under a second. That sounds like bragging (and it is)
but hear me out.
I sincerely respect and admire this person, but they have major gaps in their learning. It was a good reminder to me that just-in-time learning — as essential and amazing as it is — the kind that motivates people to say things like, “Well, I had two months to get all of Kubernetes running when a VP asked for it” or “He had two weeks to create all of JavaScript” as if it were something to be proud of. It’s not. It’s fucking dangerous.
God knows I’m an advocate for eXploration and eXperimentation in learning (the X in RWX) but it is critical that people create their own comprehensive learning strategies to supplement the fun, challenge- and project-based learning. We love this style of learning because it is like solving a bunch of puzzles, playing a hacking game, with tangible immediately results that we care about. But it does not hit all the bases.
This affinity for just-in-time learning is why tech “Recipe” books have been so successful over the years and why Stack Overflow does so well now. They have the solutions to that one immediate problem we are having. We don’t care about the rest or the context. It’s just human nature to prefer this. But it’s dangerous human nature.
This is the sort of stuff for which a healthy level of imposter syndrome is actually a good thing. We need to remember to ask ourselves constantly, “am I missing something?” Because when we don’t, well, suddenly we don’t know that YAML can contain comments and might pedantically inform someone who just laughs to themselves at the very basic thing you just revealed you don’t know, and frankly don’t seem to want to know. I do.