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Discussion on: Annotation-free Spring

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Bernd Wechner

Nicolas, a paper appears in a journal and is pitched at a very small audience that is assumed to be in the same area or doing research into it.

A newspaper by comparison is pitched at the general public.

In all contexts there is an audience, and a write consciously (or not) makes call on what language is accessible the audience and what not. The line is not objective and not stationary and not clear, but it exists and good writing is conscious of it.

I'd be very curious what portion of the dev.to audience even understands the title of this one.

As to my specifics, you're spot on, and I did look them up. Kotlin is easy and I know what it is now. Spring is more challenging, try it ... I have a lose idea of what it is, but very loose, it's not even clearly explained by its own website ;-). A Java framework that makes you more productive is about all I got.

But therein lies the source of your puzzlement. I was not complaining, and I'm fully on top of my own options, yes. I was drawn in by curiosity and offered an accessibility tip. Accessibility has been a theme on my dev.to feed and I've been learning a bit myself. Take the tip or leave it.

There's an irony here, one the internet is full of, and I actually like it, it's a sweet one. Because you're right. As to my options. But not just with regard to tose, also with regard to yours. You can read up on accessible writing or pass my comment over ;-).

Note, I am not actually dropping that suggestion, not at all. I am very open to a conversation on it.

I would ask perhaps in reflection, whether you'd concur (or not) that on your average dev.to feed (and I'm only able to guess at the demography there based on mine which I won't claim is universal as I have no idea what "algorithms" - I quote that as it's a buzz word in social media and Facebook contexts regarding selection of items for populating feeds - dev.to uses) it would draw even more readers in or save them time or generally improve the quality of such feeds if your article kick started in a dev.to audience pitch akin to - and this is just a sampler not a prescription:

Avoiding Annotations in the Java Spring Framework
Spring is a very popular Java framework and I've seen a lot of posts critical of it. They seem mostly rooted in complaints about annotations, and blissfully unaware of the options to avoid them and still use Spring ....

My point being you have a much broader audience. Of course you're entitled not to care, and pitch at that readership that knows what you mean by this title, and your intro. And that in fact is something I'd find natural and expected maybe on a Java forum. On dev.to it surprises me a little, as its a very broad forum with one feed that sees on my end mostly Web development, Javascript, Node, python stuff float by and some industry topics and professional development stuff.

I mean I'm not griping, nor complaining and in fact thank you for the opportunity to learn a little more about Java (which I know little of clearly). Was just offering some constructive feedback on a more accessible approach in this general forum

I mean I see from your footer it was originally published at A Java Geek. Case in point, an article in Java geek context moved out of it into a general developers forum ...

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Nicolas Frankel

Thanks for your detailed explanation.

The gist of my answer is: my point here is not to appeal to a broader audience. If you happen to be interested in the post, great, if not, great too 🙂

In all cases, I'm happy it made you look a bit more into the concepts I mention.

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Bernd Wechner

Thanks. And no worries. Stil, I'm curious, why publish on dev.to if no aiming at a more general developer audience? Not least stuff already published ... what's the draw to republishing on dev.to? I'm just curious, and keen to understand. That's all. Not critical.

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Miha Jamsek

He is aiming at advanced Spring developers as target audience, dev.to is as good of a place for this as any other platform. Majority of posts here are for some specific target audience and not for general developer audience (apart from posts about architecture, most of posts are not for general audience). Tags are for denoting what kind of audience is this written for (java, kotlin, spring)