Earlier 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 think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby. H…
I would actually really like it if you would share some more high quality tech blogs!
Most tech content is bullshit
221–230 of 470 posts
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Somewhat related: 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 yell…
I believe there is a categorical difference between skills operating on a continuum and those operating in a binary fashion.
Pretty much all motor skills like like Karate can be performed okay, good, better, really good, etc. Similarly, I can take gradual baby steps from being a bad photographer towards becoming okay and then good.
But for most programming things, it either works correctly, or it doesn't. There's very little middle ground in an algorithm. Either it works to solve your problem, or it doesn't. Accordingly, I don't believe I can learn much from someone else's broken example in the way that I could learn from a (mediocre but slightly better than me) photographer.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#223I 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 this problem expands to tech meetups. It is very difficult to find a quality meetup. Most people never used the tech and the presenters make gross errors. Most recent I remember was a person trying to explain why GraphQL is good for APIs, while showing code with crazy N+1s. Certainly didn't convince me.
I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire sourc…
The truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling HN. I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
But HN was never hardcore tech content? It is more of general set of articles about wide range of tech issues.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#225I 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,…
My solution for this problem: 1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago. 2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites. 3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when th…
The main reason books are better is because they are harder to write and produce. The person making the book actually has to invest a lot of their time in making it happen, unlike a blog post.
I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"
With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.
Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"
Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.
So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.
blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you're writing you're not coding Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.
I don't work 16 hours a day. Writing good content is a lot of effort, especially after 8 hours of coding. If you're churning out a post a week I would say that is already a lot.
> I don't work 16 hours a day.
Exactly. You probably spend at least some time on a hobby. For some people their hobby is technical writing.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#227A lot depends on the programming language used in the online tech materials. It's very hard to find anything worthy in Python or JS, because for many people it's their first language, and "teachers" are only one lesson ahead of their "students".
On the other hand reading something explained in OCaml, Scheme, Erlang, Julia, D or similar niche and not hyped language can be of very high quality. C also tends to be good. Interestingly, C++ is also slowly becoming a niche high-quality language recently.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, I also like those inspirational hints.
But the category of articles that I was criticizing here is when unemployed students pretend to be the authority on topic X to improve their chances of getting hired. Those articles typically do not disclose the lack of experience of the other. Quite the contrary, some of them even make up achievements and/or credentials.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#229Earlier 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…
This seems very common in JS land, I once saw a talk in a conf which seemed very basic, later on I stumbled onto a tweet about how the speaker often submits abstracts to CFPs often not knowing much(or at all) about the subject, which serves as motivation to learn and talk about it, works well after having a track record of speaking at events some conferences you can get invited or not have to prove yourself so much t…
I feel like this is not specific to TS or JS but any of these modern technologies that are popular and attract beginners.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire sourc…
This drives me crazy! I hate searching for documentation and the top results are blogs containing outdated copy and paste of the official docs with some witty text and gifs.
I've recently started using Express.js for a project at work, and I've never before encountered a seemingly popular framework/language with such frustrating content churned out by the community. Express's official docs have all the technical specs you could ask for, but the framework is very light weight without any structure and feels more like a library, sort of like Flask. I wanted to see what a typical app structure looks like, but just about every single "article" I found was either a copy/paste of the same app with everything crammed into one index.js file (routing, logic, db queries, etc...), or they were walls of text filled with occasional code snippets and didn't even provide a repo for reference. The community feels like it's targeting complete beginners with its simple examples, lengthy explanations of trivial tasks and extremely little coverage of architecture. My experience with Express felt like PHP 10 years ago with w3schools.