9 ms·

I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

61 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

duiker101 6y ago
I am 100% part of those developers that is trying to improve their communication skills. Since February I have made it a big focus to try and find a voice. It's super hard. English is not my native language, and even if it were, I am not a good communicator. But I started writing tweets and a blog. It's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I've had a lot of success, I have followers, readers etc... on the other hand, it's very hard to do it without compromising oneself and still finding an audience. Twitter is also a world on its own. Hell, I don't believe I deserve the following I have and it's very hard to find a style of communication that works for developers on that platform. The result is that it's skews toward short, simple tweets, the simpler the better. Being a good communicator is important, but it doesn't come without a cost.
- balfirevic 6y ago
  > But I started writing tweets and a blog. How did you get started? Any tips on getting dev blog readers (not that I have one yet)?
  - duiker101 6y ago
    I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced. But I had the luck of writing one blog post that got a lot of traction and to have a website that can generate a bit of traffic to the blog. The actual writing was really the hard part for me. Putting my knowledge to words is tricky. I struggle with finding topics and how to express them. What worked for now was more of a "whatever, let's just do it" attitude and try different things.
    - balfirevic 6y ago
      > I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced. Nah, that is exactly why I asked you, and I mean that in a positive way. Someone very experienced might have very well forgotten how it was when they started, or they might have started when online writing landscape was quite different. Or, worse, they might say "well, I just sent an email to my 5000-member email list, how else would you start a blog?" :) What is your blog? I dug out https://duiker101.net/ https://duiker101.net/ but that is returning 404 for me.
      - duiker101 6y ago
        I put it under the main website, blog.hackertyper.net
  - coffeefirst 6y ago
    Start by making something good. Figure the rest out later—including whether you even care if you have readers, and if so why.
- Pokepokalypse 6y ago
  I've always felt that if a developer can put themselves in to the point of view of a naive person, (ie. a complete non-technical person, OR a developer who may not have all the same experiences, or perhaps one who is self-taught, and has gaps) - then they can shape how they conceive and explain things, and it's super helpful. In fact, I think I learned this technique in Technical Writing 101.
donretag 6y ago
I am a good developer, and even better communicator. That said, I have no interest in social media. It just seems so forced.
- Traster 6y ago
  Let's face it, it's not much to do with being a good communicator. People don't go on twitter because they want to be more effective at communicating, they go on twitter because that's where the audience is despite it being a terrible place for communicating complex issues. (Here, let me link you to that 27 tweet thread, which, inexplicably, is 27 separate posts instead of a single post because we're insane).
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    The whole post honestly just sounded like he was jealous of the attention the ‘thought leaders’ were getting. Not only is jealous a petty thing to be, but that’s a particularly petty thing to be jealous of.
  - loa_in_ 6y ago
    On the other hand it's pretty smart because if you are looking for feedback where is exactly a place for feedback every 140 characters or so
- sys_64738 6y ago
  The likes of twitter is a marketing tool IMO. I'm not interested in it as it's a waste of time.
- valand 6y ago
  Attention is power, even in the context of software development. Social media is where attention is abundant if you know how to look for it. Devs should get better at communicating and self-marketing. It does not need to be an over the top marketing and self branding, in fact you shouldn't do that. Recruiters, supervisors, founders, and everyone who need devs (and any other kind of specialists) need to up their bullshit filter game.
jamestimmins 6y ago
The best developers aren't putting out tons of content or courses. The people putting out popular courses are just the best course developers/marketers. There are plenty of folks like Tom Christie, who has minimal social media following, but who built Django Rest Framework, which is used by tens of thousands of projects. The best developers are leaders, whether or not they're thought leaders.
- jamestimmins 6y ago
  Not to downplay the course developers and marketers. That's a valuable and difficult skill! It's just different than developing.
- EdJiang 6y ago
  I agree. I remember there was a bit of criticism in the iOS twitter community about iOS development influencers giving bad advice, because they haven't worked on meatier projects. Can't find much anymore but here's one example of a tweet: https://twitter.com/alex_v_bush/status/1277002102351499265 https://twitter.com/alex_v_bush/status/1277002102351499265
- m463 6y ago
  I remember reading the iWoz book by Steve Wozniak. At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog. It was basically "work alone". EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."
  - ZinZirconium 6y ago
    Team players don't work alone. What has happened to all the introverts who work alone? They're not working in tech. Tech is for extroverts who get paid to copy from public GitHub repositories and paste into private GitHub repositories and sell proprietary products built upon code ripped from open source projects. But that's okay. Not everybody can be an extrovert who gets paid to pretend to code. RMS said it best: > I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else. And then RMS was railroaded out of the free software movement he started by the social extroverts who replaced all the introverts in tech. I'm an introvert. I'm a coder. I don't get paid to code. I do something else.
moritonal 6y ago
Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content. It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.
- phalangion 6y ago
  I wish we could stop complaints about Medium from showing up on every post from Medium. It's a distraction from the content, and off topic, and yet the complaint shows up with remarkable regularity.
  - moritonal 6y ago
    The content which you can't read unless you have an account. Post it as a comment and I'll delete mine happily.
    - faceplanted 6y ago
      Right click -> open in incognito tab.
      - Doxin 6y ago
        Alternatively add a cookie exception to block all cookies from medium. Works a treat.
  - jonas21 6y ago
    The paywall that prevents you from reading the content is a bigger distraction from the content.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Maybe hn should have a dedicated "metacontent discussion" comment which collects all the discussion topics like this under a single collapseable top level thread. Whether it's about gdpr/cookies, paywalls, noscript behavior, twitter-thread rant, there can sometimes be more metacontent discussion than content discussion.
why-el 6y ago
I think this definition of success can be quite entrapping. Certainly, the pool of outstanding developers that do not fit these criteria is huge (in fact, the absolute dominant one, considering how narrow the definition is). As such, if you are a young developer, examine whether this definition suits your career aspirations (it seems to do so for author, which is OK of course), and know that there are many roads to "success". I used to think the same thing for the better part of my 20s, but not anymore. I am also virtually non-existent online (in the author's sense), but I am quite satisfied with my career. I am of course one data point, but I have many colleagues and ex-colleagues in the same boat.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
apeescape 6y ago
As Homer Simpson noted^, jealousy and envy mean different things. If you're jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you, whereas an envious person just wants to get other people's success for themself. ^ https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA
- yodsanklai 6y ago
  > If you're jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you I'm not a native speaker, but my (Apple) dictionary definition doesn't match Lisa's. jeal·ous | ˈjeləs | adjective feeling or showing envy of someone or their achievements and advantages: he grew jealous of her success.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Well, the New Oxford doesn't agree with Homer Simpson then.
- jfk13 6y ago
  That's only one of several meanings of "jealousy". Excerpted from the OED: > 3. Solicitude or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something; vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage. > 4. The state of mind arising from the suspicion, apprehension, or knowledge of rivalry: > b. in respect of success or advantage: Fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will towards another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part; envy, grudge. You're focusing on definition (3), but ignoring other aspects found in (4.b).
- to1y 6y ago
  Where did this idea come from and why is it so often claimed? Never in my life have I heard someone use 'jealousy' in that context, yet it seems to be widely accepted fact on the internet.
  - ayyy 6y ago
    When I google "define jealous" and "define envy", I read it the same as Homer. I think it's one of those pre-internet "facts" people learned in school. If you're not aware, "literally" also now literally means "figuratively". It's memes all the way down.
draw_down 6y ago
You’re not jealous of developers. You’re jealous of celebrities. Sorry
hooande 6y ago
*Envious Developer (envy is when you desire something that someone else has. jealousy is when you're afraid you'll lose something you have to someone else)
abnercoimbre 6y ago
You can improve your communication and inspire communities, without stagnating, by de-coupling it from your day-to-day; for example: - I'm a developer organizing indie conferences [0]. I'm always described as an "organization kind of guy." I don't go out of my way to influence on programming techniques. Alternatively there are: - Developers who stream their projects, commercial or otherwise. They're well-known because people value insights from seeing someone do technical work. I'm probably missing other cases of "influencers" who don't slowly stagnate by focusing too much on courses and marketing. [0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com https://www.handmade-seattle.com (Forgive the plug; hoping it's relevant.)
ZinZirconium 6y ago
> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail. Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfabe. Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. Typing out the code is the least important part of coding and by far the least interesting. But real work doesn't hold the attention of techbro posers long enough to sell ads now does it.
- duiker101 6y ago
  No. This is gatekeeping at it's finest. You can say that while they stream they are working on their social media presence more than the codebase, but streaming per-se doesn't stop them from being "real coders". Everyone codes however they want. What works for you might be different for someone else. And wanting to do it while interacting with an audience or streaming themselves creating something they already know how to do are all completely fine things.
  - ZinZirconium 6y ago
    Yes. It's gatekeeping borne of jealousy. Keep introverted nerds in tech. Extroverted marketeers took our technology and perverted it into social media. Woz said of his time building blue boxes purely motivated by intellectual curiosity: > I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying to make money. But then I thought we were all pure. Tech is so impure today it reeks. Bring back the hackers who build things for fun. Bring back the nerds who don't care to make money.
- pedrosorio 6y ago
  > Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. I’ve seen streamers do exactly this (while interacting with their audience through chat). Why did you interpret “stream themselves coding” as “typing code flawlessly on stream”?

