Ten Years of Coding Horror | Hacker News Reader

Ten Years of Coding Horror

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264 pointssathyabhat41 comments

This may be an irrelevant observation, and excuse me for that, but---the wardrobe malfunction was 10 years ago?! Good Lord, my brain's system clock needs a battery replacement.

This is my favorite Coding Horror post: http://blog.codinghorror.com/international-backup-awareness-...

Every episode of my podcast, I remind my listeners that today is International Backup Awareness Day. Ironically, it looks like Jeff forgot to backup his blog images... again.

(podcast: http://thenexus.tv/category/cs/)

doh!

They're back now. That's great!

Congrats. I've been reading for 10 years! Atwood & Spolsky have always been great reading, and mainly because they push back on fads without being to over the top, don't oversimplify, and don't pretend to have the one-true-answer.

Take the road that scares you a bit, that's the best bit of the post for me.

I liked this advice too. I think it is an interesting counterpoint to Jeff Bezos's "Regret Minimization Framework," i.e., take the path that is least likely to leave you with regrets.

What do you do about a path that scares you a bit, and is also more likely to leave you with regrets? I suspect one's choice in this case says a lot about one, and I also suspect that people like Atwood and Bezos would go for it: perhaps they would define "regret" as "not having tried something that could have been amazing!"

Yes, in the case of Bezos, it was mostly his decision to leave his cushy, high-paying job to go start an online bookstore. It seemed crazy at the time, but he knew he would regret not trying.

Relevant book: The Everything Store

I read them as saying the same thing. What would Bezos be more likely to regret in the future - staying at a cushy high-paying job when he had an awesome idea he could have implemented, always wondering what might have been if only he had tried it, or trying a grand idea, failing at it, probably not losing much of anything, and going back to another cushy high-paying job?

Yes, that does not sound like much of a dilemma. We should all be so lucky to have those options.

10 years of links to previous blog posts.

There are older blogs on the web (mine is 13+ years). What impresses me about Jeff is that he has built up such a huge audience, and effectively converted that into a business. I don't always agree with his opinions, but that's fine I can still admire his output.

And your blog link is?

[username].com judging by his submission history

You win the prize.

I've had a few offers to buy my domain but even though it's not one people follow I've still become attached to it as part of my identity, it's used for my main email address.

Just looked now and archive.org's earliest capture of my alicious.com domain is 2004. By that it's my 10yr anniversary in 2 weeks. Though I started the site ~1996 [it was on Geocities for a time too] I don't think any content remains from then.

Here's my little bit of interaction with Coding Horror:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/62hzb/why_codin...

http://blog.codinghorror.com/on-the-meaning-of-coding-horror...

SO has changed the web. It's a wikipedia-calibre resource - at least, for programmers - and its various spreading incantations in every direction seem destined to displace every other forum vehicle. It is truly a victory for humanity.

Relevant: http://youtu.be/csyL9EC0S0c?t=56m48s (sorry for bad video quality).

If you want to skip even more: http://youtu.be/csyL9EC0S0c?t=59m17s

What he says is not true at all. People will (almost) always recommend better solutions when someone is "asking the wrong question".

And what he says about Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky is total nonsense. There's nothing bad about quoting other peoples' articles. Why reinvent the wheel ? Even articles that contain extensive references contain insightful context.

And a lot of negativity in this video, overall.

I think it sort of misses the point. Both Jeff and Joel write blogs about software development and how they think you can do it better. They don't claim to be solving the world's problems themselves, they're just saying "here's a bunch of stuff we found useful or interesting".

Jeff in particular I think is a relatively modest guy who these days knows he has a certain level of clout and uses it to raise the profile of ideas he finds interesting or useful. I don't think he claims to be a genius solving the problems of software development single handedly.

Personally I think you've got to be a fairly bitter individual to dislike internet-Jeff (by which I mean the public Jeff Atwood - IRL he may kick kittens for fun in which case hate away if you have personal reasons to think he's a bad person). Disagree with him about things sure, but I really struggle to see what there is to suggest that he's anything other than a decent member of the human race.

If anyone's wondering what comic/graphic novel those panels are from, it's from 'Watchmen'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

At first I thought it was Calvin & Hobs, but after the epic spacey events weren't followed by a joke, I knew it was Watchmen.

I'm still thinking he should have taken the $120K and rebranded elsewhere, but what do I know? :-)

I used to check his site daily. Now I wait for the links to appear here. I know he's busy, but I wish he'd have time to write and share more!

I guess the question is, did the buyer want him to keep blogging there, as part of the deal?

Woooo, Ghost.

I might have to move from Squarespace to Ghost but I hate updating blogs manually, It's just another step to climb before I can actually write a post.

Since I graduated two years ago Coding Horror has taught me so much.

Congratulations, glad you're using Ghost. You should give away some "Code Keyboard" to your readers to commemorate the 10th anniversary. Keep it up

Great decision "Ghost Blog" ;)

Congratulations!

This reads more like the writings of a motivational speaker than a programmer. It's... refreshing, actually.

I can tell you from experience, when you run communities this is what happens to your written voice.

That's comes off a bit narcissistic...

No comments/discussion directly on the blog anymore? Looks like we've been purged for the anniversary. This is funny considering the recent complaint-driven-development posting. I also found the app-pocalypse-now a little ironic considering they just released a SO app.

"Along with the new design, you may also notice that comments are no longer present. Don't worry. I love comments. They'll all be back. This is only a temporary state, as there's another notable open source project I want to begin supporting here."

He's just shifted over to a new platform, as you likely would've understood from reading the article. And he explicitly states, as quoted, that comments will be back... Unsure how irony computes in this circumstance.

I read it but missed that part, sorry.

The irony was commenting about his recent criticism regarding the proliferation of native apps for websites post right after stackoverflow released a native application for their website. If you read his posting on the topic he criticizes things like having different interfaces on every application while the SO app announcement posting prompted the idea of different native interface on each platform. That seems to me that he is saying one thing while his company is doing the opposite, hence the irony. Sorry if you disagree.

Did you not actually read it? He explains why in the post...

Yes but he rambles a bit sometimes and somewhere between the Janet Jackson breast to Watchmen segue I missed it, sorry. I'll try to jump the comment gun less.

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