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Not to complain, but it seems the Web has become a huge spam bucket with useful nuggets few and far between. I have seen such articles a gazillion times till n

Not to complain, but it seems the Web has become a huge spam bucket with useful nuggets few and far between. I have seen such articles a gazillion times till now. An article that talks about a subject, very very superficially, includes an obvious example, and concludes with a generic statement. Maybe the "users are the content creators" is not such a good idea after all.

craigkerstiens 7y ago
I don't disagree that this article isn't news to anyone following Postgres and having used it. Yet I also have a conversation with someone about once a week that has no idea Postgres has any form of JSON support much less whats possible with it. There are a lot more beginners out there in the world and this type of content is useful to them. A deep dive of how GIN indexing works for JSON might be a useful nugget for those that want to dive really deep, but there is also a place for plenty of beginner content and things that may seem obvious to you.
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  I understand your point. But my contention is that there is a lot of spam, especially in the beginner content. So much so that real useful information is nowhere to be found in search engines. I have recently started learning React and when I search for a topic, I have to wade through a myriad of articles that are basically "Get Node, Get React, CRA new, etc. etc." Nothing of actual use, but search engines pick up because of SEO I guess. Finding something of value is becoming increasingly difficult. On top of that, I use DDG as my primary search engine and it doesn't help. For articles regarding PGSQL, their documentation is the ultimate source and I frankly see no reason for these articles to exist.
  - craigkerstiens 7y ago
    I hear you on value of articles diving deeper. The Postgres docs are awesome, but I find them most valuable as reference docs once you already know how to do something. I find if you're trying to learn how to do a new thing they're not quite as useful. There is definitely some value in filling the gap between a hello world of JSON and exactly how to use a specific operator. I was gonna follow up with if there are any specific things that you might find useful on the Postgres arena would be happy to start personally writing a few, but for yourself sounds like docs are good enough :)
    - kumarvvr 7y ago
      Thank you for the gesture. I love the PGSQL docs. And I usually experiment my way through the docs, as most of the time, I am usually solving a problem and will learn a bit of the underlying mechanism, quirks and tips for performance before going ahead with a method. For those, I find those docs more than sufficient. I found the same with Django docs too. The worst offender is NodeJS, and to a lesser extent, React. Edit : If only there was a method to allow users to annotate comments onto the core docs, and there was a way to upvote / downvote the comments, we could have better documentation. I have seen primitive versions of such mechanisms in PHP docs.
spousty 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I think the article was really trying to whet people's appetite for the hands on tutorial linked in the article. I wrote the blog post just to give people enough to: 1. Know they can actually store, query, and update JSON in PostgreSQL 2. Get curious and dig in deeper with the free hands on training.
simplify 7y ago
This type of article is just as important as the deeper ones. It's not "obvious" to everyone; most non-Postgres users don't know about its JSON features (yes, most! https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/)

craigkerstiens 7y ago

I don't disagree that this article isn't news to anyone following Postgres and having used it. Yet I also have a conversation with someone about once a week that has no idea Postgres has any form of JSON support much less whats possible with it. There are a lot more beginners out there in the world and this type of content is useful to them. A deep dive of how GIN indexing works for JSON might be a useful nugget for those that want to dive really deep, but there is also a place for plenty of beginner content and things that may seem obvious to you.

kumarvvr 7y ago
I understand your point. But my contention is that there is a lot of spam, especially in the beginner content. So much so that real useful information is nowhere to be found in search engines. I have recently started learning React and when I search for a topic, I have to wade through a myriad of articles that are basically "Get Node, Get React, CRA new, etc. etc." Nothing of actual use, but search engines pick up because of SEO I guess. Finding something of value is becoming increasingly difficult. On top of that, I use DDG as my primary search engine and it doesn't help. For articles regarding PGSQL, their documentation is the ultimate source and I frankly see no reason for these articles to exist.
- craigkerstiens 7y ago
  I hear you on value of articles diving deeper. The Postgres docs are awesome, but I find them most valuable as reference docs once you already know how to do something. I find if you're trying to learn how to do a new thing they're not quite as useful. There is definitely some value in filling the gap between a hello world of JSON and exactly how to use a specific operator. I was gonna follow up with if there are any specific things that you might find useful on the Postgres arena would be happy to start personally writing a few, but for yourself sounds like docs are good enough :)
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    Thank you for the gesture. I love the PGSQL docs. And I usually experiment my way through the docs, as most of the time, I am usually solving a problem and will learn a bit of the underlying mechanism, quirks and tips for performance before going ahead with a method. For those, I find those docs more than sufficient. I found the same with Django docs too. The worst offender is NodeJS, and to a lesser extent, React. Edit : If only there was a method to allow users to annotate comments onto the core docs, and there was a way to upvote / downvote the comments, we could have better documentation. I have seen primitive versions of such mechanisms in PHP docs.

spousty 7y ago

Thanks for the feedback. I think the article was really trying to whet people's appetite for the hands on tutorial linked in the article. I wrote the blog post just to give people enough to: 1. Know they can actually store, query, and update JSON in PostgreSQL 2. Get curious and dig in deeper with the free hands on training.

simplify 7y ago

This type of article is just as important as the deeper ones. It's not "obvious" to everyone; most non-Postgres users don't know about its JSON features (yes, most! https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/)