5 ms·

This is kind of Off-topic, but I've been getting back to doing web development for the past few months. One thing I've been surprised is how much high quality c

This is kind of Off-topic, but I've been getting back to doing web development for the past few months. One thing I've been surprised is how much high quality content marketing/blogs there are especially regarding React. The Logrocket blog is an excellent example of this. Lots of useful blog posts. Another one I've been relying on is the blog of Robin Wieruch [1]. I guess stating this is a little obvious, but one of the upsides of using popular tools is the productivity boost you get from the surrounding ecosystem. [1]: https://www.robinwieruch.de/blog https://www.robinwieruch.de/blog

moltar 6y ago
Listicle spam evolved aka tower content strategy.
- k__ 6y ago
  Is it really spam when the content is actually useful?
  - moltar 6y ago
    I think so. I think it’s the intent that counts. They are clearly doing an SEO and content marketing play. I see their articles in SERPs for lots of keywords. But I find them to be just barely passable quality.
    - wyattpeak 6y ago
      Is it intent? Authors write how-to books to make sales, not to pass on information for the good of humanity. Does that mean that all technical works are barely-disguised spam? I'll grant that they probably do like the idea of passing on what they know, but I very much suspect the same thing of the tech lead who was asked to write a blog post by their marketer.
    - koonsolo 6y ago
      Alright, then we can all stop writing articles and making YouTube videos. Let's only allow some starving hippies to create content as of now.
- rwieruch 6y ago
  One of my latest articles: https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-testing-library https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-testing-library Is this listicle spam or helpful for people who get started with testing in React? :) The last one I dropped was https://www.robinwieruch.de/web-applications https://www.robinwieruch.de/web-applications which has more than 5000 words (1/6 of a book) of fundamentals in web development -- which took me 3 workdays of writing without anyone paying me for it. Still it gets less attention on Twitter than some random dev meme or inspirational dev tweet; and will probably not be picked up by HackerNews if anyone posts it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I do my best to teach people fundamentals. If they like my content on my blog, people buy my books/courses. This and their feedback (e.g. on Amazon, E-Mail) gives me confidence that I am doing the right thing. Without good content I don't get paid at the end of the month ... Thanks for the shoutout @Pandabob! :)
  - kilburn 6y ago
    > Is this listicle spam or helpful for people who get started with testing in React? :) It is useful, but only because react-testing-library's documentation is horrendous in this front (its documentation is fine as a reference, but not as an introduction/getting started). However, your post will end up rotting over time as react-testing-library evolves, and will end up being old cruft spam contributing to today's issues (you search for something and find an outdated reference that doesn't work anymore). If you really want to have positive impact with your documentation efforts, the best avenue would be to work with the software authors themselves on getting your tutorial there. And then helping to maintain it. Of course you are not in any kind of obligation to do so. I just wanted you to think about it ;)
    - rwieruch 6y ago
      This holds true for all kind of content (YouTube, Courses, StackOverflow, Reddit, HackerNews) where a person has no ownership or no monetary interest (or doesn't worship pure altruism) ... At least content creators are urged to keep their content up-to-date, otherwise they would receive bad feedback (and bad SEO scores over time if people don't stay on your website). I could name you lots of articles I have kept up-to-date over the last 3 years (more than I wrote for sure), and I know this doesn't apply to all content creators, but I can tell you that it really matters for your readers and your credibility. For sure, the easiest thing as a content creator is publishing (almost) ever green content (see web applications article). However, most often you are looking for topics that solve actual problems of your readers (see react testing library article) which often leads to bleeding edge technology which isn't document well yet. For what it's worth, there will always be companies with money who pay people to write content to support their products (e.g. SaaS). This makes it harder every day for individuals like me to sustain their livelihoods. However, I strongly believe in the long run quality trumps quantity. In a perfect world, there would be (1) one perfect learning material (e.g. official documentation) and (2) one unified learning style (e.g. text, video, both) for all students. But we are not living in a perfect world and therefore people look for resources outside of the box.
sushshshsh 6y ago
Really questioning this. The things available in vanilla js, html5 and css3 are immensely powerful and extremely well documented for those who care to dig into it
- noahtallen 6y ago
  Since those are even more popular than React (given that React builds on top of that foundation), the point about using a popular tool for good ecosystem and documentation still holds for me.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  You are correct that those have a pretty good interface. But here is some advice from an old programmer: once you start making bigger and more complex projects, you will start to make your own convenience libraries. And soon you will realize that you've built your own React-like library. But only less stable and less well thought out, because react has the huge community and maturity. But if you only do some small functionality, or something specific with the technology, vanilla is perfectly fine. However, if you are a single page app coder, I would definitely go for something like React.
  - rimliu 6y ago
    Not everything has to be built with React, and the size of it is orthoganal to the technology. If fact, huge projects are likely to suffer from using React, because virtual DOMs get out of hand and a lot of resources a wasted by building and rebuilding VDOM and looking for the changes. Also, for some reason, React brings a lot of cargo-culting. Many don't stop to thing whether they should even if they can. They bring React, then they bring Redux, then all the rest is being dragged in and you get multi MB bundles for some truly trivial purposes. Of course, that's more on developers than on React, but it happens way to often. And for some reason just bringing React and Co. is not enough, it usually ends up in some imressive architecture astronautics. At the end you have a project that is big, but slow and still impossible to understand because the levels of indirection are off the charts.
    - deleted 6y ago

moltar 6y ago

Listicle spam evolved aka tower content strategy.

