Expert (Premium)

I’m not a fan of the word “expert,” not because there aren’t experts, but rather because too many who are not believe themselves to be experts. This is the opposite of imposter syndrome, where one doubts their own expertise and is worried about being outed as a fraud.

I have plenty of problems, but I don’t suffer from either condition. Despite having spent the last 25+ years documenting how Windows works and opining on the strategy decisions Microsoft has made along the way, I still have so much to learn. And because I don’t position myself---or think of myself as---an expert, there are no worries about fraud. I try to communicate what I know with certainty and what I’m unsure about with that caveat.

I do recall reading technical books and magazine articles in the 1980s and assuming that their authors were subject experts who were so awash in the topics they covered that they could simply regurgitate facts on cue. And while there are certainly people like that, the world has changed a lot since then. Most people are passingly familiar with a wide range of topics and don’t laser-focus on just one thing. Technology changes quickly, and knowing where to look is more important than retaining information that might quickly become out-of-date. Oh, and I’ve written books, over 25 of them. And what I learned from that experience is that, in many cases, one gains expertise in the writing of the book and not before one conceives of the book.

For example, when Gary Brent and I created The Delphi 3.0 Super Bible in the mid-to-late 1990s, we hadn’t memorized the entire Visual Component Library (VCL) that the 1300+ page tome would go on to document. But we had great backgrounds in Pascal, including Delphi’s predecessor, Turbo Pascal, in Object Oriented Programming (OOP) techniques and principles, and in other similar Software Development Kits (SDKs) and frameworks. We also had a great love of tinkering and spent a lot of time---maybe too much time---experimenting with code to what we could do.

And by the time I had written several books of my own, I could look back on those earlier books I had read and could see how they had been put together. There is rarely any way to know for sure, but it was clear that those authors, like me, probably had more knowledge of some topics than others, and that some content required a lot more research and work.

Anyway, I approach the Windows 11 Field Guide, the work I do here on Thurrott.com, and whatever nonsense comes pouring out of my mouth on Windows Weekly and First Ring Daily the same way: there are those things I know, those things I sort of know, and those things I simply know nothing about. And all I can do is try to handle each thing accordingly. There is nothing worse---and potentially more damaging---than someone spouting off incorrectly on some topic while behaving like an expert.

I think about all of this now because of something I had written in passing in iOS 16 Pu...