{"id":363,"date":"2011-01-30T22:13:51","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T02:13:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/?p=363"},"modified":"2023-03-13T00:14:58","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T00:14:58","slug":"fudcon-2011-lightning-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/01\/30\/fudcon-2011-lightning-talks\/","title":{"rendered":"FUDCon 2011 — lightning talks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today at the lightning talks at FUDCon 2011, the one that caught my attention was called “The Dreyfus Model: how do novices think differently from experts?” The subtitle was along the lines of “Why won’t anyone help me, I have documentation!” \u00a0Here is a pdf archive of her talk I made at the time since as of at least 2020 or earlier, it disappeared.<\/a>\u00a0 20210425 update:\u00a0 I have found a new link to Mel’s lightning talk at https:\/\/melchua.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/02\/ive-followed-your-instructions-and-i-still-cant-bake-croissants\/<\/p>\n

The gist of how Mel presented the subject was that someone is looking for a bread recipe on the internet and comes up with:<\/p>\n

Croissants<\/p>\n

flour
\nbutter
\nother stuff
\nbake<\/p>\n

She explained the various cryptic parts of this “recipe” and how obvious it may seem to an experienced baker, but to a newbie, even figuring out that Croissants is a type of bread, let alone what the “other stuff” is can be difficult to grasp, or the concepts of “oh you have to buy those ingredients first — how much? And what’s this? You need an oven? Now, when they say bake, how long? And how will I know it’s ready? Oh yeah, you need to let the bread rise first …<\/p>\n

She went on to say how installing certain bits of software and using them may seem trivial to an experienced user, but knowing how to draw in a tarball, extract it, get all the dependencies, compile it, and all the various steps required was not easy for a newbie, especially in a culture that takes several things for granted and literally may skip steps between major milestones.<\/p>\n

Ultimately her message lay in the importance of clear, concise, complete documentation.<\/p>\n

When I started learning linux, I had to relearn things too, and found things challenging. I quickly learned that things were not as obvious to myself and that when someone said “oh just do this” what they were really saying was “do this 10-15 item list as root under the following circumstances using the proper switches” — not always an obvious task when you say “install package X” while omitting all the necessary parts before and after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today at the lightning talks at FUDCon 2011, the one that caught my attention was called “The Dreyfus Model: how do novices think differently from experts?” The subtitle was along the lines of “Why won’t anyone help me, I have documentation!” \u00a0Here is a pdf archive of her talk I made at the time since … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “FUDCon 2011 — lightning talks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,44,63,109,33,45,57],"tags":[117,116,118,30,115,5],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-cooking","category-fedora-linux","category-free-software","category-linux","category-recipes","category-text-formatting","tag-croissants","tag-dreyfuss-model","tag-instructions","tag-linux","tag-mel-chua","tag-recipes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5220,"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/5220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malak.ca\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}