k__ 6y ago
Is it really spam when the content is actually useful?
- moltar 6y ago
  I think so. I think it’s the intent that counts. They are clearly doing an SEO and content marketing play. I see their articles in SERPs for lots of keywords. But I find them to be just barely passable quality.
  - wyattpeak 6y ago
    Is it intent? Authors write how-to books to make sales, not to pass on information for the good of humanity. Does that mean that all technical works are barely-disguised spam? I'll grant that they probably do like the idea of passing on what they know, but I very much suspect the same thing of the tech lead who was asked to write a blog post by their marketer.
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    Alright, then we can all stop writing articles and making YouTube videos. Let's only allow some starving hippies to create content as of now.
rwieruch 6y ago
One of my latest articles: https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-testing-library https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-testing-library Is this listicle spam or helpful for people who get started with testing in React? :) The last one I dropped was https://www.robinwieruch.de/web-applications https://www.robinwieruch.de/web-applications which has more than 5000 words (1/6 of a book) of fundamentals in web development -- which took me 3 workdays of writing without anyone paying me for it. Still it gets less attention on Twitter than some random dev meme or inspirational dev tweet; and will probably not be picked up by HackerNews if anyone posts it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I do my best to teach people fundamentals. If they like my content on my blog, people buy my books/courses. This and their feedback (e.g. on Amazon, E-Mail) gives me confidence that I am doing the right thing. Without good content I don't get paid at the end of the month ... Thanks for the shoutout @Pandabob! :)
- kilburn 6y ago
  > Is this listicle spam or helpful for people who get started with testing in React? :) It is useful, but only because react-testing-library's documentation is horrendous in this front (its documentation is fine as a reference, but not as an introduction/getting started). However, your post will end up rotting over time as react-testing-library evolves, and will end up being old cruft spam contributing to today's issues (you search for something and find an outdated reference that doesn't work anymore). If you really want to have positive impact with your documentation efforts, the best avenue would be to work with the software authors themselves on getting your tutorial there. And then helping to maintain it. Of course you are not in any kind of obligation to do so. I just wanted you to think about it ;)
  - rwieruch 6y ago
    This holds true for all kind of content (YouTube, Courses, StackOverflow, Reddit, HackerNews) where a person has no ownership or no monetary interest (or doesn't worship pure altruism) ... At least content creators are urged to keep their content up-to-date, otherwise they would receive bad feedback (and bad SEO scores over time if people don't stay on your website). I could name you lots of articles I have kept up-to-date over the last 3 years (more than I wrote for sure), and I know this doesn't apply to all content creators, but I can tell you that it really matters for your readers and your credibility. For sure, the easiest thing as a content creator is publishing (almost) ever green content (see web applications article). However, most often you are looking for topics that solve actual problems of your readers (see react testing library article) which often leads to bleeding edge technology which isn't document well yet. For what it's worth, there will always be companies with money who pay people to write content to support their products (e.g. SaaS). This makes it harder every day for individuals like me to sustain their livelihoods. However, I strongly believe in the long run quality trumps quantity. In a perfect world, there would be (1) one perfect learning material (e.g. official documentation) and (2) one unified learning style (e.g. text, video, both) for all students. But we are not living in a perfect world and therefore people look for resources outside of the box.

sushshshsh 6y ago

Really questioning this. The things available in vanilla js, html5 and css3 are immensely powerful and extremely well documented for those who care to dig into it

noahtallen 6y ago
Since those are even more popular than React (given that React builds on top of that foundation), the point about using a popular tool for good ecosystem and documentation still holds for me.
koonsolo 6y ago
You are correct that those have a pretty good interface. But here is some advice from an old programmer: once you start making bigger and more complex projects, you will start to make your own convenience libraries. And soon you will realize that you've built your own React-like library. But only less stable and less well thought out, because react has the huge community and maturity. But if you only do some small functionality, or something specific with the technology, vanilla is perfectly fine. However, if you are a single page app coder, I would definitely go for something like React.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Not everything has to be built with React, and the size of it is orthoganal to the technology. If fact, huge projects are likely to suffer from using React, because virtual DOMs get out of hand and a lot of resources a wasted by building and rebuilding VDOM and looking for the changes. Also, for some reason, React brings a lot of cargo-culting. Many don't stop to thing whether they should even if they can. They bring React, then they bring Redux, then all the rest is being dragged in and you get multi MB bundles for some truly trivial purposes. Of course, that's more on developers than on React, but it happens way to often. And for some reason just bringing React and Co. is not enough, it usually ends up in some imressive architecture astronautics. At the end you have a project that is big, but slow and still impossible to understand because the levels of indirection are off the charts.
  - deleted 6y ago