Dad-of-Four, Ex-Teleco engineer, entrepreneur, self-taught dev, interested in tech, science, and life on a broad scale. Always busy developing and learning. Currently Building Q-Droid.
All in one is still the best. If you can't control yourself in the quantities you are digesting, I feel pity. Having to scratch around to find the other bits-n-pieces is frustrating and a waste of time. I mean, use a bookmark to continue where you paused processing. Geez, can it be that hard?
A topic never consists of a single aspect. To process information this way is like reading a comic book through a toilet paper roll; one image at a time. Our minds are more than capable of lateral processing. Think peripheral vision. If we were meant to take in concepts by looking down a pipe, the world would have been designed that way. It isn't.
This goes for writing as well. How can a writer create continuation and flow by stitching something together piecemeal one document at a time. It's unnatural and counterproductive.
Wow, that's a vindictive way of giving your opinion 😅
You make some good points and as a reader I personally prefer the all-in-one as well. I, however, disagree in saying "if you can't take it you suck". Everyone is different, and if as writers we can better convey information and help some readers by splitting it up, I don't see the harm. The question is not "can you take it?" but "how do you like it"?
What I retain is: there is an easy way for readers to turn an article into a series (by bookmarking or such), it is garder the other way around. Thanks for this perspective!
Dad-of-Four, Ex-Teleco engineer, entrepreneur, self-taught dev, interested in tech, science, and life on a broad scale. Always busy developing and learning. Currently Building Q-Droid.
Yes, it is a bit snarky, and I apologise. Call it a bad hair day. Not that I have a lot of it, but yeah. And hey, I never said "suck" anywhere, did I ..? 😳
It frustrates me to find 90% click-bait information out on the web and then it's presented half-assed in about 80% of that 90% of times. The "rush-culture" is breaking us and devolving humanity IMO.
When I read stuff pre-2010-ish the people seem to have done far better work. Detailed, clear, explicit, and yes, long and all in one article. One link, one bookmark and easy to reference in personal notes. If you have a good browser bookmarking system with search functionality town to individual characters, it becomes even easier.
" The question is not 'can you take it?' but 'how do you like it'? "
It should read:
"You can take it to where you want and then stop for a coffee whenever you need to 😂"
I feel you! No offence taken, everyone gets a bit snarky sometimes (and correct: you never said suck, it was over interpretation on my part, sorry).
I agree that the quality can be very low, especially on dev.to. This is especially annoying when as a writer you spend weeks on an article and get 2 upvotes, when a billionth "hidden git commands you must know" listing pull and push gets 100.
My conundrum is that I love crafting meticulously a nice long article, but I feel like it doesn't get the attention it should. I am wondering if I should "capitulate" and try out Series, which are more in today's trend and would thus boost their chances of getting noticed. But your comments make me wonder. I mostly write for the pleasure of sharing, not for the attention, so following your logic I should stick to the singles. I love your "coffee break" point - this a highly valid one. (Gosh, I am back to square one now ^^').
Dad-of-Four, Ex-Teleco engineer, entrepreneur, self-taught dev, interested in tech, science, and life on a broad scale. Always busy developing and learning. Currently Building Q-Droid.
I totally agree with you about the value most people seem to place on reading material. I have personally decided to ignore all outside trends regarding trying to get people to read. Went the Substack way, tried to get my RSS feed to auto cross-post here to DEV, etc. And found it exactly as you said above; 100 likes for 100-times repeated (and mostly half so, work) and anything that is longer than a 3-min read gets totally ignored.
I learn so much better when — to quote you — "crafting meticulously" at something I'm interested in understanding well. And the tools we have available today are great!
I write "manuals" about all the software dev topics I'm learning, 30-50-80 page monsters sometimes. And I make sure that I put them together in a way to make it easy to; find relevant info quickly and easily, even dynamically reference to other "manuals" or a specific section in one, and build up a library covering anything from basic HTML/CSS/JS dev through to NodeJS+PHP back-ends, micro-services, DevOps, CySec, NginX/Apache server config, Cloudflare CDNs, Cloud DBs, API sec, etc.
