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Engineers Should Blog

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Re: Engineers Should Blog

#41

Post by nickjj »

Rapzid wrote: post #23

What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.

I use Jekyll for my site[1], and am very happy with it.

It gives you more than enough out of the box to put together a reasonable site without compromising anything too important.

Everything you need is there (comments via disqus, syntax highlighting, pagination, etc.).

Even with complex stylesheets and asset minification on hundreds of images and dozens of pages it reloads in development in about 3-4 seconds.

[1]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#42

Post by greglindahl »

zzzcpan wrote: post #38
Chyzwar wrote: post #32

Blogging is waste of time. Most of blogs are paid PR/Marketing/SEO content that is low quality click-bait. Like this blog post that is PR piece for company that author works. Engineer should sharpen theirs skills on github. During interview github profile is much larger hiring factor than blog.

> Blogging is waste of time. It certainly is a waste of time for improving your engineering skills, it's a myth. But it isn't for PR, which is very important these days even to get somewhere in software engineering, not to mention for pushing any kind of product or attracting other engineers to hire.

... being able to explain things concisely and accurately is a skill that helps any engineer.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#44

Post by Buge »

>Recruiting systems are optimized to filter out false negatives (i.e eliminate people that don’t satisfy their bias) at the expense of false positives (i.e miss out on good people).

I thought the definitions of false negative and false positive were the opposite.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#45

Post by mrlase »

Buge wrote: post #44

>Recruiting systems are optimized to filter out false negatives (i.e eliminate people that don’t satisfy their bias) at the expense of false positives (i.e miss out on good people). I thought the definitions of false negative and false positive were the opposite.

It is the opposite. False positive in this context would be thinking someone is good when they're actually bad and vice versa for false negative...

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#46

Post by nur0n »

JCDenton2052 wrote: post #11

No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code. Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if…

Code and blog posts are just two ways of crystallizing ideas. In the same way that not everyone can write good code, not everyone can translate ideas clearly into blog format.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#47

Post by rev_bird »

Buge wrote: post #44

>Recruiting systems are optimized to filter out false negatives (i.e eliminate people that don’t satisfy their bias) at the expense of false positives (i.e miss out on good people). I thought the definitions of false negative and false positive were the opposite.

Yeah, I had trouble parsing that sentence, but I agree. Recruiting systems usually encourage false negatives.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#48

Post by holdenk »

jlgaddis wrote: post #40
donovanm wrote: post #18

Yeah I agree with this that most software engineers should consider this. It's another way to set yourself apart from the masses that most people will never put in the time and effort to do. The idea that other people put forward that you should only write about things if you think your ideas are innovative always seemed silly to me. A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important infor…

> A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else. This is very true. There have been many, many times when there's a technical article on the top of HN on a topic that I would never have imagined writing about simply because it seemed too basic or "entry-level". There have even been a few topics that I had actually considered writing about but dismissed it,…

Some of the highest traffic blog posts I've written have been on the "entry-level" side of things.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#49

Post by noobermin »

JCDenton2052 wrote: post #11

No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code. Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if…

Another thing this turn hurts is this another avenue the "pretty people"[0] can use to get a foot in the door with little to no actual technical experience. I am reminded by a blogpost that got to the front page a few weeks ago about the "new Google OS" that was going to replace everything...written by an admitted non-coder/technical person.

Many hackers are great at what they do, actually producing working, sensible products, but aren't bloggers. Sure, if you can do both, all the more power to you. People who can't blog (out of desire or time or just because they don't like writing may be) shouldn't be seen as any less a hacker because they don't. The best way to gauge a person's ability is their work, which github, et. al. is supposed to provide.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/

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