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10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

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101–110 of 188 posts

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#101
post #83
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ? You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy. > Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions. It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an a…

> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy. I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue. Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one. "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of…

> Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.

Yes; one of the most aspects of charisma is being sensitive to your audience. Charismatic people watch how their performance is received, and adjust it on the fly. Not too much, but enough to make the audience feel cared for. This is one reason why there's a sort of magic in live performances.

I also think we're talking about two extreme ideas here that are both wrong:

1. Performances are on an objective spectrum from "right" to "wrong"

2. Nothing is good or bad. Everything is subjective.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. There's no such thing as "the objectively best pieces of music (/art / writing / etc)". But some music, art and writing is enjoyed by many people. And some is junk. There is no objective measure of music. But also, nobody would consider my amateur piano playing to be as good as The Beetles or Mozart.

> "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.

I don't know where to start with this.

Again, there's two extremes that are both wrong: a) As a writer / performer, you should conform exactly to whatever the audience wants. And b) Forget the audience. Write however you want without any regard for them.

Both of these extreme positions will result in bad work. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don't want a performer to be our slave or our master. We want you to be our friend. Our leader. Our teacher.

In other terms, write however you want. But if you don't care about your audience, don't be surprised if your audience doesn't care about you.

> people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...

I'm Australian. The class was in France, taught by a French clown. There were students from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, South Africa, NZ, Finland, Germany and more.

Not all art works across different cultures, but clowning does. I think if you showed our performances to a group of monkeys, even they would also find it funny and if they could, they would pick out the same favorites.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#102

One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills whil…

I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#103

I will never not find it insane that in college they have word minimums for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.

At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.

I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#106

One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills whil…

I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizi…

Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.

And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#107
post #82

Totally random rant. I have a lot to say. About lot of things. I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention. But most of all it's putting it all together. The…

I encourage you to still share your ideas and thoughts. It doesn't need to be as a blog, but in general. :)

Don't censor yourself out of fear of what others might think or misunderstand.

Many may get confused and some might not like it, but there may also be a small group of people who understand, which if you fall silent couldn't be reached.

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#108

[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it. My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can…

congrats! fun little story. how much did you make from it?

Re: 10 years of writing a blog nobody reads

#110
post #82

Totally random rant. I have a lot to say. About lot of things. I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention. But most of all it's putting it all together. The…

as a junior dev I completely understand the code sharing part: no matter if I write the code myself, or followed some guide about code styling/naming conventions/best coding practices, or assisted myself with an llm, the result is the same; I don't share the code at all, due to the fact of how many times I saw on the internet the "Why did you do it that way, no one does it that way" or some other discouraging comments, so no wonder that Stack Overflow was becoming less and less popular even before llm's if there is more people like me and people who were like me don't need such sites anymore since they upskilled since then. Nowadays only people reading my code (and subsuquently having a normal healthy talk, not a discussion - a talk!) is an LLM and my girlfriend or some random friend that asked what I'm up to nowadays when I was in the process of coding.
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