Expertise

[ewt]

This is a long-due follow-up poll to this one from around a month ago.

Most of the questions in this poll come from ali_anarres, not me, although I likely would have thought of them eventually.

[Poll #870553]

Comments

[ali-in-london.livejournal.com]

I answered the "in contact with" question as if it was asking about the field I want to be an expert in.

The "what other areas" question was difficult. There are an almost inexhaustable supply of topics, fields and areas that I would like to become more knowledgeable on or skilled in, but does knowledge and skill automatically equate to expertise? Somewhere I feel there is a different, and for me it's the difference between being good and being up there right at the very front. An expert is something other than just very good, they're a leader, an educator, an innovator, maybe even a visionary sometimes.

(ps: mind if I link to this poll?)

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I did explore some of what makes an expert in the earlier poll, which I did link to. Perhaps you might like to explore that first.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Do go ahead and link to the poll.

I don't think knowledge and skill automatically equate to expertise. I think hairyears gave a pretty good definition of expertise in response to the last poll, though it isn't faultless.

[reddragdiva]

Having others think you're one is probably an important part of it. Even if you're boggled by this, e.g. "Apparently I am an expert in subject x. This is a frightening concept."

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

It's slightly hard to say who's an expert in comparative fruitfly genomics, because most of the papers won't be published until the sequence papers have been. The authors of the paper (http://flybase.net/.data/docs/CommunityWhitePapers/GenomesWP2003.html) that proposed drosophila as a model for comparative genomics are probably the best choice, simply because they're effectively responsible for the field existing. http://rana.lbl.gov/drosophila/ (http://rana.lbl.gov/drosophila/) is probably the best website for providing links to the current work.

For Linux on laptops, I probably am the expert right now, in terms of breadth of coverage. Pavel Machek (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/) is another that springs to mind, as is Thomas Renninger.

Ubuntu/Debian: Colin Watson (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/), Steve Langasek (http://web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog.html), Matt Zimmerman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Zimmerman_%28technologist%29) and Adam Conrad (http://www.theadam.org/) are the people I think of most in terms of the most comprehensive understanding of how an entire Linux distribution fits together. There isn't really any sort of literature on this - a Linux distribution is a huge stack of interdependent components, and most people tend to be experts on individual aspects of them. Linux From Scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/) is possibly the closest thing to a guide, though it's all a bit too much "Do this, then do this, then do this and OH WOW A WORKING SYSTEM" rather than actually giving you a good idea about why all of these things fit together like they do.