Matisyahu's Blog

Watching the following video regarding the declining technology literacy and why it is concerning for reasons outside of just simply getting and retaining a job:

The importance of being of being self reliant when it comes to technology isn’t just a matter of being able to use technology to improve your life but understanding technology makes you less dependent on third parties. When you become reliant on a third party to provide you with a solution then you’ve now created a scenario where you’ve now got a dependency on that third party which limits your options in the future. What do I mean by that? they can keep pushing up prices and you’ll need accepting that price increase because you’re not equipped to either do it yourself (self hosting) or migrate to a different third party.

It is also important to understand what is going on under the hood in much the same way that a student completes a maths equation using a calculator but will still learn the ‘why’ behind the process taking place. The purpose of learning the why behind each step also allows you to work back from an incorrect answer and see why you got the incorrect answer. This is the reason why when you were at school your teacher required you to show your working when completing an equation. When you have an issue with your computer, being able to understand what is going on under the hood allows you to fix it yourself and then learn from that experience so maybe in future you can void the same problem occuring.

A good example of diagnosing a problem would be if you setup an email service using a domain you regisred via WordPress and you’re finding that you’re not receiving emails or not sending email. Being able to understand what TXT, MX and other settings do then allows you to compare the settings of your email provide and then compare it to what you’ve setup and understand why you’re getting the error. When I set up my settings on WordPress I looked into what each of the settings mean, what they did and how that would impact the reliability of sending and receiving emails – it gave me an appreciation of how the internet works.