

Sharpening the Saw - twampss
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001236.html

======
jrockway
I disagree about his choice in link aggregation sites. HN rarely has any good
programming articles. Programming Reddit is all programming articles, but they
are usually so stupid that it's not even worth checking out. (And God help you
if you accidentally start reading the comments.)

If you want something passive to do, I recommend reading the blog aggregator
for your favorite programming language (Planet Perl, Planet Haskell, etc.).
There is obviously some junk in there too (the Perl people get to read all my
Lisp articles), but the articles are generally "primary sources" describing
new projects and techniques. (That is to say, the author of new module foo is
the one talking about it. It's not some pundit that thinks it's cool.)

Anyway, read social news sites if you want, but remember that they are mostly
entertainment, not work. If you want to be a better programmer, the most
important thing to do is to program and be aware of other ways of doing
things. Read the source code to your libraries. Read the academic papers that
the documentation links to. Experiment with new ideas and techniques. Those
things will actually make you a better programmer. Reading blogs, not so much.

~~~
Xichekolas
> _all my Lisp articles_

Completely off topic (and I apologize to everyone else), but in viewing your
profile to find all your Lisp articles, I noticed we are rocking the same top
color... it _is_ quite pretty.

~~~
yan
I like 77aaff. Try it out.

------
jcapote
I could never read codinghorror again after reading this article
<http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/nothing-to-say>

~~~
moe
Same here, I removed coding horror from my RSS reader just the day I read that
article.

Not because of the article alone, but it summed up with an almost creepy
precision what had already unconsciously reduced my interest in his writing
over the past months. Most of his blog-posts _really_ match the template.

When I dropped the feed there were still 10 or 20 articles in the queue. Don't
think I missed out on much.

~~~
gaius
Dude's problem is that he thinks he's (still) primarily a developer, whereas
what he is (now) is a blogger.

------
Jem
Only yesterday, Jeff was agreeing with someone on reddit that HN is "sterile";
that people here are "on their best behaviour", and yet now he's recommending
HN like he's used it for years?

I don't 'get' the backtracking.

~~~
kylec
Yeah, I'm not sure how to reconcile this comment:

    
    
        There's the same amount of crap, it's just dressed up in more pretentious verbiage. IMHO.
        90% of everything is crap, no matter how "non-lame" your audience is.
    

with his apparent recommendation to use HN the following day. The only thing I
can think of is that he wants to dilute the HN community with his own.

~~~
biohacker42
_The only thing I can think of is that he wants to dilute the HN community
with his own._

A brilliant yet terrifying insight.

------
swombat
I don't think HN is a good place to sharpen your programming saw. However,
it's an exceedingly good place to sharpen your entrepreneurial saw, as well as
an excellent place to keep track of the pulse of start-up things on the web.

------
pwk
I do learn somewhat from reading stuff online, but it's often because I'm
inspired to play around with something on my own. Like a lot of people, I
learn the most by doing. So I think the point that a lot of people are making
is a good one: write more code.

There are some concepts from practicing music that might be interesting to
consider in the context of coding:

1\. Play music that's beyond your current abilities; playing the things you
already know won't help you improve. This is pretty easy to put in the context
of writing software: don't write yet another little ruby app, write it in
Haskell or Io or Clojure or Erlang...

2\. Isolate weaknesses and focus on specific things to improve. I think this
is tougher in software than in music, because a good musician is always
listening to good music to benchmark against, but it's probably not as common
for developers to constantly be reading good code. So, maybe go find some good
code to read and find ways in which it's better than what you're churning out.

3\. Don't practice music with mistakes; it's better to slow down and get it
right than to learn it incorrectly. So maybe a test suite for that weekend
hack isn't a bad idea...

I should do more of that... in both music and coding...

------
ejs
The funny thing is that most of Jeff's articles get ridiculed here, and he
still recommends it. Does he post here? I don't remember ever seeing him
defend an article or anything, not that I think it would be very effective.

Does anyone else think Jeff finds a crafty little picture, and then writes a
post about it.

~~~
anthonyrubin
For some reason his articles are always voted up no matter how ignorant and
devoid of insightful observations they are.

~~~
pchristensen
Duh, it's because there's no downvote button :)

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-
downvotin...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-
or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/)

------
riyaz
:-) all these discussions itself is showing HN is good site for tech
discussions.

If at all his post is worst post ever, i don't agree all of us won't comment
like this.

Hidden meaning is, we do agree with his post but not completely.

------
johnbender
I think most people need to spend more time coding and less time surfing
hacker news/proggit. I know I do.

The article is still right on though.

~~~
raganwald
A lot of people who read such sites say they ought to read them less. And
Jeff's point is that if you don't read such sites, you ought to.

It could be that there is a happy median and those of us over it ought to read
less while those of us under it ought to read more.

------
slackerIII
I'm curious how new users from Atwood compare to new users from TechCrunch.

