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Comment by rwieruch | Hacker News Reader

One of my latest articles: https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-testing-library Is this listicle spam or helpful for people who get started with testing in React? :)

The last one I dropped was https://www.robinwieruch.de/web-applications which has more than 5000 words (1/6 of a book) of fundamentals in web development -- which took me 3 workdays of writing without anyone paying me for it. Still it gets less attention on Twitter than some random dev meme or inspirational dev tweet; and will probably not be picked up by HackerNews if anyone posts it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do my best to teach people fundamentals. If they like my content on my blog, people buy my books/courses. This and their feedback (e.g. on Amazon, E-Mail) gives me confidence that I am doing the right thing. Without good content I don't get paid at the end of the month ...

Thanks for the shoutout @Pandabob! :)

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Thanks for posting all those tutorials, I've learn a lot from those, great content! And keep up the good work! Also, if I may suggest, maybe you could update the React/Firebase series, convert to hooks maybe. Also, just out of curiosity, are you not a fan of TypeScript? You haven't really posted anything meaningful for that topic.

I have also found your material very useful. Thank you.

> Is this listicle spam or helpful for people who get started with testing in React? :)

It is useful, but only because react-testing-library's documentation is horrendous in this front (its documentation is fine as a reference, but not as an introduction/getting started).

However, your post will end up rotting over time as react-testing-library evolves, and will end up being old cruft spam contributing to today's issues (you search for something and find an outdated reference that doesn't work anymore).

If you really want to have positive impact with your documentation efforts, the best avenue would be to work with the software authors themselves on getting your tutorial there. And then helping to maintain it.

Of course you are not in any kind of obligation to do so. I just wanted you to think about it ;)

This holds true for all kind of content (YouTube, Courses, StackOverflow, Reddit, HackerNews) where a person has no ownership or no monetary interest (or doesn't worship pure altruism) ... At least content creators are urged to keep their content up-to-date, otherwise they would receive bad feedback (and bad SEO scores over time if people don't stay on your website). I could name you lots of articles I have kept up-to-date over the last 3 years (more than I wrote for sure), and I know this doesn't apply to all content creators, but I can tell you that it really matters for your readers and your credibility.

For sure, the easiest thing as a content creator is publishing (almost) ever green content (see web applications article). However, most often you are looking for topics that solve actual problems of your readers (see react testing library article) which often leads to bleeding edge technology which isn't document well yet.

For what it's worth, there will always be companies with money who pay people to write content to support their products (e.g. SaaS). This makes it harder every day for individuals like me to sustain their livelihoods. However, I strongly believe in the long run quality trumps quantity.

In a perfect world, there would be (1) one perfect learning material (e.g. official documentation) and (2) one unified learning style (e.g. text, video, both) for all students. But we are not living in a perfect world and therefore people look for resources outside of the box.

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