How Far Should You Go
… in trying to understand the technology you use?
It’s a constant struggle for me just to keep the leading edge of IT from dropping over my horizon, and even then I can only make out the haziest outlines of what’s happening. Moreover, I know that no matter how much I run or how high the stilts I strap on, I’m eventually going to have to watch technology whiz out of sight towards the Pacific, leaving me benighted. The Complete Automotive Analogy, or CAA, dictates that as with my ride, where now I can barely even check the oil though once I used to do stuff with a thing called a distributor, I’m ultimately going to reduced to pushing buttons and hoping for the best from the magic under the hood.
I could become a mechanic — that is, I could learn to program in C++ or even “just” learn PHP — but the gain wouldn’t be worth the pain. At the other end of the spectrum, I’m not ready yet to shrug and just kick the tires. Fortunately, the middle ground offers plenty of room for me to push myself just that bit and learn about what’s happening, even if I can’t craft developments myself.
Which brings me to, among other things, Ajax. You’ve probably seen it in action: you click on something and with a nifty fading transition a whole section of a website appears; you click and drag a box from this part of a website to that part; you perform a speedy calculation right there on a site. (For a set of examples take a look at Google AJAX Search API samples.) Though it’s not everywhere at the moment, it soon will be. So what is it?
It stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and it’s essentially a way to speed up the interactivity of a website by by-passing the normally slow and methodical way that browser and server exchange information. I learned this and more from the first of a great series of articles called Mastering Ajax published by IBM. I don’t know how many of the 6 articles I’ll manage, but I’ll hang in there for a bit.
Then there’s the whole business of RSS. Sure, I know about dragging that feed icon into my feed reader (I use a desktop reader; much prefer it). But what’s the difference between RSS 1.0, 2.0, 0.91 and Atom? I’ve yet to read eventhe Wikipedia piece on it or Rss20AndAtom10Compared. What about XML itself? &cet.
To revert to the CAA for a moment, given that I and most Slawyers are not simply drivers but chauffeurs (I think that’s the comparison), we ought to work that middle ground as vigorously as we can — as part of our professional duty — hard though it may be. I think it’s easier to do that with good company, and I’ve found Slaw helpful indeed. But I think Slaw can do more here (as in so many other areas). I suggest we identify those technologies that we need to learn more about and then that we collect material that can teach us about them and help us stay within sight of IT as it changes.
You can either learn technologies on an as needed basis, or do a pre-emptive strike. I have spent very little time learning AJAX, just enough to get something installed. At the same time, I did learn a fair bit of DHTML a few years back, but I have no clue if (how) those skills would transfer. If you can ‘hack’ at programming code, and have good practices like keeping backups of EVERYTHING, sometimes that’s enough.
I’ve invested a lot of time on RSS, and think those skills will do me well for a long time. This one’s an obvious pre-emptive strike for me.
The other strategy I think is helpful is learning those technologies that are timeless, or are the basis of further technologies. HTML coding, in one form or another, is worth everyone’s time (IMO). Learn those 30-50 tags and feel comfortable when someone shows you the source code.
One can’t learn everything, but feeling comfortable with those technologies that you’re called upon to use, or at least understanding what’s going on in the background can be very helpful.
One more thing… get savvy with those tech support forums. Know where they are, and know the technology enough to implement the advice you receive.
An example… there are some absolute *freaks of nature* out there when it comes to PHP coding. I can’t even come close to writing that type of high end code (especially from scratch), but I sure can copy their work if it suits my project. Point is, everyone has limits, and everyone has specialties.
The specialty of Slawyers just happens to be finding needles in haystacks. Use it!
Typical Steve, three posts in and I obviously didn’t read the last paragraph as closely as I should have. Oh well… :-)
I agree, we could do a better job of relaying technology skills. We will have to be selective though. Skills and the operation of vendor products are two different things, and I don’t think any of us want to be seen as endorsing. Critiquing maybe…
I like your suggestion to “identify those technologies that we need to learn more about and then that we collect material that can teach us about them and help us stay within sight of IT as it changes.” Often, I find that I learn technologies by using them and not by reading about them. Therefore, to participate in your endeavour, I will try to post on technologies that I use and what I learn from them.
– “Apprenti n’est pas maître.”
I suppose my answer is that I go just as far as I need to to do what I’m trying to do. It’s good to have a look at maps and travel guides, though, to have some idea of the places I might find it useful to go. A lot of people trace the term “AJAX” to
this article by Jesse James Garrett. I have found reasons to use JavaScript to make it possible to fiddle with XHTML web pages using the DOM (Document Object Model). But nothing I’ve wanted to do yet was sufficiently data-query oriented that i would think of using XMLHttpRequest. So, apart from buying a book or two to browse, I haven’t taken the trouble to learn much about AJAX. On the other hand, learning XSLT is something I have invested quite a lot of time in, because the further I get into it, the more it looks to be a great way to make my note-taking and writing more efficient, as well as vendor-proof.
I am more in the mode of Dominic in that I learn by doing, not necessarily by reading about something. I would also warn against getting to inolved in the details of a particular technology and losing sight of the big picture, losing sight of how it can help you.
If you’re interested in RSS I created several tutorials for some local law librarians who were having trouble understanding some of the concepts behind it. They’re very basic, and they won’t tell you what the difference is between 2.0, 1.0, atome, etc. But I think they’re practical and can help people learn how to use RSS for better information management.
http://www.schwabe.com/library/rss_tutorials.htm