Leaving Everything Behind For Elixir [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Early in my career 15 years ago, I was getting all my info from experienced old folks like Douglas Crockford, Don Norman and Alan Kay.
My recommendation: Jon Gjengset - https://www.youtube.com/@jonhoo
It's not a good platform for discovering anymore. You only get pushed mainstream stuff that their ads do well on.
Sometimes you get what you ask for.
If anything, I'd say he's a perfect example of what it looks like when cancel culture makes its way into technical circles.
For example, he got lambasted for having a sexist joke on the whiteboard on his door... he didn't write it, someone else did.
The primary audience for software influencers are either junior themselves or non-devs aspiring to join the industry. It's not the same thing that Douglas Crockford or Alan Kay were doing back in the day.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I've lost count of how many times I've seen people say things that are obviously not great. They generally make sense in theory but not practice.
All that being said, there's thankfully some more niche YouTubers, or whatever you want to call them, who don't put much work into the stream per se, but their teaching and information is so good and valuable within their domain that they have decent viewership. People like Jon Gjengset who has far less subscribers both because a) he's covering more nich topics, e.g. 1.5 hour streams in depth on Rust language concepts and b) he just streams very plainly. People love his content, but it's a smaller pool and he's not going to get the hundreds of thousands of subs that t3.gg or Primeagen get.
And YouTube et al show the public what's mainstream/popular, or bound to be - not geohot.
I also don’t release very much of my code to the public.
Just looking at the merits though:
The article author is clearly a medium article programmer that bounces from one thing to the next to the next to the next depending on which medium article he happened to read most recently.
Theo demonstrates that I have to take what he says with a grain of salt, as he is unquestionably wrong to suggest that sql in the presentation is fine for anything but quick and dirties (I’d suggest that even quick and dirties is a dangerous proposition for sql in the presentation. Use Jupyter or something similar for quick and dirties).
Neither of these two are people I would ever find myself listening to.
My issue with this individual arises from the discrepancy between his public claims of significant expertise in the content he produces. He positions himself as a highly experienced developer, attracting a large following of junior developers who take his advice at face value.
I am trying to collect data points supporting his claims of seniority. For instance, his website prominently features a statement that he is the creator of the T3 Stack. However, a review of the contributor statistics for the T3 Stack https://github.com/t3-oss/create-t3-app/graphs/contributors reveals minimal contributions from him, which raises questions about the validity of his claims.
But then, for someone not deep into react, a magic string like "use server" also does not clarify anything.
Also, he argues that just because you can it does not mean you should scatter sql queries around your views. But again, just because you can do a bunch of implicit stuff on a Rails controller it does not mean you should.
I felt that he has a bit of an agenda against DHH and I guess that's why he thrashes Rails as much as he did on that video.
Like droning on about scaffolding without acknowledging that it's just get you going training tool that you're expected to grow out of almost immediately.
Or bemoaning that Rails is "framework" and so you're forced to use all of it. It's just reasonable defaults you can opt out of really easily. e.g. swap out ActiveRecord for Sequel or replace ActionController with GrapeAPI. Don't like backend rendering? Just remove it. You can pick only the bits of Rails you want via Railties.
Even going on about how you're forced to put business logic in models is pretty silly. It's right there in the Rails Guides how to keep models only for data access and move business logic into business logic into pure service classes. Don't like that? Use modules or engines or Trailblazer or any number of alternatives.
So yeah, no one should take him seriously.
> That said...most of my work is clearly not in Elixir. What if I left it all behind? Dropping React, NextJS, TypeScript, tRPC, everything I'm known for? What about PHP, Rails, Gatsby, and Remix? Lots to talk about here
> Daniel did just that, and requested I react to it, so here we are
> Link to article: https://dev.to/danielbergholz/from-nextjs-to-rails-then-elix...