[jeffwass]

On a somewhat related note, in hardware space :

Twenty years ago I practically got a job offer merely by asking a question on Usenet about a particular piece of test equipment.

IIRC it was some HP 'bed-of-nails' beast for programmatically testing circuit boards. You would setting pins as inputs/outputs, analog or digital, give pulse or waveform patterns, etc.

It sounds really cool, but this thing was horrendous to use, you had to run it on a specialized HP-UX box with a Motif interface, and it was not very pleasant.

But I was surprised that by asking one random question on some HP or Motif usenet forum (which I don't believe I could get anybody to answer), some tech company was practically offering me a job to use this system for their own test workflow.

I refused, but it did give me some confidence knowing I had some obscure job skills I could fall back on if needed.