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Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

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Re: Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

#141

Post by icebraining »

ganstyles wrote: post #93
avinassh wrote: post #92

I love the blog posts of Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/ they are quite informative and very enjoyable to read.

I really enjoy these, but they're really for an entry level audience. See, e.g., how to do a select query in SQL. Good to know, for sure, and helpful if you're unfamiliar with SQL, but definitely really basic. Love the drawings though, and I could see if I were just getting into being an SWE or aspired to be one, they could be a good starting point.

They're for an entry level audience, but not just for aspiring SWEs. I've been a professional developer for a while, yet I'm part of the entry level audience for XDP programs[1] or for the ML bias-variance tradeoff [2]. Her posts are "entry-level" because she's so good at making complex stuff easily understandable for beginners of all kinds.

[1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/07/xdp-bpf-tutorial/

[2] https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/01/02/winning-the-bias-variance-tr...

Re: Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

#144

Post by strokirk »

spectramax wrote: post #124
chrisseaton wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you're not a native English speaker, but 'please do X' is not a polite way to ask someone to do something in English. I know it looks like it is if you look up 'please' in the dictionary, but it really doesn't sound like it in practice to native ears. You made a blunt demand, not a polite request. Also since your username is 'BossingAround' and you were literally bossing someone around in your comment…

Completely disagree as a native English speaker. "Please do foo" is polite. "Please pickup milk after work", "Please forgive me", "Please create a SSL cert for your website". Tangentially: Same thing happens in code reviews. People become extra soft at objective reasoning!!! The onus is on the offendee, not the offender. Stop being offended so much all the time, you'll live a healthier, happier life. Special treatmen…

Why would the onus be on the offendee? The person making the request or giving the feedback is the person that has the most opportunity to choose their method of affect their communication. The receiver has very little choice, except sucking it up stoically.

If you really want to communicate an idea, it's in your own best interest to adapt your approach to the listener.

Re: Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

#145

Post by dang »

randomdude402 wrote: post #122
chrisseaton wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hi this is a great article! I don't know if you've ever considered adding TLS to your personal site? I know a lot of people like me really appreciate even small websites having this.

Seems like unnecessarily much ass kissing for a simple request. IMO, "Please x" is a plenty polite way to ask for x in English, and "I am not going to x" is not rude at all I always fail to understand when people shy away from simplicity in communication. How long until we replace `wontfix` tags with `I totally would but I already have a thing that day`

They're not shying away from simplicity, but from ambiguity, especially when the range of possible interpretations includes being a jerk. We don't have nonverbal channels to communicate in this format, unlike in person, where positive intent has many easy ways to come across. Here the only channel we have is words, so it needs to be explicit in words. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(Doubly so when the message is off-topic and double again when it's a cliché.)

Re: Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

#146

Post by njitbew »

icebraining wrote: post #141
ganstyles wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoy these, but they're really for an entry level audience. See, e.g., how to do a select query in SQL. Good to know, for sure, and helpful if you're unfamiliar with SQL, but definitely really basic. Love the drawings though, and I could see if I were just getting into being an SWE or aspired to be one, they could be a good starting point.

They're for an entry level audience, but not just for aspiring SWEs. I've been a professional developer for a while, yet I'm part of the entry level audience for XDP programs[1] or for the ML bias-variance tradeoff [2]. Her posts are "entry-level" because she's so good at making complex stuff easily understandable for beginners of all kinds. [1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/07/xdp-bpf-tutorial/ [2] https://jvns.ca/bl…

I recently came across her "Perf zine" [1] and immediately bookmarked it because I enjoyed it so much. It may target entry-level engineers, but it's still a joy to read for anyone.

[1] https://jvns.ca/perf-zine.pdf

Re: Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

#147

Post by [deleted] »

noir_lord wrote: post #101
njitbew wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Dutch speaker, we're known to be very direct, but I too believe adding "Please" in front of a request does not per se make it more polite. Another example that bothers me quite a lot is adding "Thanks" to a request without awaiting a reply. Writing "Can you please do xyz? Thanks" makes it come over as an instruction instead of a request, even though the author may have had the best intentions (express his gratitu…

One of the things I love about some European cultures is that they carry over their natural bluntness when they speak English, my partner is Hungarian and to English ears her way of speaking is blunt to the point of trauma, I think it’s great, I far prefer people just get to the point particularly when they are asking for something. I am really not a fan of saccharine sweet false politeness.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

#148

Post by shaklee3 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #130
shaklee3 wrote: post #25

For low-level software, these are great: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ https://travisdowns.github.io/ https://preshing.com/

Good blogs, but I wouldn't call them focused on "low-level" software. The material is more of a conventional desktop software development.

Maybe I just don't read all the articles, but the ones I've seen on there are definitely for low-level programming. Things like release/acquire semantics, writing a game engine, and AVX512 penalties.
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