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The problem with dev.to, and pretty much every blogging platform like it, is that it encourages the mindset that the articles about problems you have yourself a

The problem with dev.to, and pretty much every blogging platform like it, is that it encourages the mindset that the articles about problems you have yourself are the best articles to learn from, and that things that aren't directly applicable to other people won't get promoted. That leads people to think they should write boring, generic things about language fundamentals in order to become 'famous'. People end up rewriting the language docs in their own words. How dull. The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way. You can learn a lot about dev work from those (approaching problems, thinking about things, some cornercase dev tools, algorithms, etc) even if you can't cut and paste code from them into your own project. This exposes a further problem though - you can't write those articles until you're sufficiently experienced to face those problems, and knowledgeable enough to solve them. If you're a new dev starting out with ambitions to be a 'thought leader' and wanting to get to the top fast, you're bound to end up writing another "Why Array.pop is the best array method ever!" article.

uxcolumbo 4y ago
> The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way Do you have a list of those articles? And which sites do you visit to find those articles?
- Merg 4y ago
  Lobste.rs frankly. More programming oriented, less ego boosting.
  - b112 4y ago
    Are there magnets involved? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hzBh0J1YFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hzBh0J1YFU
  - Hallucinaut 4y ago
    How does one get an invite to join though? The suggestion seems to be to scroll through a list of hundreds of online handles to see if you know someone by their pseudonym, and assumes you can reach them out of band, which is obviously not going to work for the vast majority of people.
    - sshine 4y ago
      I’ll invite you. Just send me an email.
      - phlummox 4y ago
        Might I email you as well? I'm a regular lobste.rs reader, but not yet a member.
        sshine 4y ago
        Yes. You should just have gone ahead and emailed me, since now I have to respond both here and there. ;-)
      - DunbarTrout 4y ago
        Late to the party but I've been really enjoying lobste.rs and been passively trying to get an account. Would you be able to facilitate this?
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
      That’s the beauty of it.
- onion2k 4y ago
  And which sites do you visit to find those articles? https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ignoramous 4y ago
  A few that come to mind: Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630 How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367933 Writing an open source GPU driver without the hardware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107002 Teleforking a process onto a different computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987747 How NAT traversal works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711 BPF, XDP, Packet Filters, and UDP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391 A viable solution for Python concurrency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782 Updating the Go Memory Model https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459 zig-cc: A drop in replacement for gcc/clang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138 Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280 Time-lock encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752 My first impressions of Web3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208 How to build large scale end to end encrypted video calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938 Secure value recovery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413 How Google code search worked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469 Deploying authoritative DNS with Mirage Unikernels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589 Playing around with Fuschia OS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564 Making tokio scheduler 10x faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708 JVM Anatomy Quarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815 The hunt for a cluster-killer Erlang bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090 Static B Trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140 Files are hard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859 Faster JavaScript calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648 Firefox's new compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236 Abusing Linux's firewall: The hack that allowed us to build Spectrum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807 Million packets per second ingress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185 Streams: A general purpose data structure for Redis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396 Let's build a compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474 Improving compression with zstandard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592 When bloom filters don't bloom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979 Critbit trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862 Mobile physical memory security https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517 How the Linux kernel works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 Following a select statement through postgres internals LMAX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993 ELF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672 Reading privileged memory with side channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845 How fast are Linux pipes anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934 Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518 io_uring examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549 Clojure design patterns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561 Inside the Magic Pocket https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536 A high performance cache in Go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949 Lockfree data structures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202 mtime considered harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744 Bracket colorization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470 Linux load averages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288 A bump in the wire to make your internet go faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496 Backblaze durability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837 H.264 is magic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403 Redbean: single file web server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 Gotchas from 2 years with Node https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303 Counting objects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471 Idempotent APIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681 Norvig's auto correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587 QuickJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154 ...
- Swizec 4y ago
  I’ve been putting my own on https://swizec.com/blog https://swizec.com/blog for over 10 years. About 15,000 people agree they’re good enough to stay subscribed.
  - uxcolumbo 4y ago
    Already subscribed to yours ;) Good newsletter content.
- Kaze404 4y ago
  I have a page called “Library” in my blog where I collect articles I find interesting. https://leite.dev/pages/library/ https://leite.dev/pages/library/
dredmorbius 4y ago
Neither quality nor truth are popularity contests.
oefrha 4y ago
IMO these social blogging platforms for developers lowered the overall quality of online technical content by a lot, and made researching technical topics a fair bit harder. It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront. Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more grifters churning out a massive amount of blind-leading-the-blind garbage to "build a presence", and they usually pose as experts even though they barely know the topics. As an example, whenever I try to compare two similar technologies/libraries I'm not familiar with, I can almost always find one or more Medium or whatever articles on the topic, but 80+% of the time it's quite clear the author basically wrote the useless crap of an article after reading the READMEs, or slightly better, the bare minimum example projects.
- CJefferson 4y ago
  This is a hard problem, and I'd love someone to solve it. I was looking recently for some guides about Docker, as some parts were confusing me -- everything on the first couple of pages of Google was clearly just badly repeating the "getting started" guide, which I'd already read!
  - layer8 4y ago
    Blogging platforms that make it easier to publish and to be discoverable contribute to the problem just by making it easier to publish and to be discoverable. When writing a blog meant writing your own HTML, or at least installing and configuring some blogging software, and you’d have to write content other people linked to get a good page rank for your website, that served as a filter for low-quality content. I’m not advocating to abolish blogging platforms, but they’ve been a double-edged sword in that way.
darkerside 4y ago
This is totally a function of the experience level of the reader. When I was a beginner/intermediate dev, I was actively seeking out articles about the basics in everyday language from different people so I could grok the language. I'm much more comfortable going straight to documentation now, but there is absolutely a place for beginner explanatory blog posts. The fact that they are generally crap is an orthogonal problem and one the author addresses pretty well IMO.

uxcolumbo 4y ago

> The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way Do you have a list of those articles? And which sites do you visit to find those articles?