61 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

I am 100% part of those developers that is trying to improve their communication skills. Since February I have made it a big focus to try and find a voice. It's super hard. English is not my native language, and even if it were, I am not a good communicator. But I started writing tweets and a blog. It's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I've had a lot of success, I have followers, readers etc... on the other hand, it's very hard to do it without compromising oneself and still finding an audience. Twitter is also a world on its own. Hell, I don't believe I deserve the following I have and it's very hard to find a style of communication that works for developers on that platform. The result is that it's skews toward short, simple tweets, the simpler the better. Being a good communicator is important, but it doesn't come without a cost.

balfirevic 6y ago
> But I started writing tweets and a blog. How did you get started? Any tips on getting dev blog readers (not that I have one yet)?
- duiker101 6y ago
  I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced. But I had the luck of writing one blog post that got a lot of traction and to have a website that can generate a bit of traffic to the blog. The actual writing was really the hard part for me. Putting my knowledge to words is tricky. I struggle with finding topics and how to express them. What worked for now was more of a "whatever, let's just do it" attitude and try different things.
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    > I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced. Nah, that is exactly why I asked you, and I mean that in a positive way. Someone very experienced might have very well forgotten how it was when they started, or they might have started when online writing landscape was quite different. Or, worse, they might say "well, I just sent an email to my 5000-member email list, how else would you start a blog?" :) What is your blog? I dug out https://duiker101.net/ https://duiker101.net/ but that is returning 404 for me.
    - duiker101 6y ago
      I put it under the main website, blog.hackertyper.net
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Start by making something good. Figure the rest out later—including whether you even care if you have readers, and if so why.
Pokepokalypse 6y ago
I've always felt that if a developer can put themselves in to the point of view of a naive person, (ie. a complete non-technical person, OR a developer who may not have all the same experiences, or perhaps one who is self-taught, and has gaps) - then they can shape how they conceive and explain things, and it's super helpful. In fact, I think I learned this technique in Technical Writing 101.

donretag 6y ago

I am a good developer, and even better communicator. That said, I have no interest in social media. It just seems so forced.

Traster 6y ago
Let's face it, it's not much to do with being a good communicator. People don't go on twitter because they want to be more effective at communicating, they go on twitter because that's where the audience is despite it being a terrible place for communicating complex issues. (Here, let me link you to that 27 tweet thread, which, inexplicably, is 27 separate posts instead of a single post because we're insane).
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  The whole post honestly just sounded like he was jealous of the attention the ‘thought leaders’ were getting. Not only is jealous a petty thing to be, but that’s a particularly petty thing to be jealous of.
- loa_in_ 6y ago
  On the other hand it's pretty smart because if you are looking for feedback where is exactly a place for feedback every 140 characters or so
sys_64738 6y ago
The likes of twitter is a marketing tool IMO. I'm not interested in it as it's a waste of time.
valand 6y ago
Attention is power, even in the context of software development. Social media is where attention is abundant if you know how to look for it. Devs should get better at communicating and self-marketing. It does not need to be an over the top marketing and self branding, in fact you shouldn't do that. Recruiters, supervisors, founders, and everyone who need devs (and any other kind of specialists) need to up their bullshit filter game.

jamestimmins 6y ago

The best developers aren't putting out tons of content or courses. The people putting out popular courses are just the best course developers/marketers. There are plenty of folks like Tom Christie, who has minimal social media following, but who built Django Rest Framework, which is used by tens of thousands of projects. The best developers are leaders, whether or not they're thought leaders.

jamestimmins 6y ago
Not to downplay the course developers and marketers. That's a valuable and difficult skill! It's just different than developing.
EdJiang 6y ago
I agree. I remember there was a bit of criticism in the iOS twitter community about iOS development influencers giving bad advice, because they haven't worked on meatier projects. Can't find much anymore but here's one example of a tweet: https://twitter.com/alex_v_bush/status/1277002102351499265 https://twitter.com/alex_v_bush/status/1277002102351499265
m463 6y ago
I remember reading the iWoz book by Steve Wozniak. At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog. It was basically "work alone". EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."
- ZinZirconium 6y ago
  Team players don't work alone. What has happened to all the introverts who work alone? They're not working in tech. Tech is for extroverts who get paid to copy from public GitHub repositories and paste into private GitHub repositories and sell proprietary products built upon code ripped from open source projects. But that's okay. Not everybody can be an extrovert who gets paid to pretend to code. RMS said it best: > I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else. And then RMS was railroaded out of the free software movement he started by the social extroverts who replaced all the introverts in tech. I'm an introvert. I'm a coder. I don't get paid to code. I do something else.

