CodingHorror: I Stopped Reading Your Blog Years Ago
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
If you're giving developers terrible advice on, for instance, how to write secure code, with an audience the size of yours, you have transcended 'online flamewar'. It's not a game anymore. At some point, at some level of influence, you actually take on some kind of responsibility to be right, and when you're wrong, you should be called on it in no uncertain terms.
Unbelievable.
Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I find it condescending to imply that Steve Yegge decided to stop blogging because he can't handle criticism. Furthermore, the whole Susan Boyle reference seems like sensationalist approach to criticizing sensationalism.
With this post, Coding Horror has just jumped the proverbial shark. Or maybe it did so a long time ago and I didn't notice...
http://github.com/zacharydanger/coding-horrible/tree/master
It's more of a joke than anything.
Except obviously he doesn't ;-)
Reminds me of that Zen story about the monks who help a woman across a river.
For anyone else: http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/obsessed.html
You can accurately say that the message of this article, like many of his articles, is completely obvious. However, the typical HN response to his articles also points out that sometimes the completely obvious points can go unheeded.
pg doesn't talk that much about this, but it's in the guidelines, and I think it's one of his cornerstones of HN. Actually, he does it instead of talking about doing it. I have something to learn from him in this.
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I am long past trying to figure when atwoods joking or completely missing something.
Wouldn't the truth of your beliefs about software development be best expressed by the success of your projects?
Well, your statement could have a bit of truth if Jeff only blogged about how to create a successfull business, wich is obviously not the case. But even then, since i believe the success of a business relies much more on the quality of your original idea than on anything else, for me this is just dead false.
At any rate, success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, I seem to have heard somewhere. Or, as a soft core porn actress once said in The Jade Goddess, on Cinemax late one night, "Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's what you do with them that counts."
I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea. If only ideas count, doesn't that make them even MORE important? Or, are you claiming that success is just luck?
Also, "original" was certainly not accurate, the current idea and orientation of the business is well enough, you're totally right about that.
But there is still some truth in what i say, in that , if your original idea doesn't appeal to a lot of people, you're not gonna have any success. Your site concept is the foundation, and SO concept is a very good one.
>"I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea"
I never made that claim, implicitly or explicitly, that's just your paranoïa speaking. Quite the contrary, i believe Jeff deserves full credit for what he did, and for his ideas. I also truely believe Jeff to be a very intelligent human being.
This is unrelated to the fact that i really think his technical level is quite low on everything programming related, at least in what he shows on his blog. That combined with the very blunt displays he makes of his claims is probably the source of all the "hate" you see on technically oriented sites like HN.
This is not to say Jeff is a bad programmer. All you can deduce from his blog is that he likes to banter about things he doesn't truly know. The fact that he's ignorant of some things doesn't set him appart - we all ignore much more than we know - the fact that he talks about it like an expert does .