Merg 4y ago
Lobste.rs frankly. More programming oriented, less ego boosting.
- b112 4y ago
  Are there magnets involved? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hzBh0J1YFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hzBh0J1YFU
- Hallucinaut 4y ago
  How does one get an invite to join though? The suggestion seems to be to scroll through a list of hundreds of online handles to see if you know someone by their pseudonym, and assumes you can reach them out of band, which is obviously not going to work for the vast majority of people.
  - sshine 4y ago
    I’ll invite you. Just send me an email.
    - phlummox 4y ago
      Might I email you as well? I'm a regular lobste.rs reader, but not yet a member.
      - sshine 4y ago
        Yes. You should just have gone ahead and emailed me, since now I have to respond both here and there. ;-)
    - DunbarTrout 4y ago
      Late to the party but I've been really enjoying lobste.rs and been passively trying to get an account. Would you be able to facilitate this?
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    That’s the beauty of it.
onion2k 4y ago
And which sites do you visit to find those articles? https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ignoramous 4y ago
A few that come to mind: Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630 How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367933 Writing an open source GPU driver without the hardware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107002 Teleforking a process onto a different computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987747 How NAT traversal works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711 BPF, XDP, Packet Filters, and UDP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391 A viable solution for Python concurrency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782 Updating the Go Memory Model https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459 zig-cc: A drop in replacement for gcc/clang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138 Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280 Time-lock encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752 My first impressions of Web3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208 How to build large scale end to end encrypted video calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938 Secure value recovery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413 How Google code search worked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469 Deploying authoritative DNS with Mirage Unikernels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589 Playing around with Fuschia OS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564 Making tokio scheduler 10x faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708 JVM Anatomy Quarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815 The hunt for a cluster-killer Erlang bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090 Static B Trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140 Files are hard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859 Faster JavaScript calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648 Firefox's new compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236 Abusing Linux's firewall: The hack that allowed us to build Spectrum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807 Million packets per second ingress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185 Streams: A general purpose data structure for Redis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396 Let's build a compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474 Improving compression with zstandard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592 When bloom filters don't bloom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979 Critbit trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862 Mobile physical memory security https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517 How the Linux kernel works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 Following a select statement through postgres internals LMAX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993 ELF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672 Reading privileged memory with side channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845 How fast are Linux pipes anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934 Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518 io_uring examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549 Clojure design patterns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561 Inside the Magic Pocket https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536 A high performance cache in Go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949 Lockfree data structures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202 mtime considered harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744 Bracket colorization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470 Linux load averages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288 A bump in the wire to make your internet go faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496 Backblaze durability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837 H.264 is magic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403 Redbean: single file web server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 Gotchas from 2 years with Node https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303 Counting objects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471 Idempotent APIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681 Norvig's auto correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587 QuickJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154 ...
Swizec 4y ago
I’ve been putting my own on https://swizec.com/blog https://swizec.com/blog for over 10 years. About 15,000 people agree they’re good enough to stay subscribed.
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  Already subscribed to yours ;) Good newsletter content.
Kaze404 4y ago
I have a page called “Library” in my blog where I collect articles I find interesting. https://leite.dev/pages/library/ https://leite.dev/pages/library/

dredmorbius 4y ago

Neither quality nor truth are popularity contests.

oefrha 4y ago

IMO these social blogging platforms for developers lowered the overall quality of online technical content by a lot, and made researching technical topics a fair bit harder. It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront. Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more grifters churning out a massive amount of blind-leading-the-blind garbage to "build a presence", and they usually pose as experts even though they barely know the topics. As an example, whenever I try to compare two similar technologies/libraries I'm not familiar with, I can almost always find one or more Medium or whatever articles on the topic, but 80+% of the time it's quite clear the author basically wrote the useless crap of an article after reading the READMEs, or slightly better, the bare minimum example projects.

CJefferson 4y ago
This is a hard problem, and I'd love someone to solve it. I was looking recently for some guides about Docker, as some parts were confusing me -- everything on the first couple of pages of Google was clearly just badly repeating the "getting started" guide, which I'd already read!
- layer8 4y ago
  Blogging platforms that make it easier to publish and to be discoverable contribute to the problem just by making it easier to publish and to be discoverable. When writing a blog meant writing your own HTML, or at least installing and configuring some blogging software, and you’d have to write content other people linked to get a good page rank for your website, that served as a filter for low-quality content. I’m not advocating to abolish blogging platforms, but they’ve been a double-edged sword in that way.

darkerside 4y ago

This is totally a function of the experience level of the reader. When I was a beginner/intermediate dev, I was actively seeking out articles about the basics in everyday language from different people so I could grok the language. I'm much more comfortable going straight to documentation now, but there is absolutely a place for beginner explanatory blog posts. The fact that they are generally crap is an orthogonal problem and one the author addresses pretty well IMO.