Warning: this post won’t teach you anything technical. It’s about how I see myself. That may be of interest to you, or it may not. If not, feel free to skip it knowing you’re not missing anything else.
One of the great problems of the world today is undoubtedly this problem of not being able to talk to scientists, because we don’t understand science. They can’t talk to us because they don’t understand anything else, poor dears. (Michael Flanders)
For a while, I’ve made myself slightly miserable (only slightly – I’m generally a very happy guy) by seeing just how impoverished my own understanding of computing is compared with my “heroes” in the industry: Eric Lippert, Joe Duffy, and Wes Dyer to name but three. I always learn a lot from their blogs, but often I don’t manage to take it all in. I understand enough about Wes’s post about monads to realise that I’ve probably implemented a monad with my (incredibly primitive) Future classes in “push LINQ” – but my grasp of them is tenuous at best. I understand enough about threading to be able to reason about concurrency in my day-to-day life, but I’m never going to have Joe’s depth of knowledge of either the Windows-specific stuff or the underlying principles and theories. I can hold an interesting (to me) conversation with Eric over email, but I suspect that if we were talking in real life I’d have to constantly ask him to slow down.
This used to bother me. I used to almost feel that it was unfair that others were so much smarter than me. Yes, I know how arrogant that sounds even in terms of ambition, and I’m not going to flinch away from the term. However, I’m a bit more comfortable with my place in life now. You see, just because they’re so much smarter than me doesn’t mean I’m useless. I want to be a bridge.
People have occasionally used the word “expert” about me, entirely inappropriately. I’m not an expert in threading, or floating point, or text encoding. I know a bit more about those topics than most developers, and sometimes that’s all that’s required to be labeled as an expert these days. After the last ten months, I could probably agree with the label when applied to C# as a language, although certainly not .NET as a framework, or even the act of developing in C#. I happen to have read the spec more closely than most people, and retained that information reasonably well, that’s all.
The trouble is, real experts can be hard to understand sometimes for the “average developer” (again, I know how that sounds; I’m not putting myself above this “average developer” in all or even many respects, just on the topics I happen to write about). Don’t get me wrong: it’s not because they lack communication skills (although that’s sometimes the case). It’s that a lot of what they talk about is at a level of depth which requires a lot of background knowledge for one to properly understand it. This is where I believe I can play a useful role – I like explaining the most useful bits of what I’ve understood from the experts, but in a way which hopefully any interested developer can understand.
C# in Depth is a good manifestation of that. If you want the unadulterated “truth” about C# (at least in theory) you look at the spec. But that’s frankly a pain to read, and there’s very little to distinguish the bits which are really important from the corner cases which you’re unlikely to ever encounter. I hope my book covers provides more depth than the level of knowledge most C# developers already have (and more depth than most other books provide), but without going so deep as to be impenetrably difficult to understand.
Having identified this role, I’m really quite happy to try to fulfil it. I just hope I can keep doing so. It’s a lot of fun.
