The real lesson here is the power of asking the experts. Over the years there are countless times when I've replaced a huge or messy work-around with a tiny fix someone on IRC or a mailing list suggested.
Googling is great, but it only helps when you know what you're looking for. Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve is far more useful.
Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve
This is critical. All sorts of "dumb questions" turn out to have been created by faulty assumptions or bad solutions to a larger problem. Often it's like traveling to the top of a mountain to boil water instead of fixing the broken stove. When asking for help, users should always ask the big picture question ("I need help setting up a server to do X, I'm getting error message Y when doing Z" rather than just the specific problem "I'm getting error message Y when doing Z").
<glyph> For example - if you came in here asking "how do I use a jackhammer" we might ask "why do you need to use a jackhammer"
<glyph> If the answer to the latter question is "to knock my grandmother's head off to let out the evil spirits that gave her cancer", then maybe the problem is actually unrelated to jackhammers
As a corollary: when providing help, always demand the big picture. Frequently you will catch flak for this, in the form of "I am the expert in X, I know what I'm doing just fix the miniscule thing", but it is always great to see the look on someone's face when you say "Oh, dept. Y already does that and makes the result available at foo, it should save you a few hours of work".
Good point. This is why in Extreme Programming (and Cucumber), user stories are supposed to include a "Why?".
"As a user, I should be able to mark my favorite posts, so that I can find them again." It may turn out that users don't need to find old posts, or would prefer to search instead of looking through an old list.
> Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve is far more useful.
Tiny little problem. You may not be able to.
Having worked in commercial, academic and government contexts, I can tell you that real life projects will always, always have some kind of hurdle to prevent you from divulging "what you're trying to do."
You might be working from a spec that only tells you what your superiors what you to know, there might be some legal or "market positioning" reason that requires you to preserve secrecy, or there might be department politics that will cause fur to fly if somebody outside your team finds out what you are really doing...
I sure hope my current stab at self-employment works out; I'd really had to go back...
It can sometimes be really hard to even communicate assuming you do have the ability to tell them everything they need to know about. I'm not sure the original poster would have been able to figure out what he should have done had he not gone down all these rabbit holes; you need to understand the true screwed-ness of visual formats to really grok it.
On the other hand, one may argue that lbrandy is now an expert on color space conversions. He already had enough expertise to solve the problem and he now knows even more. Asking an expert wouldn't have helped him in achieving that.
Exactly. I think all the people replying with their stories of missing braces or semicolons or typos are missing the point. This wasn't an issue that could've been solved by careful (character by character) reading. It was one that required a ton of research. Tracking down a missing brace doesn't teach you anything. Tracking down an issue like this does.
Googling is great, but it only helps when you know what you're looking for. Telling expert humans what you're trying to achieve is far more useful.