Most tech content is bullshit

Please tell me you did this on purpose.

Some of the reasons she mentioned are legitimate (meaning, they are good reasons to follow random blog posts and stack overflow answers), like having no time, or it is comfortable. Some are not exactly good reasons, but happens often since we are humans (we are lazy, we don’t believe in our selves).

I also would like to add one more legitimate reason: it is not that important. Like it is an edge case, a temporary code, a piece of software where the highest performance isn’t necessary.

I think it is important to maintain an attitude of always having a critical mind while reading tech content. And understanding her point that something being published does not mean that something is right. But, once that’s your default attitude, it is ok to accept that, sometimes, you can critically conclude that it’s ok to just follow that tutorial and copy that code without much thought.

If that is challenged in the future, it is also ok to answer that you did just because you copied someone on the internet. As along as you accept that this is not a strong reason, and recognize that it might have been a misjudgment on your part.

I think this depends on what you're learning and how you've learned how to learn. As a beginner, I don't have any business going right to the master to ask about how I can improve my skills, so that I can "level up" and get the best results right away. Then again, we Western folk like pills and magic solutions for everything. We want results now, now, now.

If you're a white belt, go chat with a yellow or orange belt. If you're a blue belt, go chat with the purple belt. You don't walk up to a black belt and ask about the best way to tie your belt. No, you go ask the other white belts who have been at it for a little longer than you have, the people who have a couple of stripes on their belt. These people are closer to where you are in the given moment. They were in your shoes not too long ago, so they can help translate your mistakes, and help make sense of what you're thinking, asking, or learning.

When you see a really great photograph that touches you in ways you cannot describe, you're not seeing the product of an expensive camera, or a filter, you're seeing the result of someone who has taken hundreds of thousands of really shitty photographs over the course of their lifetime. You're seeing the results of maybe decades of practice. If this person writes a tutorial about taking photographs, can you learn from it? Sure. But they're not going to make you a better photographer by osmosis, you've got to go take a lot of pictures and read the beginners tutorials along the way.

So yeah, if I've been burning my bread rolls for months, I'd love to know that one thing you did to not set the house on fire every time you put rolls in the oven.

When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming.

At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality. I remember this sort of was true in the PHP documentation. The official documentation was always deeply flawed, but the comment thread attached to that documentation generally had the right info.

But that was a precursor to our current situation. To get correct info you had to read a lot of conflicting info and synthesis it yourself.

So I think we are seeing as good as the free ecosystem can get and what's sad is that we seem to have lost the paid ecosystem. It's not nearly as strong as it used to be.

What people probably don't know about O'Reilly back in the day is what went into a book.

The author was almost always a subject matter expert already. And their editor was also a subject matter expert. Then the book would go through tech review and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries. Then the book would be published and bugs would come into an errata tracking system. The vast majority of those bugs would get fixed between printings.

And then, on top of all that, there was a tech support number. And if the code in the book wasn't working for you, then you could get a live person to try to work through it with you.

That all costs a lot of money, but when you split the cost out across consumers it was only $30 or so per book.

I value my time. And there are many, many places where I wish I could pay for quality. Tech content is one of them.