121–130 of 130 posts
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Theres no irony in my statement. Youre just not (intentionally or unintentionally) trying to understand me.
I don't understand you either. Please elaborate.
He seems like he doesnt even know why he thinks writing is good, and if i were him id be a little embarassed.
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I actually miss the days when engineers blogged more rather than accumulating karma on Stackoverflow. When Stackoverflow emerged it was a great source of knowledge but these days you have to sift through the comments to check if the solutions are still current after api changes. For a lot of stale answers github issues can be more helpful. The benefit of blogging isn't just to broadcast your knowledge but creating a…
>I actually miss the days when engineers blogged more rather than accumulating karma on Stackoverflow. 100% hit. I do write sometimes on StackOverflow to give back some help to the wonderful minds over then Internet, because, sharing knowledge is what makes the whole engineering better. What percent of clickbait attention-craving blogging does share some useful insight and/or knowledge? >I find it strange that this i…
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I don't understand you either. Please elaborate.
Im not saying all writing is bad, so his comment just wasnt even relevant. He seems like he doesnt even know why he thinks writing is good, and if i were him id be a little embarassed.
Please do elaborate and explain how and why I should be ashamed of myself because I really don't know how writing can ever be bad for anyone.
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Yes. The last thing the world needs is more half-baked self-promoting drivel. I love writing. I put more than half of mine in a drawer. A drawer is a wonderful place for of unfinished drafts that aren't ready or aren't working. I don't know if everyone should write; that feels presumptuous. But if you do, I highly recommend a drawer.
On the other hand, publishing publicly will force you to fix every little detail. For example, the most popular article on my blog is about the TCP "time wait" state on Linux. I knew for years how it worked and wanted for people to stop blindly use some sysctls. Therefore, I thought, what's best than a blog post to spread some awareness on this? But, for every sentence, I had to be sure that this was true. So, I chec…
The open source analogy is actually pretty good. Some projects you know you how to go about right away. But when you're not sure, start anyway; rough drafts are like prototypes. Dropping a few (not all) can be part of the process.
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 funny thing is that you never know which posts will be popular. On my blog three old posts generate over 70% of the traffic. Some people have found them informative, and linked on a couple of pages.
When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)
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> 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.
I used to have an issue with writing classes in college. Since the writers-to-be in the class aren't experts in any particular field, they are forced to pick sides in ridiculous polemic topics just to fill a page. This transfers over to the real world in the form of frivolous articles written to provide a constant stream of content to a readership. People like engineers and other folks with technical jobs have some o…
Damn... I never thought of this. Great idea.
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>I actually miss the days when engineers blogged more rather than accumulating karma on Stackoverflow. 100% hit. I do write sometimes on StackOverflow to give back some help to the wonderful minds over then Internet, because, sharing knowledge is what makes the whole engineering better. What percent of clickbait attention-craving blogging does share some useful insight and/or knowledge? >I find it strange that this i…
Your explanation is very different from the interpretation I made from what you wrote. Yes I agree that clickbait only adds noise but your comment seemed dismissive of engineers writing unless they were exceptional engineers.
Look, here's an example, which emerged this morning as a pure coincidence:
I have a almost-finished blog post draft in front of my eyes my colleagues and I have been writing some time now. It outlines a problem we've stumbled, and, we believe, many other engineers have stumbled or will stumble upon quite soon (while migrating their code from Go 1.3 to 1.6 and further). The problem is exceptionally boring and stupid. We took extremely boring un-brilliant way to solve it.
The engineer who first encountered could've just written something like 'go memory management sucks', or 'how go moves forward and breaks my stuff in production', a million-and-first post about minor opinion. This is what I call useless noise, and, when used for self-promotion, quickly becomes click-bait out of desperation to get at least some attention.
Instead, we've fixed the issue, and in spare time have been slowly adding detail, reproducing cases and generating isolated statistics exactly for this case, and it grew into useful piece of knowledge for regular engineers (like we are) not to repeat the stupid mistakes we've done.
It is not as immediately rewarding, to sit on it longer until your writing has at least some utility for others, and will pay them off for the time and attention and context switch they've invested into you. This is what matters, not the "exceptionality" of engineers who are writing this.