This site is one of the reasons.
Most tech content is bullshit
111–120 of 470 posts
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#112I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…
IMHO the worst is that lot of young people actually consume, like and share that SEO/marketing stuff and spread it around without much thoughts. That’s the most popular dev content you will find on dev.to, medium, YouTube (for some reasons dev related videos became huge last year), and other publishing platforms. They don’t just generate useless content, they in fact have a public for it, thus little reason to stop.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
About 5 years ago I attended a local code meetup and someone gave a presentation about this new TypeScript thing. He basically just explained the basic syntax, concepts. etc. A bit boring, but not the worst I've seen. Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really us…
I can barely speak in front of a crowd on something I’ve got 20 years experience in.
This is still something I really can't wrap my mind around. What is the key difference in early life between people who will speak authoritatively regardless of competence, across the spectrum to experts who can't or won't? I don't think Dunning-Kruger explains it because it's not like every shy expert used to be a gregarious beginner.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#114Personally, my favourite one is seeing 1000th tutorial post on React.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#115People tend to follow paths that are tried and tested, and often blindly so. Why? Because it's incredibly efficient to do so, and the vast majority of products do not need some incredibly levels of tolerance or performance.
If everything on the web were to be bespoke items, built from scratch, things would stop up. Simply too resource consuming.
For many, the process is to simply copy something that works, and use it until it breaks - and then look at the needed upgrades / reasons to why things failed.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#116I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…
The internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids.
Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.
I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do…
I wouldn't want to read a tutorial by someone who has just learned it. I want a tutorial by someone who has ample experience. How would you feel if I write a cookbook the first time my bread rolls didn't catch fire? ... to solicit feedback?
It totally depends on the tutorial and the way it is written. I have personally learned a lot from "hey everyone, I just learned this neat thing and wanted to share!" type articles on the Internet, where the author discloses their level of experience upfront so you can have the appropriate expectations.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#118I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…
I think the solution (or at least a big part of it) is the resurgence of real blogs. When real developers write deeply technical posts about their experiences, on their own sites, everybody wins. Discovery is an issue, but there have been a number of HN threads recently on ways to mitigate this. Webrings, blogrolls, RSS... there was never going to be a super-convenient or efficient way to generate a high-quality, high signal-to-noise ratio set of sources. But curating your own preferred set of such sites, and making a habit of taking and publishing dev notes on your projects, and participating in the blog revival, is a step in the right direction.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#119I’ve said this for a long time: The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read. Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 20…
In the last couple years I worked on migrating some teams from CVS to Git. That is the reality of a lot of projects in the industry.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#120Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.
Ha, I just posted something similar almost at the same time, but you said it better.
There are dozens of us who would have stepped up if you two didn't.