I mean SW dev is NOT easy. The abstraction layers are hectically fuzzy and obscure to any experienced observer. Adding the IaaS, PaaS underneath it all makes it 10X worse. However, after two years doing this, it's as if the fog is lifting. Frustration levels are down 95% and I can start to see the way all the interdependent components interrelate and form into one huge organism.
And sorry you can't cover that kind of complexity in 3-minute pretzel crumbs, expecting to understand remotely how these things are connected and dependent on each other. If the crumbs aren't connected into a whole pretzel, you have no idea you're even eating a pretzel, forget how it's supposed to look or taste.
I'm chuckling, because it's sad and ironic. People that put their hearts into something and create really good stuff simply gets ignored in favour of the "3-minute Goldfish" material that continues to swirl round and round in a bowl, endlessly repeating itself. In the beginning I had hell eating goldfish food. You spot something new and seemingly shiny, just to find it thin and flaky. Having no substance whatsoever.
So, I decided to start writing for myself, and nobody else. And I love it! If someone really wants to know one possible solution to A,B, or C, that I've covered in public, then great if they read the whole damn thing and benefit from it. There are no "publishing timelines" as I decide to share what I have learned when I'm happy it's of value and forms a distinguishable part of the whole, referencing the whole, and placing it into proper context.
If you feel the need, you can always feed it to folks one page at a time, but the admin load going with that is not worth it in my opinion.
If you want some reading material on SW dev with more substance and value for money, Substack is NOT the place. Well it might change, seeing that you can publish books on there now too it seems, and they have a Stripe payment platform integrated should you want to get paid for your more hardcore stuff. I find SitePoint a very valuable paid subscription seeing there you get steak, eggs, fries, a salad, desert AND a cappuccino for your money. Not to forget Quincy Larson's freeCodeCamp stuff. Many valuable materials and references to quality info there too. DEV.TO has it's value for me in the sense sometimes the commentors refer you to valuable tools and resources, or al least to a starting point of such. And of course to have long-winded conversations here with cool people like you now and then :-)
In ref to; "My conundrum is that I love crafting meticulously a nice long article + (Gosh, I am back to square one now ^^')".
Stick to your guns Lucy. Someday, there will be a reward and an appropriate one. Probably not from the quadrants in the galaxy you are expecting them to come from at the moment, but who knows, you might just peak the interest of the Vulcans or Asgard out there.
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All in one is still the best. If you can't control yourself in the quantities you are digesting, I feel pity. Having to scratch around to find the other bits-n-pieces is frustrating and a waste of time. I mean, use a bookmark to continue where you paused processing. Geez, can it be that hard?
A topic never consists of a single aspect. To process information this way is like reading a comic book through a toilet paper roll; one image at a time. Our minds are more than capable of lateral processing. Think peripheral vision. If we were meant to take in concepts by looking down a pipe, the world would have been designed that way. It isn't.
This goes for writing as well. How can a writer create continuation and flow by stitching something together piecemeal one document at a time. It's unnatural and counterproductive.
Wow, that's a vindictive way of giving your opinion 😅
You make some good points and as a reader I personally prefer the all-in-one as well. I, however, disagree in saying "if you can't take it you suck". Everyone is different, and if as writers we can better convey information and help some readers by splitting it up, I don't see the harm. The question is not "can you take it?" but "how do you like it"?
What I retain is: there is an easy way for readers to turn an article into a series (by bookmarking or such), it is garder the other way around. Thanks for this perspective!
Yes, it is a bit snarky, and I apologise. Call it a bad hair day. Not that I have a lot of it, but yeah. And hey, I never said "suck" anywhere, did I ..? 😳
It frustrates me to find 90% click-bait information out on the web and then it's presented half-assed in about 80% of that 90% of times. The "rush-culture" is breaking us and devolving humanity IMO.
When I read stuff pre-2010-ish the people seem to have done far better work. Detailed, clear, explicit, and yes, long and all in one article. One link, one bookmark and easy to reference in personal notes. If you have a good browser bookmarking system with search functionality town to individual characters, it becomes even easier.
