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> 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 we
by 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 agoI 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