
I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer - kiyanwang
https://medium.com/@dangoslen/ill-admit-it-i-m-a-jealous-developer-4c526f0e0abb
======
jamestimmins
The best developers aren't putting out tons of content or courses. The people
putting out popular courses are just the best course developers/marketers.

There are plenty of folks like Tom Christie, who has minimal social media
following, but who built Django Rest Framework, which is used by tens of
thousands of projects.

The best developers are leaders, whether or not they're thought leaders.

~~~
m463
I remember reading the iWoz book by Steve Wozniak.

At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular
advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog.

It was basically "work alone".

EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."

~~~
scarface74
Woz would have been nowhere without Jobs.

Jobs wouldn’t have succeeded when he came back without Schiller, Forstall,
Cook, Fadell, etc.

~~~
m463
I took it to mean "get in the zone", not "don't play well with others".

~~~
scarface74
How did that whole leaving artists alone to get in the zone work out when Ive
wasn’t reigned in?

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moritonal
Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means
it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content.

It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting
their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your
content.

~~~
phalangion
I wish we could stop complaints about Medium from showing up on every post
from Medium. It's a distraction from the content, and off topic, and yet the
complaint shows up with remarkable regularity.

~~~
moritonal
The content which you can't read unless you have an account. Post it as a
comment and I'll delete mine happily.

~~~
faceplanted
Right click -> open in incognito tab.

~~~
Doxin
Alternatively add a cookie exception to block all cookies from medium. Works a
treat.

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donretag
I am a good developer, and even better communicator. That said, I have no
interest in social media. It just seems so forced.

~~~
Traster
Let's face it, it's not much to do with being a good communicator. People
don't go on twitter because they want to be more effective at communicating,
they go on twitter because that's where the audience is despite it being a
terrible place for communicating complex issues. (Here, let me link you to
that 27 tweet thread, which, inexplicably, is 27 separate posts instead of a
single post _because we 're insane_).

~~~
AmericanChopper
The whole post honestly just sounded like he was jealous of the attention the
‘thought leaders’ were getting. Not only is jealous a petty thing to be, but
that’s a particularly petty thing to be jealous of.

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apeescape
As Homer Simpson noted^, jealousy and envy mean different things. If you're
jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you, whereas an
envious person just wants to get other people's success for themself.

^ [https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA](https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA)

~~~
to1y
Where did this idea come from and why is it so often claimed? Never in my life
have I heard someone use 'jealousy' in that context, yet it seems to be widely
accepted fact on the internet.

~~~
ayyy
When I google "define jealous" and "define envy", I read it the same as Homer.
I think it's one of those pre-internet "facts" people learned in school.

If you're not aware, "literally" also now literally means "figuratively".

It's memes all the way down.

~~~
spanhandler
To me that meaning checks out, but is a bit archaic. It’s how you might see it
used in an older translation of the Bible, or a 19th century translation of
the Greek tragedians, or maybe Tolkien, or something like that.

Modern, and especially colloquial, usage tends to be as a synonym of
“envious”, so far as I know. “I’m jealous of her hair”. “His Instagram posts
of his beach house make me so jealous”. “Stop mocking her car—you’re just
jealous”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen the older meaning intended in
colloquial speech or all but the stuffiest of writing in the last 20+ years.

So, as is typical, two useful words have become one word through misuse.

------
duiker101
I am 100% part of those developers that is trying to improve their
communication skills. Since February I have made it a big focus to try and
find a voice.

It's super hard.

English is not my native language, and even if it were, I am not a good
communicator. But I started writing tweets and a blog.

It's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I've had a lot of success, I have
followers, readers etc... on the other hand, it's very hard to do it without
compromising oneself and still finding an audience.

Twitter is also a world on its own. Hell, I don't believe I deserve the
following I have and it's very hard to find a style of communication that
works for developers on that platform. The result is that it's skews toward
short, simple tweets, the simpler the better.

Being a good communicator is important, but it doesn't come without a cost.

~~~
balfirevic
> But I started writing tweets and a blog.

How did you get started? Any tips on getting dev blog readers (not that I have
one yet)?

~~~
duiker101
I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very
unexperienced. But I had the luck of writing one blog post that got a lot of
traction and to have a website that can generate a bit of traffic to the blog.

The actual writing was really the hard part for me. Putting my knowledge to
words is tricky. I struggle with finding topics and how to express them. What
worked for now was more of a "whatever, let's just do it" attitude and try
different things.

~~~
balfirevic
> I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very
> unexperienced.

Nah, that is exactly why I asked you, and I mean that in a positive way.

Someone very experienced might have very well forgotten how it was when they
started, or they might have started when online writing landscape was quite
different. Or, worse, they might say "well, I just sent an email to my
5000-member email list, how else would you start a blog?" :)

What is your blog? I dug out [https://duiker101.net/](https://duiker101.net/)
but that is returning 404 for me.

~~~
duiker101
I put it under the main website, blog.hackertyper.net

------
abnercoimbre
You can improve your communication and inspire communities, without
stagnating, by de-coupling it from your day-to-day; for example:

\- I'm a developer organizing indie conferences [0]. I'm always described as
an "organization kind of guy." I don't go out of my way to influence on
programming techniques.

Alternatively there are:

\- Developers who stream their projects, commercial or otherwise. They're
well-known because people value insights from seeing someone do technical
work.

I'm probably missing other cases of "influencers" who don't slowly stagnate by
focusing too much on courses and marketing.

[0] [https://www.handmade-seattle.com](https://www.handmade-seattle.com)

(Forgive the plug; hoping it's relevant.)

------
why-el
I think this definition of success can be quite entrapping. Certainly, the
pool of outstanding developers that do not fit these criteria is huge (in
fact, the absolute dominant one, considering how narrow the definition is). As
such, if you are a young developer, examine whether this definition suits your
career aspirations (it seems to do so for author, which is OK of course), and
know that there are many roads to "success".

I used to think the same thing for the better part of my 20s, but not anymore.
I am also virtually non-existent online (in the author's sense), but I am
quite satisfied with my career. I am of course one data point, but I have many
colleagues and ex-colleagues in the same boat.

------
hooande
*Envious Developer

(envy is when you desire something that someone else has. jealousy is when
you're afraid you'll lose something you have to someone else)

------
ZinZirconium
> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail.

Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not
rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real
life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the
reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As
staged as professional wrestling is kayfabe.

Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and
testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. Typing out the code
is the least important part of coding and by far the least interesting. But
real work doesn't hold the attention of techbro posers long enough to sell ads
now does it.

~~~
duiker101
No. This is gatekeeping at it's finest. You can say that while they stream
they are working on their social media presence more than the codebase, but
streaming per-se doesn't stop them from being "real coders".

Everyone codes however they want. What works for you might be different for
someone else. And wanting to do it while interacting with an audience or
streaming themselves creating something they already know how to do are all
completely fine things.

~~~
ZinZirconium
Yes. It's gatekeeping borne of jealousy. Keep introverted nerds in tech.
Extroverted marketeers took our technology and perverted it into social media.

Woz said of his time building blue boxes purely motivated by intellectual
curiosity:

> I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying
> to make money. But then I thought we were all pure.

Tech is so impure today it reeks. Bring back the hackers who build things for
fun. Bring back the nerds who don't care to make money.

