Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog – Page 67 – Struggling with the dark and responding to the light.

I (Still) Believe

Nearly fifteen years ago, during a high school band trip to NYC, I was part of a well-reasoned insurrection. We had one goal: to commandeer one of the charter buses on a trip a few miles down the road, where the Metrostars were playing the Columbus Crew in the what was the third week of the opening season of Major League Soccer. Our plot somehow worked, and I remember racing up the steps of the Meadowlands to find my seat behind one of the corner flags and watch actual first division soccer in my home country. The Metros lost 2-0, and my general disappointment ended up turning me into a DC United fan for the remainder of the season.

Tags childhood, mls, rbny, soccer

Debated

What If There’s Bears?

I am a huge, huge fan of Atlassian’s tools, and I’ve worked pretty hard to make them a part of culture at my office. They’ve just started a series of blog posts on using a wiki for technical writing, and I loved this bit:

Do you feel nervous at the thought of customers adding angry comments on your documentation wiki? Spammers running riot? Here’s the flipside for you to consider: customers answering other customers’ questions in the wiki, external developers adding code samples to help flesh out your document, partners volunteering to write new documentation.

I think that when it comes to implementing any new technology (especially from being inside IT), there’s a lot of fear and belief that someone, somewhere, is going to misuse/abuse it. But we often lose site of the advantages that will come from the tool and clever use by your community.

“But what if…?” is the common thing I hear when talking about new technology, and my tongue-in-cheek response is now going to be “What if there’s bears?”, in due deference to this old Will Hines video: