3 thoughts on “Shorter median commenter on any mid-range software engineering blog”
As long as the “do this” instruction is comprehensible and applicable to the task, I’m fine with that.
IME, the median reply thread on a software community board goes like this:
1) “Yeah, I’ve had that problem, too.”
2) “Here’s the solution to a totally unrelated problem.”
3) [significantly later] “Did anyone ever work out a solution for this?”
4) [there is no #4]
Yeah, it’s when it’s not applicable to the task, or there is in fact no “task” as such, that it’s less helpful.
Have you seen stackoverflow.com yet? They seem to do a better job than most of providing relevant answers, and since it’s more of a Web 2.0 social networking thing, it seems like there are fewer drive-bys and posts are less stale. (Though of course it’s pretty new, too.)
Oh, and I discovered another common pattern: “Great post! Now I’m going to ignore it and talk about X.” Which I guess is at least slightly more polite than “TLDR.”
Chrononaut 
As long as the “do this” instruction is comprehensible and applicable to the task, I’m fine with that.
IME, the median reply thread on a software community board goes like this:
1) “Yeah, I’ve had that problem, too.”
2) “Here’s the solution to a totally unrelated problem.”
3) [significantly later] “Did anyone ever work out a solution for this?”
4) [there is no #4]
Yeah, it’s when it’s not applicable to the task, or there is in fact no “task” as such, that it’s less helpful.
Have you seen stackoverflow.com yet? They seem to do a better job than most of providing relevant answers, and since it’s more of a Web 2.0 social networking thing, it seems like there are fewer drive-bys and posts are less stale. (Though of course it’s pretty new, too.)
Oh, and I discovered another common pattern: “Great post! Now I’m going to ignore it and talk about X.” Which I guess is at least slightly more polite than “TLDR.”