Comment by rootlocus
21 hours ago
Why just one each day then? Why not a shared knowledge base? Do you start with a "bag of tricks" and then hand them out one by one each day to remind people you're the guy with the bag of tricks?
"Oh, yeah, I know a cool trick, but y'all have to wait until tomorrow to find out what it is."
"Look! It's a way to evaluate SQL expressions with a select with a from! Oh, you already knew about it?"
I have nothing against sharing knowledge, especially when seeing someone else do something that can be done better. But just leaving daily breadcrumbs to remind people you're the guy that teaches random trivia feels like attention seeking.
Sharing an hundred tips one tip a day has certainly more chance to be shared correctly than pointing to a page containing those hundred tips.
Personally I don't care if the guy looks for attention or not. IMO people that do care have likely some jealousy issues ("I don't want other to get more attention than I do"). Lose-lose attitude.
I don't think that's a generous way to interpret it.
I see it more as: every day they will go on the slack channel and pause, wondering "Is there a neat trick I've learned or used recently?" then they share it. It's like a ritual to remember that you can share things because it's easy to forget other people don't work the same way you do. Writing it all at once is difficult (you have to remember a lot of stuff at once) and it tends to go unread.
I also think every single day is a stretch, but it's nice to pause once in a while to think about how you could help other people with something you've learned.
Because it's about the journey and not just the artefact. If you're not thinking of something that's useful and preparing snippets to share every day you are not practising it. Having to come up with something stretches your imagination and critical thinking skills. What's true for the writer is true for the reader - if you just shared a simple repository with tricks, exceedingly few are going to read that, and the ones who do will forget it. Daily practise is important.
You’re right, a centralized repository would be good too.
Both a centralized repository AND a daily message, especially for new employees, would be ideal, imo!
Normalize chatting and sharing stuff in slack!