[This was originally published on my old blog on 18 September, 2007. A friend recovered the post from Time Machine. There were some good comments on the original posting, but those were not saved by Time Machine. Unfortunately, the attitude I observed 5, 15, and 25 years ago hasn’t changed much. Enjoy.]
A few months ago, I used the phrase “the collective experience of the industry” in an online discussion about good practices in software development. I got slammed. We have no “collective experience,” I was told, we just have “a bunch of individual experiences.”
At the time, I thought it was incorrect to say that we have no collective experience. Software developers encounter many of the same situations and solve many of the same problems over and over again, in different domains and in different technical contexts. At the time, it seemed to me that the common aspects of these experiences could form the basis of a corpus of shared professional knowledge.
Continue reading Can a new dog learn old tricks?