moritonal 6y ago

Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content. It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.

phalangion 6y ago
I wish we could stop complaints about Medium from showing up on every post from Medium. It's a distraction from the content, and off topic, and yet the complaint shows up with remarkable regularity.
- moritonal 6y ago
  The content which you can't read unless you have an account. Post it as a comment and I'll delete mine happily.
  - faceplanted 6y ago
    Right click -> open in incognito tab.
    - Doxin 6y ago
      Alternatively add a cookie exception to block all cookies from medium. Works a treat.
- jonas21 6y ago
  The paywall that prevents you from reading the content is a bigger distraction from the content.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Maybe hn should have a dedicated "metacontent discussion" comment which collects all the discussion topics like this under a single collapseable top level thread. Whether it's about gdpr/cookies, paywalls, noscript behavior, twitter-thread rant, there can sometimes be more metacontent discussion than content discussion.

why-el 6y ago

I think this definition of success can be quite entrapping. Certainly, the pool of outstanding developers that do not fit these criteria is huge (in fact, the absolute dominant one, considering how narrow the definition is). As such, if you are a young developer, examine whether this definition suits your career aspirations (it seems to do so for author, which is OK of course), and know that there are many roads to "success". I used to think the same thing for the better part of my 20s, but not anymore. I am also virtually non-existent online (in the author's sense), but I am quite satisfied with my career. I am of course one data point, but I have many colleagues and ex-colleagues in the same boat.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

apeescape 6y ago

As Homer Simpson noted^, jealousy and envy mean different things. If you're jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you, whereas an envious person just wants to get other people's success for themself. ^ https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA

yodsanklai 6y ago
> If you're jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you I'm not a native speaker, but my (Apple) dictionary definition doesn't match Lisa's. jeal·ous | ˈjeləs | adjective feeling or showing envy of someone or their achievements and advantages: he grew jealous of her success.
kubanczyk 6y ago
Well, the New Oxford doesn't agree with Homer Simpson then.
jfk13 6y ago
That's only one of several meanings of "jealousy". Excerpted from the OED: > 3. Solicitude or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something; vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage. > 4. The state of mind arising from the suspicion, apprehension, or knowledge of rivalry: > b. in respect of success or advantage: Fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will towards another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part; envy, grudge. You're focusing on definition (3), but ignoring other aspects found in (4.b).
to1y 6y ago
Where did this idea come from and why is it so often claimed? Never in my life have I heard someone use 'jealousy' in that context, yet it seems to be widely accepted fact on the internet.
- ayyy 6y ago
  When I google "define jealous" and "define envy", I read it the same as Homer. I think it's one of those pre-internet "facts" people learned in school. If you're not aware, "literally" also now literally means "figuratively". It's memes all the way down.

draw_down 6y ago

You’re not jealous of developers. You’re jealous of celebrities. Sorry

hooande 6y ago

*Envious Developer (envy is when you desire something that someone else has. jealousy is when you're afraid you'll lose something you have to someone else)

abnercoimbre 6y ago

You can improve your communication and inspire communities, without stagnating, by de-coupling it from your day-to-day; for example: - I'm a developer organizing indie conferences [0]. I'm always described as an "organization kind of guy." I don't go out of my way to influence on programming techniques. Alternatively there are: - Developers who stream their projects, commercial or otherwise. They're well-known because people value insights from seeing someone do technical work. I'm probably missing other cases of "influencers" who don't slowly stagnate by focusing too much on courses and marketing. [0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com https://www.handmade-seattle.com (Forgive the plug; hoping it's relevant.)

ZinZirconium 6y ago

> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail. Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfabe. Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. Typing out the code is the least important part of coding and by far the least interesting. But real work doesn't hold the attention of techbro posers long enough to sell ads now does it.

duiker101 6y ago
No. This is gatekeeping at it's finest. You can say that while they stream they are working on their social media presence more than the codebase, but streaming per-se doesn't stop them from being "real coders". Everyone codes however they want. What works for you might be different for someone else. And wanting to do it while interacting with an audience or streaming themselves creating something they already know how to do are all completely fine things.
- ZinZirconium 6y ago
  Yes. It's gatekeeping borne of jealousy. Keep introverted nerds in tech. Extroverted marketeers took our technology and perverted it into social media. Woz said of his time building blue boxes purely motivated by intellectual curiosity: > I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying to make money. But then I thought we were all pure. Tech is so impure today it reeks. Bring back the hackers who build things for fun. Bring back the nerds who don't care to make money.
pedrosorio 6y ago
> Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. I’ve seen streamers do exactly this (while interacting with their audience through chat). Why did you interpret “stream themselves coding” as “typing code flawlessly on stream”?