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Paul Irish is a little quiet lately. He used to be very active on Twitter, but only posts sparingly now. Also his second last post is from 2018[0] with a three

by beauHD 4y ago

Paul Irish is a little quiet lately. He used to be very active on Twitter, but only posts sparingly now. Also his second last post is from 2018[0] with a three year gap between that and his latest post, which was last year. No post for 2022 yet. I always admired that guy, and still do. He contributed a lot to the webdev scene. But the scene is saturated now with developers of the same Paul Irish caliber pushing out tonnes of brilliant stuff, it makes me wonder if it's hard to get noticed now, with the constant barrage of new webdev material & tutorials. [0] https://www.paulirish.com/2018/raf-internals-and-node-debugging-guide/ https://www.paulirish.com/2018/raf-internals-and-node-debugg...

Swizec 4y ago
> makes me wonder if it's hard to get noticed now, with the constant barrage of new webdev material & tutorials. As someone with 10+ years of blogging about webdev, publishing tutorials, and some indie success with monetizing all this: Yes it’s harder to get noticed now. And also it feels less interesting. When I started, the web was new and exciting. At least to me. The world was our oyster and we were the frontier of a new wave. That was fun. And there were few of us digging around, playing with tech, and figuring out new strange ways of holding existing tech to push the envelope. Even if just a little. Then someone discovered content marketing is a good growth tactic. Then they professionalized it. Then they hit scale. Now much of the content you see is either targeted at beginners because there’s a lot of them and the content is easy to produce – but uninteresting to us experienced folk. Or it’s produced by teams of developer advocates financed by deep pockets and supported by all sorts of processes. You can’t compete with that no matter how hard you try. A team of full-timers will outwork and outproduce you every day. That leaves the more interesting content, the deep truths of software engineering that play behind the framework and tactic du jour. Those are hard to uncover, difficult to explain, and usually require so much backstory that there’s no way to fit them into the attention-grabby environment of casual browsing. And they don’t play well with SEO (beginners don’t search for it), neither does it play well with recommendation/social algorithms (not instantly catchy). The nail in the coffin for me was a youtube comment saying “Hey can you make NextJS tutorials instead? Nobody uses React anymore” – Next is built on React. tldr: There’s too much content, mostly for beginners, churning through framework after framework, and all of it has become exhausting instead of exciting. Audiences don’t have time for the interesting stuff. edit: Counterintuitively, I think the good stuff is no longer online. It’s in books. Lots of great new books coming out regularly.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I think the true depth of content moved to be behind paywalls. I consider myself an advanced Frontend engineer and I find only Frontend Masters and specialized (and expensive) courses can really help me fill what gaps I do have or learn something with more depth. I also read a lot more technical books than blogs too, but I’m finding even those harder to find that are relevant
  - Swizec 4y ago
    I guess books are a type of paywall when you think about it. And I agree there’s no good search engine for them. No good search engine for paid courses either, it seems.
    - ayewo 4y ago
      In your mind, what would a search engine for paid courses look like?
robin_reala 4y ago
Paul’s somewhat active here. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paulirish https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paulirish
danielvaughn 4y ago
Yeah I hadn't heard from him for many years. Just recently I submitted a request to the chrome devtools team, and Paul responded. I was like "hey I know that name!"

by beauHD 4y ago

Swizec 4y ago

> makes me wonder if it's hard to get noticed now, with the constant barrage of new webdev material & tutorials. As someone with 10+ years of blogging about webdev, publishing tutorials, and some indie success with monetizing all this: Yes it’s harder to get noticed now. And also it feels less interesting. When I started, the web was new and exciting. At least to me. The world was our oyster and we were the frontier of a new wave. That was fun. And there were few of us digging around, playing with tech, and figuring out new strange ways of holding existing tech to push the envelope. Even if just a little. Then someone discovered content marketing is a good growth tactic. Then they professionalized it. Then they hit scale. Now much of the content you see is either targeted at beginners because there’s a lot of them and the content is easy to produce – but uninteresting to us experienced folk. Or it’s produced by teams of developer advocates financed by deep pockets and supported by all sorts of processes. You can’t compete with that no matter how hard you try. A team of full-timers will outwork and outproduce you every day. That leaves the more interesting content, the deep truths of software engineering that play behind the framework and tactic du jour. Those are hard to uncover, difficult to explain, and usually require so much backstory that there’s no way to fit them into the attention-grabby environment of casual browsing. And they don’t play well with SEO (beginners don’t search for it), neither does it play well with recommendation/social algorithms (not instantly catchy). The nail in the coffin for me was a youtube comment saying “Hey can you make NextJS tutorials instead? Nobody uses React anymore” – Next is built on React. tldr: There’s too much content, mostly for beginners, churning through framework after framework, and all of it has become exhausting instead of exciting. Audiences don’t have time for the interesting stuff. edit: Counterintuitively, I think the good stuff is no longer online. It’s in books. Lots of great new books coming out regularly.

no_wizard 4y ago
I think the true depth of content moved to be behind paywalls. I consider myself an advanced Frontend engineer and I find only Frontend Masters and specialized (and expensive) courses can really help me fill what gaps I do have or learn something with more depth. I also read a lot more technical books than blogs too, but I’m finding even those harder to find that are relevant
- Swizec 4y ago
  I guess books are a type of paywall when you think about it. And I agree there’s no good search engine for them. No good search engine for paid courses either, it seems.
  - ayewo 4y ago
    In your mind, what would a search engine for paid courses look like?

robin_reala 4y ago

Paul’s somewhat active here. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paulirish https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paulirish

danielvaughn 4y ago

Yeah I hadn't heard from him for many years. Just recently I submitted a request to the chrome devtools team, and Paul responded. I was like "hey I know that name!"