3 ms·

"They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook..." How do you know if you've never met the

"They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook..." How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them? "There's this group of people I've never met or talked to, and here are my assumptions about them." is a horrible thing to write. Baseless assumptions because you're some sort of 'thought leader' in web doesn't lend itself to saying backend dev, embedded devs, game devs, enterprise devs, etc are putting things out there. This article can be distilled down to "I live in a bubble and can't be bothered to look very far outside of it. Why aren't those devs coming to me?" Such a bad take.

charcircuit 4y ago
>How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them? By definition. If they tweeted or used facebook they would make their presence known and would no longer be a dark matter developer. Same with leaving comments on a blog, writing blog posts, or attending meet ups with other programmers.
- onion2k 4y ago
  I've been active on Twitter for almost 15 years, I have a couple of thousand 'followers', and I've seen posts from maybe 500,000 people at most. That's out of 450,000,000 active users at Twitter's peak. The notion that you'll have seen all, or even a significant amount, of the active devs is just daft. Same for blogs, Facebook etc. Unless Scott is open about how often he seeks out and reads blogs by people outside of his immediate bubble I think it's fair to assume this is just him failing to listen rather than millions of devs failing to speak. Also, isn't this kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Once Scott sees a dev on Twitter or at a conference he must mentally move them from "dark matter" state to "not dark matter" state. By definition that means it's impossible to ever meet a dark matter dev, so they'll always be unknown to him.
metisto 4y ago
My take on this is that we all live in our "bubbles". You, me and the next person reading this. What I believe Scott is saying, that there are a lot of people not reading this. However,they do get stuff done just fine. Advice I see here is: If you are a creator, take into the account how your decisions will affect ALL users of your product.
chx 4y ago
> How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them? To quote the footnote of the article: > These people and companies all exist, I've met them and spoken to them at length.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
> thought leader Not to me, not to the majority of developers in the world. Maybe to a bubble of people that do like to blog their drivel, the active twitter users and all others with unwarranted self importance.
ejb999 4y ago
>>Such a bad take. Agreed - never liked the author, met him several times in person - he is as fake as fake can be, and is real passion in life is self promotion. The article reeks of elitism.
ajkjk 4y ago
You meet them everywhere. Except for Twitter.

charcircuit 4y ago

>How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them? By definition. If they tweeted or used facebook they would make their presence known and would no longer be a dark matter developer. Same with leaving comments on a blog, writing blog posts, or attending meet ups with other programmers.

onion2k 4y ago
I've been active on Twitter for almost 15 years, I have a couple of thousand 'followers', and I've seen posts from maybe 500,000 people at most. That's out of 450,000,000 active users at Twitter's peak. The notion that you'll have seen all, or even a significant amount, of the active devs is just daft. Same for blogs, Facebook etc. Unless Scott is open about how often he seeks out and reads blogs by people outside of his immediate bubble I think it's fair to assume this is just him failing to listen rather than millions of devs failing to speak. Also, isn't this kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Once Scott sees a dev on Twitter or at a conference he must mentally move them from "dark matter" state to "not dark matter" state. By definition that means it's impossible to ever meet a dark matter dev, so they'll always be unknown to him.

metisto 4y ago

My take on this is that we all live in our "bubbles". You, me and the next person reading this. What I believe Scott is saying, that there are a lot of people not reading this. However,they do get stuff done just fine. Advice I see here is: If you are a creator, take into the account how your decisions will affect ALL users of your product.

chx 4y ago

> How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them? To quote the footnote of the article: > These people and companies all exist, I've met them and spoken to them at length.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

> thought leader Not to me, not to the majority of developers in the world. Maybe to a bubble of people that do like to blog their drivel, the active twitter users and all others with unwarranted self importance.

ejb999 4y ago

>>Such a bad take. Agreed - never liked the author, met him several times in person - he is as fake as fake can be, and is real passion in life is self promotion. The article reeks of elitism.

ajkjk 4y ago

You meet them everywhere. Except for Twitter.