Rob Walling

If you're hired by someone is a client who can judge taste or thinks they can, but they can't explain the why.

And it's because they haven't gotten to stage two.

this ability to explain why something works or doesn't.

It's a refined skill.

It's a key marker of deeper expertise and it takes a lot of time and exposure and I think some self-learning as well to learn the vague rules.

And maybe there are rules of thumb and maybe there are hard and fast rules or maybe there are rules in your own head, but it's your pattern matching that gets you here.

And then stage three is mastery.

It's knowing how to fix it.

This is not just diagnosing a problem, seeing there's a problem, understanding why.

It's being able to say, this is how to make it better.

So as a developer, you move from saying this code is bad to refactor this class or extract this into a parameter.

In films, it might mean that you know pacing really well.

You can say, oh, the pacing was off and here's what I would have done.

Structural changes, right?

That character didn't need to be there at all.

Story arc improvements, writing improvements.

And being able to prescribe how to improve moves you from being a critic to creation and mastery, right?

Being able to actually improve a work of art, or in this case, a piece of software or a website.

And this is kind of like ninja level expertise, right?

It's editorial vision.