RWDevCon 2017 Inspiration Talk: I’m an Idiot by Richard Turton
Rich is a professional idiot. In this talk from RWDevCon 2017, he talks about how to leverage your inner idiot to make you a better coder, writer and communicator. By Richard Turton.
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Give Help
How does an idiot answer a question successfully? You use your idiocy.
Ask clarifying questions if you don’t understand. This is a great trick, because sometimes you just say, “Oh, what’s this bit here doing?” And then that person suddenly realizes that that bit there is their entire problem, and they get to feel great, because they’ve actually solved their own problem. You get to feel great because you’ve helped them solve their own problem without needing to know anything.
Remember how it feels when you don’t know something and how hard it can be to ask for help. Don’t act surprised that somebody doesn’t know something that you know. You didn’t know once. Don’t belittle someone for having the self-awareness to know what they don’t know.
This duckling only learned how to swim (and code) by asking helpful idiots on Stack Overflow. (Image via pixabay.com)
This duckling only learned how to swim (and code) by asking helpful idiots on Stack Overflow. (Image via pixabay.com)
Give simple answers, but give clear answers with reasons behind them. Don’t just dump a load of code on people and say, “Try this!”
And of course, you might not know the answer to the question. This is fine. You can move on, or you can do a bit of research and try to find the answer yourself. I learned a lot by doing that on Stack Overflow. I’d see questions and have no idea what the answer was, so I’d go and find out all about the thing. You can learn a lot more that way; it gives you a broader range of things to get involved in than simply making a project, because a project is usually constrained to a few areas.
Go Forth and Idiot
We can see that a strategy for successful idioting boils down to these two points:
- Communicate clearly
- Help each other
You have to communicate clearly with yourself and with the other idiots. It’s much more important to be clear than to be clever. You have to realize that your idioting overlaps with the idioting of others, and that we can build amazing things if we help each other and work together.
There’s too much knowledge in the world for one idiot to keep it all in their head, so we literally do have to share it; there’s no other way.
Thank you very much, idiots!
