Harry’s presentation on Org-Mode is great. He shares his personal preferences. You can read his blog to learn about them too. The meter to the presentation is perfect, too. It left me thinking more about
- What are out expectations as viewers?
- What are our expectations as presenters?
- Is it worth communicating assumptions?
- Is it all an sales exercise?
- How does our experience with commercial software change our valuation of OSS?
- Org-Mode is large and expressive; can we ever say more than “In my experience, X is good or bad”? Sure everything is in our experience but people really don’t listen unless you make strong statements, right?
- As of 2016, is it fair to start a conversation with something like “I’ve spent 1,000 hours mastering X… this is the context of what I’m about to share”? When we provide opinions should we provide the same contextual disclaimer? What does mastery mean today and what is it’s role in practice? Does mastery have a place when sales matters most? Do both have a place?