Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't make any intuitive sense. Meeting people starts with conversations.
Not the way I do it.
How do u do it?
I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
131–140 of 229 posts
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. It’s a perfectly valid choice to write essays that are hyper-focused on just teaching the facts as efficiently as possible, but that isn’t some kind of universal rule that must be applied to all essays. I personally don’t care for the popular “Amer…
>As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. Of course, just like anyone's free to say "it's a generic 4:4 I–V–vi–IV pop song, nothing to write home about" or "it's yet another ISO standard blogpost, don't bother clicking through the popup". Though I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden…
> "trying to create an illusion of creativity with randomness"
I doubt that's why authors use this technique, though. I think it's part humble-brag ("hey I'm so smart I don't take complexity seriously!") and part an expression of nervousness ("it's scary to write things and publish on the internet, because haters"). A less serious style also allows you to take criticism more easily, perhaps.
That's an explanation, not an excuse! I like dense, solid prose more.
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. It’s a perfectly valid choice to write essays that are hyper-focused on just teaching the facts as efficiently as possible, but that isn’t some kind of universal rule that must be applied to all essays. I personally don’t care for the popular “Amer…
This seems orthogonal to the complaint: the person you are responding to is assuming you aren't just doing this because you think it is a worthy art form for your audience of people who enjoy it, but that you are attempting to write something that provides strong value to the reader. You are welcome to write whatever you want, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is helping. If you want a music analogy, you a…
"Useful" is very much context-dependent. A post that does not catch the reader's attention is not useful. If you write in a style that is indistinguishable from a thousand other authors writing about the same topic, your writing is equally useless.
It is a mistake to think that an "audience" is one uniform set of people with identical needs, tastes, and interests. And therefore it is a mistake to suggest that there is something inherently "less useful" about one style of writing over another.
Less useful for whom? Under what circumstances?
I agree 100% that if you define your audience as "person trying to solve a problem and googling for help," my writing is terribly useless.
But I don't write for that person under those circumstances, and I assure you that the pictures in my blog posts do not bleed over to obscure any of the text.
I personally think that analogy doesn't really fit. A different take might be to consider Raymond Smullyan writing about combinatory logic.
If you just want to solve a homework problem, reading "To Mock a Mockingbird" is going to be an exercise in frustration. What's all this faffing about with birds and forests? Or locks and vaults?
Nevertheless, a great many people have found the book both useful and entertaining, which is a kind of useful in its own right. Smullyan also knew that there were other ways to write, and he wrote textbooks that eschewed the metaphors and entertainment while focusing on the utility.
---
I am not fooling myself that my writing is helping some people, some of the time. I know that it does, and I have the data to prove it. But, I am also not fooling myself that what I write is the best thing for all people under all circumstances.
I regularly endorse buying books like Eloquent JavaScript or You Don't Know JavaScript precisely because they are written in a manner that is useful in a different way than my own writing is useful.
But getting back to the subject of the post... I think that ultimately, search should be sure to highlight StackOverflow and MDN results or similar. Reference works designed to answer questions simply and directly are what you need when you're in the middle of a problem.
Blog posts serve a different purpose, such as motivating you to want to solve the problem in the first place.
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. It’s a perfectly valid choice to write essays that are hyper-focused on just teaching the facts as efficiently as possible, but that isn’t some kind of universal rule that must be applied to all essays. I personally don’t care for the popular “Amer…
>As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. Of course, just like anyone's free to say "it's a generic 4:4 I–V–vi–IV pop song, nothing to write home about" or "it's yet another ISO standard blogpost, don't bother clicking through the popup". Though I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden…
I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden blogpost would be a sea-shanty with changing time signatures and atonal riffs with a rabid scene kid at the vocals - kind of bizzare, kind of crass, fully useless for pulling a rope on a galleon.
To my great delight, this phrase illustrates the value of writing with feeling and metaphor. It captures my imagination and motivates me to think about your argument carefully.
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#135This has not been my experience. I never take notes, almost never go to StackOverflow, and can find anything I don't know from MDN and W3 docs. Maybe it's because the things I work on are really simple, but I like to think it's because I've developed a deep enough understanding of JS/React/Redux and design my code in such a way that I'm easily able to reason through any task and resolve any bug.
> I'm easily able to reason through any task and resolve any bug.
This is 80% of my code, but I only spend 20% of my time doing it.
Its that obscure bug that really requires reading.
I find if I am spending lots of time Googling/Stack Overflow, its for the quick lookup of parameters and a real world example.
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#136Using search engines sometimes feel like a lost art if you spend any time in Facebook groups, where people will ask mundande, simple, and easily Googleable questions. Sometimes I wonder if people do it to fill some sort of social need, and don't particularly care for the answer.
Coding is the one place I think you are correct.
Most information is extremely niche, but Coding is all over the internet.
I have not been able to google some of my (Industry Level) Chemistry questions.
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm hoping that the community will mature alongside its technology. Which technology? Web development frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 12 months. 'Mature' and 'obsolete' are near synonymous.
> Web development frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 12 months. Initial realeases of the most popular JS-frameworks: Angular – 2010 React – 2013 Vue – 2014
Polymer 0.5 - circa 2014
Polymer 1 - 2015
Polymer 2 - 2017
Polymer 3 - 2018
LitElement - 2019
(I'm aware that Polymer insists it isn't a 'framework'. But it is. If their breaking changes cause incompatibilities between components using different Polymer versions, that's what I call a 'framework'.)
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#138Using search engines sometimes feel like a lost art if you spend any time in Facebook groups, where people will ask mundande, simple, and easily Googleable questions. Sometimes I wonder if people do it to fill some sort of social need, and don't particularly care for the answer.
HN seriously overestimates the technical capabilities of the average person.
Facebook now has enough reach that it includes many people who don't know how to use technology properly. Finding an answer through Google takes a little bit of skill to frame the question and pick the result that will give you the answer.
Roughly 70% of adult Americans use Facebook [1]. This study [2] is from 2015, but it says that only a third of America adults are capable of medium-difficulty technical tasks, such as tasks where you need to '[evaluate] the relevance of a set of items to discard distractors'.
Remember, 20% of American adults have below basic or no literacy skills [3], which means they are not capable of tasks such as:
- "using a television guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time"
- "comparing the ticket prices for two events" [4]
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about...
[2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
[3] http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/literacy-all-adult-liter...
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#139Google is not a search engine. It is a memory upgrade, and anybody who tries to write software with a standard human memory is obsolete.
So many people missed the point of this post that I ended up replying to it instead of them.
"Memory upgrade" means not relying entirely on your own memory and previous knowledge. That doesn't exclude internalizing the language, nor coming up with new solutions. It probably changes a lot depending on what you do, but I've found it imperative to keep up to date with an ever-changing engine, and it would have been malpractice to just rely on memory, and a great waste of my employer's time.
Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. Of course, just like anyone's free to say "it's a generic 4:4 I–V–vi–IV pop song, nothing to write home about" or "it's yet another ISO standard blogpost, don't bother clicking through the popup". Though I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden…
> "trying to create an illusion of creativity with randomness" I doubt that's why authors use this technique, though. I think it's part humble-brag ("hey I'm so smart I don't take complexity seriously!") and part an expression of nervousness ("it's scary to write things and publish on the internet, because haters"). A less serious style also allows you to take criticism more easily, perhaps. That's an explanation, no…
Hmm you're right, on a related note patching holes in my understanding of a topic with "distance" and sarcasm is something I'm personally guilty of. I'm grateful of HN for being much less conductive for that style than, say, Reddit.