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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#301

Post by jedberg »

bdcravens wrote: post #247
jedberg wrote: post #176

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 assume company blogs have a process where you have approval over what you write, both before and after the article is written. To this end (more so if the author has "evangelist" in their job title) the writing is a function of their job, and not a hobby.

Function of their job or not, the point is that the people who are implementing the technology are the ones writing about it. The "doers" are also doing the writing.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#302

Post by jakub_g »

azemetre wrote: post #290
jjice wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their…

What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent (last ten years)? The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).

High Performance Browser Networking - it's 2013 but apart from new tech and higher speeds, the basics of networking remain the same (also available online since a recently at https://hpbn.co/)

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#303

Post by 4636760295 »

jedberg wrote: post #291
city41 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if the blogs from tech companies can really count here. Those articles are made with the company's interest in mind, typically to boost recruiting. In my experience, they are always written on company time.

Written on company time or not, those are still engineers who are doing real engineering work who are also writing about their work.

Meh, I've worked for more than one of these, and I'd say they are thinly veiled hiring or marketing material.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#304

Post by rammy1234 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #295
tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. 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…

Books are awesome and somewhat under-appreciated piece of knowledge today. Many people prefer to lurk around blogs, documentation, tutorials for some technology, but I always trying to find a book from some reputable author. It does not always exist, but often it does exists and it's much better way to learn a technology. It might take a bit more time, because usually books present information in a more thorough way…

I find very few books to be thorough. If you find books that contradicts itself, then the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A good reference point for a good book IMO

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#305

Post by Animats »

tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I 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,…

"Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots (of) back links."

That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#306

Post by jedberg »

timwaagh wrote: post #248
jedberg wrote: post #176

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…

Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far from a programmer. That's not to disrespect…

> Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author.

He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer. I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it.

But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at all true.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#307

Post by rgblambda »

brightball wrote: post #280
jjice wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their…

I’m the same way. I prefer books because an expert had the opportunity to help you understand a subject from start to finish. Stack Overflow is great for quick reference to small questions.

Or edge cases that the book might not cover.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#308

Post by jedberg »

4636760295 wrote: post #303
jedberg wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Written on company time or not, those are still engineers who are doing real engineering work who are also writing about their work.

Meh, I've worked for more than one of these, and I'd say they are thinly veiled hiring or marketing material.

Sure, but again, not sure how that disproves that the doers are the ones writing about the tech.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#309

Post by polytely »

jacobobryant wrote: post #233
bartread wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe part of problem is Google SEO. This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers. Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of…

> Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily lookin…

Quick question about findka, Is the idea to only upvote/downvote things you have actually experienced and liked or dislike, or do you also upvote/downvote things you don't know but like or dislike?

I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without actually engaging with stuff.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#310

Post by clarry »

weinzierl wrote: post #239
ozim wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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." Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.

And they often assume the reader is a complete novice, which means a lot of pages are wasted on obvious yada yada and then there's less space for genuinely interesting deep stuff that you'd only learn from an expert (or through a lot of practice and trial & error).
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