Howdy Julia,

I debated whether I should respond to you at all, however I feel that I must. You and I don't know each other, and based on the last sentence of your reply I suspect we agree with one another more than we disagree. Nonetheless, your reply seems to imply that my comment and my earlier disagreement were done out of malice or arrogance. A different commenter used the term "gatekeeping".

Fundamentally most of the building blocks of the Internet that people interact with regularly, including DNS, are well-defined and relatively easy to understand /relative to other technical things/. Protocols like DNS are effectively shoving text into packet. All of the hard stuff isn't in the bare protocol, it's in understanding the complete stack of abstractions the protocol relies on, the abstractions that allow the protocol to be simple but can sometimes not work in unexpected ways. If there is anything I've learned in my life, it's that integrations and scaling are what make technical things hard, the basic protocols are generally very simple and they are robust primarily because they are simple. They are simple primarily because they get to rely on all the underlying abstractions to be there. Technology now exists in a world of abstractions on top of abstractions, and understanding the basic building blocks is now rare since many technologists focus on mastering a particular layer of abstraction, yet if you understand the basic building blocks, even in an incomplete sense, it can greatly empower you to be more capable and comfortable with the abstractions.

"Hard" and "Easy" are relative terms, and I do believe that saying things are hard can lead people to avoid them altogether. I have spent a considerable portion of my life working diligently to mentor people in their technical careers, foster technical understanding, and bring people along with me on knowledge journeys. I have done this through extensive written documentation (internal to companies), teaching classes (internal to companies), public conference talks, guest lecturing at universities, and mentorship of people who are interested in learning technology but come from non-traditional backgrounds. I myself come from a non-traditional background. I've also worked hard to improve the UX and accessibility of every piece of software I touch, because I think that technology as a tool and the information about how it works should be accessible.

I really appreciated your article and I think you have a great writing style to explain things in an understandable way. Your Implement DNS project is really great, and I will be linking it to others in the future as they go through the process of learning DNS. In no way was my disagreement before or this reply meant to throw shade on you, your article, or otherwise. It's because I believe saying things are hard actually discourages people from learning them, leads to avoidance, and in particular I believe DNS is one of the more simple of the many possible things someone can learn about how the Internet works. I am /very much/ not trying to in any way disparage the intelligence of anyone who is struggling with learning any technology. I believe that learning technology is much like learning anything else, it requires interest and time. Saying that some of the simpler things are hard can discourage people from having the interest, and if people do not have the interest they will not invest the time.

Very specifically, I think for the audience here on HN, they've had to learn and use technologies that are far more difficult than DNS in their lives and careers with an almost certainty. In a relative sense, I do not believe DNS is difficult to learn. DNS has a /lot/ of edge cases though, which can be hard to troubleshoot, understand, and resolve, so from this perspective it is hard to master and I wouldn't claim to have fully mastered it myself. As an example of what I mean, another commenter mentioned Git. I have a pretty deep understanding of Git as well, yet I consider it significantly more difficult to learn and understand than DNS, largely because DNS is better documented, easier to inspect, and doesn't require the technologist to understand complex algorithms like merkle trees. Yet almost every tech worker in the world uses Git every day, often with many frustrations and weird edge cases, as in regular usage it fails far more often than simpler technologies like DNS. The entire strength of DNS from a robustness, adoption, and resilience perspective is largely its simplicity, which is why I think relative to the many other things that exist that it's not hard to learn.

Our opinions are always colored by our experiences, as is mine, which I stand by. One of those experiences I'll recount here, which is that I have known a woman for a little over 6 years now who is currently working in IT and finishing a bachelor's in IT through WGU. She's one of the top performer's on her team and has a gift with understanding and explaining abstract concepts to users, which has made her well-liked by all at her company. Not long after I met her she shared with me that she'd always wanted to go into IT, but felt like she couldn't do it because everyone she'd met along the way had told her it was too hard for her because she suffers from a learning disorder called dyscalculia which interferes in her ability to do math. For reasons I don't fully understand, math ability is used by many technical people as a determinant of your ability to learn and work with technology. I was one of the first people she'd met in her life that encouraged her to pursue her interest in technology and told her she could do it. I did so by pointing out that many of the things people were saying were hard were concepts she already understood in the abstract and offering to go on the journey with her. She had been so dejected by others telling her things were too hard for her she never pursued a college education. I invested significantly in learning with her and 3 years ago she finished an associates and multiple certifications and started her first IT job, and she's been excelling in it the entire way.

I've continued to mentor her, along with many others, because I legitimately do believe that much of the technology around us is much easier to learn and understand than people commonly believe, and that understanding how it works is a key to understanding how our world works now and is incredibly empowering even for people who don't work with technology every day. I am adamantly opposed to any sort of gatekeeping of technology knowledge, and in no way am advocating that gatekeeping or trying to disparage those who struggle to learn. If anything, one of my existential fears is that as a society we fall into a situation where so few people understand the technology we rely on every day that it creates a new and more dire social gap beyond the wealth gap, a knowledge gap that fundamentally separates those who can effectively participate in the levers of power (including democratically) from those who cannot. I am heavily invested in ensuring that knowledge is free, accessible, and that there is an open pathway for people to learn and it's one of my core optimisms about the Internet.