There's a particular sadness to a missed connection between a question and its answer. Someone asks. The response covers everything they already knew, or introduces terms they don't recognize, or solves a different problem entirely. Twenty minutes pass. The asker walks away with almost nothing. The person who answered thinks it went fine.

Both sides can do better, and both sides are worth practicing. Julia Evans has written clearly about this, asking and answering, and I want to pull out what's most useful.

When you're asking

State your current understanding before you ask. "My understanding is that service X retries on connection failure, is that right?" This calibrates the answer and often surfaces the misunderstanding on its own. "How does X work?" is almost always too open. "Does X do Y?" is almost always more useful.

Ask yes/no questions, not because you only want yes or no, you'll usually get more, but because they're harder to go off on a tangent answering. When you lose the thread, say so: name the term you didn't recognize, stop when the explanation has gone somewhere unhelpful. Interrupting isn't rude. Staying lost is worse.

When you're answering

Before you say anything, find out where they are. "How familiar are you with X?" gets a more honest answer than "Do you know X?" And ask what prompted the question, not just what the question is. Someone asking about service discovery is usually in the middle of something specific, something that matters to them right now.

Show your work. Walk them through how you'd figure it out, what you'd look at, what you'd rule out, what told you what. If you find yourself doing the thing instead of explaining it, stop and narrate. The goal isn't for them to have the answer. It's for them to know how to find it next time, on their own, without you.

When the same question comes in twice, write something down.

Let the room learn too

Alistair Cockburn called it osmotic communication, knowledge that spreads by proximity, overheard rather than formally transmitted. A question in a shared channel, an explanation in a thread: these reach the people who didn't know they had the same question. The understanding diffuses on its own.

That's not a side effect of working in the open. It's the point.