{"id":3102,"date":"2004-07-11T17:28:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-11T07:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/be-your-own-teddy-bear\/"},"modified":"2014-10-10T13:14:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T02:14:00","slug":"be-your-own-teddy-bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/3102","title":{"rendered":"Be your own teddy Bear"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sellsbrothers.com\/spout\/default.aspx?content=archive.htm\">The Sells Spout<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Be Your Own Teddy Bear<br \/>\n<br \/>Wed, 10\/17\/01 <\/p>\n<p>According to legend, the TA office next to the Stanford computer science lab is guarded by a teddy bear. Before a student is allowed to consume valuable time asking a question of the TA, they must first explain it to the teddy bear. Apparently the bear is able to answer 80% of the questions that students ask, saving time for the TAs to play Unreal Tournament. <\/p>\n<p>I often feel like I act as the teddy bear for the COM community. I get several email messages a day from folks that consider the mailings lists (resources set up to answer just these kinds of questions) to be too slow, so they ask me directly. If I don&#8217;t know the answer off of the top of my head, I often respond with the following phrase: <\/p>\n<p>    &#8220;Can you send me a tiny, tiny project that reproduces the problem? &#8211;Chris&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>This, of course, implies that I will actually build and debug the project. And 20% of the time, I do. The other 80% of the time, by the time folks have reduced the problem enough to demonstrate it for me, they&#8217;ve already solved it, saving me the time (thank goodness). <\/p>\n<p>Knowing that this is the case, I recommend that you become your own teddy bear. A whiteboard is handy for explaining the problem to yourself and Microsoft development tools are now so handy that you can typically whip out a small reproduction project very quickly. These very activities will often solve the problem, but even if they don&#8217;t, you&#8217;ve got a concise description of the problem and a small repro case to send to your friends or to post to the list. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From The Sells Spout Be Your Own Teddy Bear Wed, 10\/17\/01 According to legend, the TA office next to the Stanford computer science lab is guarded by a teddy bear. Before a student is allowed to consume valuable time asking &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/3102\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Be your own teddy Bear<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5cfmK-O2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.radio-active.net.au\/web3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}