391–400 of 470 posts
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…
There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average developer^[1]. The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not apply to their situat…
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…
The problem with physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new versions of the same software, or the software gets replaced, or new best practices arise. Then you have to buy another version of the book. In addition to this, which basically makes physical programming books a nonstarter already, you have the issue that book…
For me it comes down to scale. The chances I find precisely what I'm looking for on stack overflow is much higher than even the best curated content of all kind, just because SO is much bigger.
I have seen new libraries becoming popular not because they solved their target problem better in a measurable way than the existing ones, but because they used [insert fancy tech that is hype right now].
I have seen articles reposted in tech newsletters that were completely bullshit. The last one was about manually cleaning up some weak references because that would magically help performances, without any data to back that up.
Performances in general is HARD. There are very few general truths that hold true and many rules of thumb that change rapidly as mobile platforms evolve. Most of the performance optimizations I used to make 5 years ago just don't matter anymore. Measuring the bottlenecks is not that hard but still very rarely made, even in performance articles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was aroun…
The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated sin…
But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term.
Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.
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,…
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…
It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.
To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..
When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.
By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.
At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.
I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.
There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average developer^[1]. The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not apply to their situat…
I believe a lot of people (myself included) don't realize they read a lot of blog posts and articles about a topic they are interested in, but have no time trying out, and feel they know something about the subject when most of these articles are copying each other to gain popularity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the reference. Worry less about "vibes," I guess would be my advice. And consider that if someone says "brown cows eat grass" they're not trying to describe the entire universe; they're actually taking it as a given that your brain will work hard enough to remember that non-brown cows, and non-grass-eating cows, and even brown, non-grass-eating cows exist and have their own stories that are outside the sc…
It's hard for me to see society being able to self-critique via social media as a bad thing—newspaper headlines have certainly been exploiting the same linguistic tricks you point out for centuries. I don't see why it's bad to return the favor and build a culture that isn't represented by legacy/traditional/whatever media.
The thing putting a negative spin on it is that at least in this author's opinion, "Most tech content is bullshit." I'm saying maybe that's because now we have access to the bottom 90% too along with the top 10% that we already had. (There was bullshit in the old days too of course, but it was usually found coming out of someone's mouth as opposed to in a book that someone bothered to spend money to print thousands of times. Although there are exceptions there too! It's death by a thousand disclaimers up in here!)
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…
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…
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…
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…