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It's interesting the author uses DHH in the example because DHH is not a ghost online. Besides Rails itself, he has almost half a million Twitter followers and

by nickjj 6y ago

It's interesting the author uses DHH in the example because DHH is not a ghost online. Besides Rails itself, he has almost half a million Twitter followers and even a lot of non-Rails developers know who he is. It really is surprising at how little views his videos get, especially the ones where he spends 20 minutes going over his thought process while going over a feature of Basecamp. This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation in how he applies something to a real world use case. I guess it really boils down to discoverability being mostly about SEO (aka. picking good titles) and how much love you get from the algorithm to push your content in front of folks. But I have a feeling it has a lot more to do with the algorithm at this point due to the sheer number of videos out there. I know I struggle on YouTube (programming / tech topics), even with 11k subs and posting a new video every week consistently, most of the time I'm getting like 400-600 views after the first day and some videos get more views over time depending on how popular the topic is. These are usually videos with 100% or close to 100% upvotes and lots of positive comments. It's super hard to get to the point where you consistently get a lot of views. I've only had a few videos get more than 100k+ views after all this time.

creamytaco 6y ago
"This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation". I weep for the world where this is true. DHH found a niche and through copious application of the "worse is better" approach, became famous. That in itself makes him neither interesting nor particularly talented. The real tragedy is hundreds of genius engineers posting eye-opening material in their personal blogs, that I have little time to fully follow much less digest, being invisible to the masses.
- nickjj 6y ago
  > I weep for the world where this is true It's too late to edit my comment but I should have been more specific and included the word "web" in there instead of having it applied to all developers. I've watched all of DHH's YouTube videos and ignoring his opinionated views on things I think it would be hard to say he's not a good developer. His thought process is very clear and the code he writes (at least in the videos I've seen) seems good, especially since it's in an older code base that's really running in production at scale and not a little toy example to make it look good on video. In my mind, a talented developer is more than someone who can think of and implement great algorithms. It's pulling together many things (coding chops, ability to communicate, API design, thoughtfulness of the code quality, being able to turn the code into something nice for either developers or app features depending on who the audience is, etc.) and IMO DHH hits all of these marks, so it's surprising to me at how little views his videos gets. I wonder if that's why he stopped making them.

by nickjj 6y ago

creamytaco 6y ago

"This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation". I weep for the world where this is true. DHH found a niche and through copious application of the "worse is better" approach, became famous. That in itself makes him neither interesting nor particularly talented. The real tragedy is hundreds of genius engineers posting eye-opening material in their personal blogs, that I have little time to fully follow much less digest, being invisible to the masses.

nickjj 6y ago
> I weep for the world where this is true It's too late to edit my comment but I should have been more specific and included the word "web" in there instead of having it applied to all developers. I've watched all of DHH's YouTube videos and ignoring his opinionated views on things I think it would be hard to say he's not a good developer. His thought process is very clear and the code he writes (at least in the videos I've seen) seems good, especially since it's in an older code base that's really running in production at scale and not a little toy example to make it look good on video. In my mind, a talented developer is more than someone who can think of and implement great algorithms. It's pulling together many things (coding chops, ability to communicate, API design, thoughtfulness of the code quality, being able to turn the code into something nice for either developers or app features depending on who the audience is, etc.) and IMO DHH hits all of these marks, so it's surprising to me at how little views his videos gets. I wonder if that's why he stopped making them.