" The question is not 'can you take it?' but 'how do you like it'? "
It should read:
"You can take it to where you want and then stop for a coffee whenever you need to 😂"
I feel you! No offence taken, everyone gets a bit snarky sometimes (and correct: you never said suck, it was over interpretation on my part, sorry).
I agree that the quality can be very low, especially on dev.to. This is especially annoying when as a writer you spend weeks on an article and get 2 upvotes, when a billionth "hidden git commands you must know" listing
pullandpushgets 100.My conundrum is that I love crafting meticulously a nice long article, but I feel like it doesn't get the attention it should. I am wondering if I should "capitulate" and try out Series, which are more in today's trend and would thus boost their chances of getting noticed. But your comments make me wonder. I mostly write for the pleasure of sharing, not for the attention, so following your logic I should stick to the singles. I love your "coffee break" point - this a highly valid one. (Gosh, I am back to square one now ^^').
I totally agree with you about the value most people seem to place on reading material. I have personally decided to ignore all outside trends regarding trying to get people to read. Went the Substack way, tried to get my RSS feed to auto cross-post here to DEV, etc. And found it exactly as you said above; 100 likes for 100-times repeated (and mostly half so, work) and anything that is longer than a 3-min read gets totally ignored.
I learn so much better when — to quote you — "crafting meticulously" at something I'm interested in understanding well. And the tools we have available today are great!
I write "manuals" about all the software dev topics I'm learning, 30-50-80 page monsters sometimes. And I make sure that I put them together in a way to make it easy to; find relevant info quickly and easily, even dynamically reference to other "manuals" or a specific section in one, and build up a library covering anything from basic HTML/CSS/JS dev through to NodeJS+PHP back-ends, micro-services, DevOps, CySec, NginX/Apache server config, Cloudflare CDNs, Cloud DBs, API sec, etc.
I mean SW dev is NOT easy. The abstraction layers are hectically fuzzy and obscure to any experienced observer. Adding the IaaS, PaaS underneath it all makes it 10X worse. However, after two years doing this, it's as if the fog is lifting. Frustration levels are down 95% and I can start to see the way all the interdependent components interrelate and form into one huge organism.
And sorry you can't cover that kind of complexity in 3-minute pretzel crumbs, expecting to understand remotely how these things are connected and dependent on each other. If the crumbs aren't connected into a whole pretzel, you have no idea you're even eating a pretzel, forget how it's supposed to look or taste.
I'm chuckling, because it's sad and ironic. People that put their hearts into something and create really good stuff simply gets ignored in favour of the "3-minute Goldfish" material that continues to swirl round and round in a bowl, endlessly repeating itself. In the beginning I had hell eating goldfish food. You spot something new and seemingly shiny, just to find it thin and flaky. Having no substance whatsoever.
So, I decided to start writing for myself, and nobody else. And I love it! If someone really wants to know one possible solution to A,B, or C, that I've covered in public, then great if they read the whole damn thing and benefit from it. There are no "publishing timelines" as I decide to share what I have learned when I'm happy it's of value and forms a distinguishable part of the whole, referencing the whole, and placing it into proper context.
If you feel the need, you can always feed it to folks one page at a time, but the admin load going with that is not worth it in my opinion.
If you want some reading material on SW dev with more substance and value for money, Substack is NOT the place. Well it might change, seeing that you can publish books on there now too it seems, and they have a Stripe payment platform integrated should you want to get paid for your more hardcore stuff. I find SitePoint a very valuable paid subscription seeing there you get steak, eggs, fries, a salad, desert AND a cappuccino for your money. Not to forget Quincy Larson's freeCodeCamp stuff. Many valuable materials and references to quality info there too. DEV.TO has it's value for me in the sense sometimes the commentors refer you to valuable tools and resources, or al least to a starting point of such. And of course to have long-winded conversations here with cool people like you now and then :-)
In ref to; "My conundrum is that I love crafting meticulously a nice long article + (Gosh, I am back to square one now ^^')".
Stick to your guns Lucy. Someday, there will be a reward and an appropriate one. Probably not from the quadrants in the galaxy you are expecting them to come from at the moment, but who knows, you might just peak the interest of the Vulcans or Asgard out there.