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Top comments (125)
I can remember when I first started lurking on dev.to, years ago - this place was a go to site for high quality guides, articles, and really interesting content from people who I came to follow on social media and respect their position within the industry.
I come here every day but now it just feels like dev.to is starting to become "just another" posting ground for anyone with a vague semblance of a question that could have easily been Googled, click-baity "The BEST 10 somethings cos I want to boost my social media follower numbers", and tiny snippetty articles that are only a few small paragraphs at best.
Maybe dev.to isn't the place for me anymore? But I would be interested to see if I am alone in my opinions or whether anyone has felt a change here.
Thanks
This is a good rant and part of the reason I became a moderator.
I don't think of Dev community as just about great articles or interesting content. For me what makes Dev.to successful is how it connects developers with each other in a way that makes it easy and fun for everyone to share their knowledge, opinions, and experiences.
I agree that there are some articles that need to be more improved, but on the other hand I think that many small articles are still useful and just enough to share ideas or to highlight on interesting new techniques or subjects.
Finally, I hope you change your mind :).
Interesting thoughts, as a DEV moderator this is something that we're actively trying to tackle. Take a look at the mod page also, you could become one yourself and help us with your insight:
dev.to/community-moderation
Also a thought is that curating your feed, followed and blocked tags can go a long way 😁 (and you can filter by top monthly, etc which is what I often to, which helps filter out some of the noise)
how can viewers filter on "experience level of post"? My feed (and random browsing) shows 99% low quality (and low experience level) content.
Have you tried setting your experience level?
dev.to/settings/ux
I'd say also following specific tags will help with this. Some tags are modded, others not as much. That might help.
I don't see many questions here, thinking about it. Maybe it's just how I have my feed configured.
I do see a lot of "10 ways to get more successunits" though.
Oh yes, this happens as soon as something get's more well known.
The problem isn't new, at first, the internet was full of accurate knowledge shared by a select few. Then everything turned to s**t as everyone had to start writing crappy article to prove that they know something.
Now, every article is being written by someone who has practically no experience in some.
Myself included. I'm writing an article about memory allocation in the human brain right now!!!!
Is this a rant or a cliché?
I think it is cliché. No harm done though.
I really really dislike battle/vs/face-off posts, like Framework X vs Y.
In my experience they are either clickbait or poorly researched.
I'm concerned that newer developers will jump on a hype train, feel like they have to take sides to stay ahead, or be turned off by the (fake) competition amongst peers.
Agreed. The only thing I like seeing are comparison posts about older frameworks vs newer (not bleeding edge) frameworks. Those help weigh the pros and cons vs upgrading and also let me know about whats new and should be used in future projects.
Yup! Comparison posts can be very helpful. The way Gartner or other businesses rate technologies in an objective way (or attempting to be objective) is good for anyone new to a category of products.
I think what's missing from these battle posts, like you said, are a fair pros/cons list.
You can tell someone doesn't really know or understand a technology if they only have good things to say about it... likewise if they only have bad things to say, it's probably going to be an anecdotal account.
That and the rush to adopt insert new library here
But it's so much better than insert library that does the same thing here.
Learning a new tool ? Why did you BEGIN your usage of it with ten plugins already installed ? Why can't you take some time to learn how the tool works, get familiar with the command AND THEN use plugins to mitigate some pitfalls that you have experienced and are impeding your work.
Everyone's onboarding should begin with a good read of "The Pragmatic Programmer".
100%
Too many people confuse an automated build with practicing CI.
Just being curious what's the difference between the two?
CI refers to Continuous Integration, the practice of everyone pulling and pushing in the same branch in order to ensure that all the code is always integrated into the latest state as explained in these links:
martinfowler.com/articles/continuo...
davefarley.net/?p=247
An automated build is when you use a task runner like Jenkins, Travis or CircleCI to automatically execute all the steps that are needed for your build instead of someone executing those by hand. A good example is ensuring the tests pass and then generating a Docker image and pushing it into the register.
And in summary...
Most people doing CI use builds, but not all people using builds are doing CI.
I think the fact it's called CI in nomenclature doesn't help 😦
The number of devs that are confused by CI/CD nomenclature is too damn high. Can't blame them at all tho. Since the number of references to CI/CD that... are not right... is also too damn high haha
OH MY LORD YES.
Processes are virtual machines. Docker could be replaced with a
.servicefile and Git. Kubernetes is more complicated than the Apollo program but still deploys the same web app we used to deploy before.Why is everything so complicated for no apparent reason?
Talk to some big companies, and I mean big, where bin packing 100 processes onto giant VMs instead of 50 processes can yield enough savings to add multiple elite devs, and you'll start to see why.
That said, there's still no reason for the usability cliff. If I knew more about sociology, I might speculate that this kind of thing is far more ancient than any digital technology, and the complexity used as a way to maintain group boundaries and control of the direction of the technology, au la
2 Chronicles 23:6.Most of these are drastically over complected, and haven't properly considered too many use cases beyond "we have 5 devs who can work on scaling this full time."
I consider Nomad the exception to this, but I'm bia$ed.
Funny story, I worked at a place that started up and managed docker containers using systemd😂😂
Have you tried using NixOS to manage systemd services? It's great! Huge fan myself.
I have not but it sounds interesting I'll definitely have a look!
Although on the professional side I've totally thrown the towel on having things that make sense and I'm more focused on having people run the bullshit for me. If I can find a simple way of running things in a managed Kubernetes I'll be perfectly happy to let my host run the crazy zoo :)
That is actually something I have been working on. Luckily last year I helped 44 developers land their first jobs in tech. Very passionate about this but the solution to this is a part marketing problem, part risk problem.
It is risky and costs money to train new talent. It is a very high gamble. But it can be done. If I can do it in a city like Memphis,TN it can be done anywhere. Just have to market the hell out of yourself.
You hit the nail on the head. The current disorganization of what's left of the labor market precludes anything resembling the old-style apprenticeships or getting us their benefits.
Our company has created internal programs specifically to address this huge need. But tying these kinds of activities to revenue, to connect it to value given to the customers, is the real trick.
Butterfly pain!
I have a strong love/hate relationship with many things about web development.
CSS is powerful and fairly good, and I've learned to like it, but I also really hate it:
Other things have to do with browsers and CSS:
Standards in CSS: For some reason good programming standards like scope and not using globals all over the place are completely ignored in CSS.
No versioning for the web. Yes there are downsides to versioning, but I think the eternal backwards compatibility is very unfortunate because we can never fix design mistakes. Our only options are to only use "higher order languages" that hide those mistakes from us, or completely copy-paste functionality with new syntax and minor changes and just never use the "old way" of doing things.
JavaScript prototype system is bad. I have never, ever, had a use case that required me to use dynamic scoping for
this. Having to use hard binding all the time for proper classes has only ever gotten in my way. It should have been completely hidden away in ES6 classes, without having to wait for the class properties proposal which copies functions everywhere.As a junior/mid dev looking for a job, the pain is real. Not all of us want to work at a top 5 or even 10 tech company. I just want to be able to work with a good knowledgeable team where I can learn and contribute.
As another jr/mid-level dev, I feel your pain, Glenn!
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