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Well, remember that Coding Horror is more of a classical personal blog or online diary style work, rather than a medium for delivering essays. Jeff freely admi

by gwc 18y ago

Well, remember that Coding Horror is more of a classical personal blog or online diary style work, rather than a medium for delivering essays. Jeff freely admits he tends to shoot from the hip, in contrast to guys like PG or Joel Spolsky (Jeff talked about this briefly in the first stackoverflow.com podcast). As a result from time to time you get posts that more emotionally driven by Jeff's issue du jour. For me I just tend to take Jeff's tone with a grain of salt rather than expecting each post to be dispassionate analysis. Jeff simply doesn't vet his material the same way as PG, but we end up with more of it from which occasionally really good observations and discussions result.

pchristensen 18y ago
Atwood gets a lot of crap from the HN crowd, so it's great to hear a reasoned, dispassionate argument about the pros and cons of Coding Horror. The "shoot from the hip" comment was that while Spolsky might go over one of his showcase pieces 30-40 times, Atwood would look at it maybe once or twice while he was writing it and the hit "Publish".
- jrockway 18y ago
  And as a result, Joel's writings are a lot more valuable. I have a personality like Atwood -- if I'm mad about something, I immediately feel the urge to write a scathing and negative blog entry. Every time I do this, though, I get a lot of negative feedback. So, I try to tone down my personality and stick to instructional entires now, and amazingly I get positive feedback every time. Nobody cares what I think... but if they learn something, then my blog is worth reading. "Show, don't tell." is what they teach in elementary school. It is a very valuable piece of advice. (In this case, I mean "show why foo is good", not "tell the reader that bar is bad". Criticism and snarkiness breads criticism and snarkiness.)
gexla 18y ago
I think he could provide more understanding to his readers (and possibly for himself) if he were to explain exactly why each of those queries are made. Wordpress is meant to make online publishing easy for non developers and it has to make sacrifices for flexibility. Wordpress serves most people very well and there are many high traffic sites running it. Surely he will be able to do the same for himself if he chooses to run Wordpress.
raganwald 18y ago
"For me I just tend to take Jeff's tone with a grain of salt rather than expecting each post to be dispassionate analysis." Well, I like a lot of what he writes (by a lot, I mean, "a lot of posts every year," not necessarily, "most of his posts.") I'm quite happy his posts aren't dispassionate. Shrug. I guess I'm being remarkably asymmetrical and patently unfair: I want his passion, it's just that this post is a necessary consequence of his style.

by gwc 18y ago

pchristensen 18y ago

Atwood gets a lot of crap from the HN crowd, so it's great to hear a reasoned, dispassionate argument about the pros and cons of Coding Horror. The "shoot from the hip" comment was that while Spolsky might go over one of his showcase pieces 30-40 times, Atwood would look at it maybe once or twice while he was writing it and the hit "Publish".

jrockway 18y ago
And as a result, Joel's writings are a lot more valuable. I have a personality like Atwood -- if I'm mad about something, I immediately feel the urge to write a scathing and negative blog entry. Every time I do this, though, I get a lot of negative feedback. So, I try to tone down my personality and stick to instructional entires now, and amazingly I get positive feedback every time. Nobody cares what I think... but if they learn something, then my blog is worth reading. "Show, don't tell." is what they teach in elementary school. It is a very valuable piece of advice. (In this case, I mean "show why foo is good", not "tell the reader that bar is bad". Criticism and snarkiness breads criticism and snarkiness.)

gexla 18y ago

I think he could provide more understanding to his readers (and possibly for himself) if he were to explain exactly why each of those queries are made. Wordpress is meant to make online publishing easy for non developers and it has to make sacrifices for flexibility. Wordpress serves most people very well and there are many high traffic sites running it. Surely he will be able to do the same for himself if he chooses to run Wordpress.

raganwald 18y ago

"For me I just tend to take Jeff's tone with a grain of salt rather than expecting each post to be dispassionate analysis." Well, I like a lot of what he writes (by a lot, I mean, "a lot of posts every year," not necessarily, "most of his posts.") I'm quite happy his posts aren't dispassionate. Shrug. I guess I'm being remarkably asymmetrical and patently unfair: I want his passion, it's just that this post is a necessary consequence of his style.