You could fairly say that my husband and I are “into” winemaking: Fifteen gallons are fermenting in the living room as I write, with six or seven more (five-gallon) kits cooling their heels in the den. About two or three months ago, I decided to get a little more serious about the actual discipline of winemaking.
Mind you, the guy who runs the homebrew shop is completely awesome—I’d never think to question his word. But it was time to start understanding why I like what I like. And more to the point, to stop wasting money—even ten bucks at a time—playing whack-a-mole at the supermarket liquor department.
Winemaking and what I do for a living (nominally, programming computers) are similar in that there are a lot of posers out there. And a lot of hooey that passes for “conventional wisdom,” largely propagated by the know-it-alls. (We all know how that story ends…) Not to mention the annoying fads. (Stupid “Sideways”!)
So the only antidote is immersion into the subject matter. But here’s the deal: You don’t have to know, much less understand everything while in that immersive state. I (maybe naively) registered for the mailing list of Derby, an open source Java database (brought into this world by IBM, before being fostered by the Apache Foundation). Thirty one messages hit my Inbox less than twenty-four hours later, and I made the commitment to myself to read them all before bedtime.
But that’s okay. See, I know I’m a poser when it comes to that particular database system. That being said, I need to know where the proverbial bodies are buried: I have two upcoming projects riding on that understanding. And there’s no other way to achieve that except to start now. There is enough time that I don’t need to scurry off to Wikipedia the first time I can’t zen something purely from context. (The third or fourth time may be another story…)
And wouldn’t you know it…four more messages just arrived. Time to skee-daddle, folks.
