This meme of "do things and blog about it" presumes a certain amount of extroversion. I'm rather fed up with it altogether.
Would you rather be thought of as the best developer, or actually be the best developer? The two aren't mutually exclusive, but I find it entirely suspicious that the rise in needing to "put yourself out there" has correlated so strongly with social media becoming pervasive. If I have a finite amount of time available for hacking, why do I want to spend a not-insignificant amount of it signaling?
Hacker culture has been corrupted by this 'need' for influence. Perhaps it isn't the same as the neckbeard culture I looked forward to joining in my youth.
The theme of all of this isn't just to signal. It's that putting yourself out there will cause you to bend and grow. Over and over I read testimonials of people with low confidence who decided to do something like this and found it incredibly fulfilling. Don't just do the things you've always done. Stretch yourself, and you might be amazed what you can accomplish. Blogging improves your writing ability at the very least, and can also cause you to think more critically about your ideas. If you happen to build some influence or good relationships, even better.
Obviously if you aren't interested in any of that, there is nothing wrong with spending the time the way you want to spend it. But it's not about signaling or influence, at least as I interpret it.
It's unfortunate that someone downvoted you, I've tried to negate that.
The only reason I made a comment to this effect is that I've noticed an uptick in articles about how Github is your resume/marketing yourself/marketing your OSS/how you should only work on 'important' OSS/some other silly notion. I want to believe this isn't a problem, but with open source powering so much, it appears that people want to be the next DHH.
I think there is something to worrying about software shifting to a heavily reputation-based economy (as opposed to one oriented around making things). Namely, in that shift, it rewards people who generate noise, regardless of the amount of signal contained. Polluting the well, in this case, results in everyone having to output a certain amount of signaling just to keep up.
It's entirely possible I am projecting some here, as I've struggled with this myself. I just don't want to always concerned with this tripe, because it's not the same at all as actually making software.
samspot is dead on here, at least from my perspective. I am very private and have suffered from social anxiety for years. I don't use Facebook because I am overly sensitive to the reactions of others (no likes? everyone hates me and thinks I'm stupid). I spend far too much time thinking about what others think of me, so my natural inclination is to completely remove myself from public view at all opportunities. I don't use GitHub for this reason. I'd like to contribute and become part of a community, but I'm so terrified of being judged that I never step forward.
So I completely understand the author's attempts to go public. It isn't about being the next DHH, it's about overcoming the fear of rejection. I have been considering "going public" for years for this very reason.
Seriously. What's the worst that could happen about pushing some open source code on GitHub? You don't have to start by contributing to openssl or something of similar magnitude. Just push some stuff to your personal one.
Trust me, I graduated college with an art degree and some of my earliest GitHub stuff shows this. But I keep pushing, literally. One of my babies has 1300+ stars and that's awesome to me. I don't think of it like validation, but more like "holy shit a lot of people like this." Some of my libraries are sitting at 0 stars, and that's ok.
Freaked me out a bit saying I was dead, I appear to be alive again, at least from checking with some random devices.
I'm not sure if this describes you, but I can be pretty thin skinned on the internet, which often discourages me from posting. I write things and delete them more often than I hit submit.
One nice thing about going public is it's unlikely anyone will notice you for a while. Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC).
Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC).
If only getting visitors were as easy as being related to them!
No, seriously speaking, my blog had perhaps 200~300 visitors for the average article from 2006 through, hmm, late 2009 or so? (What changed? A combination of discovering HN, going full time, changing my writing style to exclusively focus on the 4k to 8k word essay that I feel is generally my best work, and a minor refocusing on topics.)
It's not about being the best programmer. After all, most of us are not the best - yet :) It's important not to discourage each other by pretending that only the best programmers matter. The whole point of the post is that it's sometimes important to "signal" that we're not perfect.
This is a much better comment than how it started out.
Intellectual humility is a good capsule summary of what I'm looking for (despite my username; I never claimed to be self-consistent). But intellectual humility can be at odds with the notion of always presenting the 'best' side of yourself to the market. I'm interested in an individuals steps and missteps, not a carefully-marketed image.
Seriously, humility is one of the most arrogant things I've ever come across. You do not ever "signal" and be humble at the same time, that isn't how people work.
Can't I just spend an evening decoding a binary format? When I'm done, can't I just put it on a wikia without sitting around to make sure my name stays attached to it?
The meme used to be "do things and publish in journals about it" now it's blogging because that's easier. But it's always been important to put yourself out there if you wanted others to use your work.
It's not a need to influence, it's to share and spread knowledge. That's one of, if not the, fundamental tenets on which hacker culture was built and depends on.
You do things, find something new or interesting, share it with the world so others can build on your work.
Not to mention "put yourself out there" usually means the same rehash of the groupthink, and/or sometimes baseless opinions ("here's why I hate MongoDB because of blah blah blah, but I never used it actually")
There are a lot of useful blog posts and social media interactions and they're usually useful (especially with google), but no, I don't need another blog post saying how to install RabbitMQ
This is a whole separate topic, but I'm glad you mentioned it.
I don't see enough heresies entertained in a supposedly-progressive-minded crowd like HN. That is a problem, because it represents a real stumbling block to progress.
Have you considered blogging to be not about extroversion but instead just being a personal journal that is public?
I think the type of blog you are referring to desires to engage others, while a blog that is indexable simply there to add value for other who might be trying to figure their way through the same random things that you have been.
Yeah, this is the only form of blogging I can tolerate: recording thoughts over a period of time as an individual explores a set of topics. It takes on a decidedly different tone from the more presumptuous, link-baity "why X is the best language ever"-style of blogs. Namely, the latter has no speck of intellectual humility; it is merely a long-form tweet.
I agree with you completely on being bored of posts about "x" that are based on preference, opinion, interpretation that can't see there being more than one equally valid way of solving a problem.
What is interesting is when someone picks up a problem and simply solves it using the tools at hand, be it old, new, preferred, or trying out a new approach. I learn far more from the approaches than the results.
Would you rather be thought of as the best developer, or actually be the best developer? The two aren't mutually exclusive, but I find it entirely suspicious that the rise in needing to "put yourself out there" has correlated so strongly with social media becoming pervasive. If I have a finite amount of time available for hacking, why do I want to spend a not-insignificant amount of it signaling?
Hacker culture has been corrupted by this 'need' for influence. Perhaps it isn't the same as the neckbeard culture I looked forward to joining in my youth.