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Community of Practice / Community of Theory

willcrichton.net · 991 words · saved by 1 readers

Several years ago, an incoming Ph.D. student asked me for advice about how to do good research in PL/HCI (programming languages and human-computer interaction). The advice I gave them at the time was: With a few years of hindsight, I would now amend this advice to say: In short, a community of practice is a group of people who share a central activity or technology that they learn and work with together. My main community of practice is "people who use Rust." I have a colleague in the community of practice of "people who knit." One of my former advisors is in the community of practice of "people who design self-driving cars." A community of practice is valuable because it helps you find important problems. You get to understand the day-to-day challenges of engaging in the practice. The people in the community can give you feedback on your ideas from the perspective of real-world use, as opposed to hypotheticals. When you succeed in doing good research, these people can immediately bene

Community of Practice / Community of Theory Will Crichton, 8/3/2023 Several years ago, an incoming Ph.D. student asked me for advice about how to do good research in PL/HCI (programming languages and human-computer interaction). The advice I gave them at the time was: Find a community of practice. With a few years of hindsight, I would now amend this advice to say: Find a community of practice and a community of theory. In short, a community of practice is a group of people who share a central activity or technology that they learn and work with together. My main community of practice is "peop

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