Bicycle syndrome
In the last article I suggested that my reader knows how SQL works in detail, as well as the mechanism of the HTTP protocol . But usually it’s not the case. And I immediately remembered the story described in one of my favorite books «Suspicious minds: Why we believe conspiracy theories» by Rob Brotherton. It describes the following experiment – psychologist Rebecca Lawson asked the group of test subjects if they ride a bicycle in their lives at least once? The majority replied positively. Then she asked if they knew how the bicycle works. There were little less positive answers, but still the vast majority. And then she proposed the following image and asked to finish the picture so it would be possible to ride this bicycle.

And then the most amazing thing happened – more than half of people could not do it. This deceptively simple task shows that most people have no idea how the bicycle works. But the most interesting thing is that they do not understand that they do not know it, and begin to understand it only at the moment when they have to demonstrate this knowledge.
It’s pretty much the same thing with HTTP and SQL. More than 90% IT specialists wrote SQL requests at least once in the lab or university. People work with HTTP every day as regular users, and as IT professionals they occasionally configure web servers that actually works with HTTP. But when one has to answer a specific question … well, you’ve got the idea.
Continue reading “A1: 2017 – Injections (Part 2)”